 Four Island Utopias
Plato's Atlantis, Euhemeros of Messene's Panchaia;
Iamboulos' Island of the Sun; Sir Francis Bacon's New Atlantis Diskin Clay and Andrea Purvis Duke University 1999 • 1-58510-000-5 • paper • 190 pages • 5½ x 8½ • $12.95 This text provides a convenient compilation of four key texts, important for the understanding of utopian thinking in the ancient world and middle ages, along with maps and an extensive introduction to Classical Utopian thought. 
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Table of Contents Preface
List of Maps and Figures
Chronological Table of Authors
Introduction
1. What is a Utopia?
2. More and the Discovery of Utopia
3. Islands at the Sacred Extreme in
Greek Literature
4. The Islands of the Odyssey
5. Aristophanes’ Cloudcuckooland
6. Plato’s Atlantis
7. Theopompos’ Continent beyond Ocean
8. Euhemeros’ of Messene’s Panchaia
9. Iamboulos’ Islands of the Sun
10. Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis Texts
I. Plato, Atlantis
1. Timaeus Prologue
2. Critias
3. What Hermocrates Said
II. Euhemeros of Messene, Sacred Inscription
III. Iamboulos, Island of the Sun with Lucian’s
description of the peoples of the Moon
IV.Francis Bacon, New Atlantis
V. Supplement: Utopian Prototypes,
Developments and Variations
1. The Elysian Field(s) and the Island(s)
of the Blest
2. The Hyperboreans
3. The Ethiopians
4. The Continent beyond Ocean
5. The Amazons, with an excursus
on the Atlanteans
Bibliography
Index | |
Preface This book began with teaching and is meant primarily for students and teachers. Over that last many years Diskin Clay has taught a course on Utopias: Ancient and Modern. Four Island Utopias grew out of the need to provide students and teachers with translations of three Greek texts which are of great importance to the ancient segment of this course: Plato’s description of the island of Atlantis in the Prologue to his Timaeus and in its sequel, the Critias; Euhemeros of Messene’s Panchaia; and finally Iamboulos’ Islands of the Sun. Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis had always been one of our readings and now makes the fourth of four island utopias. We begin, therefore, with one of Plato’s last works and end with one of Bacon’s last works; we move in space from the Atlantic to the mid Pacific and from the 350s B. C. to the third decade of the seventeenth century.
This course may never assume a final shape, but the book we present here comes from the course Diskin Clay offered in the spring of 1999 and the collection of texts we prepared for the undergraduates of this course. For this Andrea Purvis supplied the translations, brief introductions, and annotations of the Supplement on 'Utopian Prototypes, Developments, and Variations.' The Introduction to these texts and to Greek utopian writing is the product of our close collaboration.
The reader might well want to read the texts presented here before turning to the Introduction. Each of the texts selected has its own brief foreword and essential annotations. In the Introduction and in our presentation of the texts that are included in this volume we have had in mind the student and reader interested in our themes (and these themes are many and varied) and the teacher. Thus, we have severely limited our range of references and attempted to focus attention on the primary sources. For the reader who will begin with our texts, our use of the term 'utopia' requires some warning and apology. Our working definition of the term is justified in the Introduction (§1, 'What is a Utopia?') and illustrated by almost all of the texts we include, with the possible exception of Bacon’s New Atlantis. A work of utopian literature does not present an ideal society as a model for social reform: it works rather by indirection in directing the reader’s critical gaze away from the society created by the utopian author onto his or her own society. Its focus is not the ideal but the real. Its object is to open up possibilities usually excluded by the sheer familiarity of the reader’s and author’s own society. We occasionally use the term 'utopia' literally to refer to utopian places that can be found 'nowhere.' The is the literal meaning of the Greek words Thomas More combined to produce the name of his fictive island, Utopia. Rarely is the term 'utopia' used to describe a society regarded as perfect by its author and the model for the reformation of existing societies. In the case of Francis Bacon’s Ben Salem and its governing scientific guild (or House of Salomon), the term (also coined by Thomas More) 'eutopia' (an excellent place) might serve as well. But we express some doubts about just how seriously Bacon took his New Atlantis in our Introduction (§10, 'Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis').
This book is dedicated to our students, the happy few who have discovered the islands presented here even as we have discovered and rediscovered them in their company. | |
