Pierre Vidal-Naquet (born in 1930) is one of the largest French historians, the author of over twenty books on ancient and modern history. He was one of the first to introduce structural analysis into the study of ancient Greek history and clearly showed that the categories of the imaginary are sometimes more powerful than the illusions of reality. “The object of my research,” he writes, “is not myth in itself, as is often thought, but myth, located at the intersection of thinking and society and, thus, helping the historian to understand and analyze them.” The historian chose the problem as the central object of research transition to adult military service of Athenian and Spartan youths. This is how the “black hunter” was born - a young man in a black cloak, a character who combined the features of two mythical heroes - Melanthes and Melania. With the help of this capacious image, the author interpreted the rites of passage from one age group to another, showed their role in the religious, social and political life of ancient Greece. “Greece without miracles,” closer to primitive peoples and cultures than to modern Europeans, and therefore viewed through the prism of anthropology - such is the slogan of the school to which P. Vidal-Naquet belongs and without whose achievements today it is difficult to imagine the science of antiquity.P. Vidal-Naquet is also not indifferent to the problems of our time. Published in Russian for the first time, his article “Atlantis and Nations” seems very relevant in our age of mass circulation of nationalist theories and historical falsifications.