Ideal Commonwealths | Page 2

descended from ten sons of Poseidon (Neptune),
who was the god magnificently worshipped by its people. Vast power
and dominion, that extended through all Libya as far as Egypt, and over
a part of Europe, caused the Atlantid kings to grow ambitious and
unjust. Then they entered the Mediterranean and fell upon Athens with
enormous force. But in the little band of citizens, temperate, brave, and
wise, there were forces of Reason able to resist and overcome brute

strength. Now, however, gone are the Atlantids, gone are the old virtues
of Athens. Earthquakes and deluges laid waste the world. The whole
great island of Atlantis, with its people and its wealth, sank to the
bottom of the ocean. The ideal warriors of Athens, in one day and night,
were swallowed by an earthquake, and were to be seen no more.
Plato, a philosopher with the soul of a poet, died in the year 347 before
Christ. Plutarch was writing at the close of the first century after Christ,
and in his parallel Lives of Greeks and Romans, the most famous of his
many writings, he took occasion to paint an Ideal Commonwealth as
the conception of Lycurgus, the half mythical or all mythical Solon of
Sparta. To Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus, as well as to Plato, Thomas
More and others have been indebted for some part of the shaping of
their philosophic dreams.
The discovery of the New World at the end of the fifteenth century
followed hard upon the diffusion of the new invention of printing, and
came at a time when the fall of Constantinople by scattering Greek
scholars, who became teachers in Italy, France and elsewhere, spread
the study of Greek, and caused Plato to live again. Little had been heard
of him through the Arabs, who cared little for his poetic method. But
with the revival of learning he had become a force in Europe, a strong
aid to the Reformers.
Sir Thomas More's Utopia was written in the years 1515-16, when its
author's age was about thirty-seven. He was a young man of twenty
when Columbus first touched the continent named after the Florentine
Amerigo Vespucci, who made his voyages to it in the years 1499-1503.
More wrote his Utopia when imaginations of men were stirred by the
sudden enlargement of their conceptions of the world, and Amerigo
Vespucci's account of his voyages, first printed in 1507, was fresh in
every scholar's mind. He imagined a traveller, Raphael
Hythloday--whose name is from Greek words that mean "Knowing in
Trifles"--who had sailed with Vespucci on his three last voyages, but
had not returned from the last voyage until, after separation from his
comrades, he had wandered into some farther discovery of his own.
Thus he had found, somewhere in those parts, the island of Utopia. Its

name is from Greek words meaning Nowhere. More had gone on an
embassy to Brussels with Cuthbert Tunstal when he wrote his
philosophical satire upon European, and more particularly English,
statecraft, in the form of an Ideal Commonwealth described by
Hythloday as he had found it in Utopia. It was printed at Louvain in the
latter part of the year 1516, under the editorship of Erasmus, and that
enlightened young secretary to the municipality of Antwerp, Peter
Giles, or Ægidius, who is introduced into the story. "Utopia" was not
printed in England in the reign of Henry VIII., and could not be, for its
satire was too direct to be misunderstood, even when it mocked English
policy with ironical praise for doing exactly what it failed to do. More
was a wit and a philosopher, but at the same time so practical and
earnest that Erasmus tells of a burgomaster at Antwerp who fastened
upon the parable of Utopia with such goodwill that he learnt it by heart.
And in 1517 Erasmus advised a correspondent to send for Utopia, if he
had not yet read it, and if he wished to see the true source of all
political evils.
Francis Bacon's "New Atlantis," first written in Latin, was published in
1629, three years after its author's death. Bacon placed his Ideal
Commonwealth in those seas where a great Austral continent was even
then supposed to be, but had not been discovered. As the old Atlantis
implied a foreboding of the American continent, so the New Atlantis
implied foreboding of the Australian. Bacon in his philosophy sought
through experimental science the dominion of men over things, "for
Nature is only governed by obeying her." In his Ideal World of the New
Atlantis, Science is made the civilizer who binds man to man, and is his
leader to the love of God.
Thomas Campanella was Bacon's contemporary, a man only seven
years younger; and an Italian who suffered for his ardour in the cause