Four Island Utopias: Being Plato's Atlantis, Euhemeros of Messene's Panchaia, Iamboulos' Island

of the Sun, Sir Francis Bacon's New Atlantis by Diskin Clay; Andrea Purvis
Review by: D. M. Hooley
International Journal of the Classical Tradition, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Winter, 2002), pp. 459-461
Published by: Springer
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Book Reviews 459
There seems to have been another
understanding
of
predication
- however
poorly
appreciated
- in the air at the time.
In
conclusion,
no one should take these
relatively
minor worries to
diminish the
value of Nehamas' collection. I am sure that he has considered
responses,
and
espe-
cially
in the case of the last
worry
it is not as if
anyone
else has
anything
like an
adequate interpretation
of this
Protagoras argument
- at least to
my
mind. Moreover,
there is far too much more of value in this collection of
essays
than a review
essay
of
this sort could have
any hope
of
addressing.
I have not even touched on Nehamas'
important
contributions to Plato's
theory
of
beauty
and the
arts,
nor his introductions.
Readers who have not had the
opportunity
to read Nehamas'
essays
before will wel-
come the
opportunity.
Readers who have read them before will
profit
from the
oppor-
tunity
to read them
again together.
I
encourage every
serious scholar of Plato to seize
the
opportunity.
Hugh
H. Benson
Department
of
Philosophy
University
of Oklahoma
Diskin
Clay
and Andrea Purvis
(eds.),
Four Island
Utopias: Being
Plato's
Atlantis,
Eu-
hemeros
of
Messene's
Panchaia,
lamboulos' Island
of
the
Sun,
Sir Francis Bacon's New Atlan-
tis
(Newburyport,
MA: Focus
Publishing
Co., 1999),
XXII + 193
pp.
...
Not in
Utopia-subterranean
fields,-
Or some secreted
island,
Heaven knows where!
But in the
very
world,
which is the world
Of all of
us,-the
place
where,
in the end
We find our
happiness,
or not at all!
The Prelude XI.140-44
Something
about
any
collection of
utopian readings
sends one
scurrying
back
from island
imaginings
to Wordsworth's
homely good
sense. Not that this is not a fine
gatherum
of
readings put together by
Diskin
Clay
and Andrea
Purvis;
it
is,
and is all
the better for
including
some less well-known
texts,
Greek
prototypes
of the
great
island
utopias
of the Renaissance and
beyond. Perhaps
it is that what
usually
stands
revealed are the radical
imperfections
of
virtually
all
utopian
visions-as well as their
dangerous temptations-compacts
of
folly
and moral
aspiration,
writ
frighteningly
large,
that make the humdrum
shortcomings
of real-world
living
seem almost
paradisal.
But this
book,
whatever its own weaknesses (and these are
relatively few),
is not
to be taken to task for the failures of
utopian imagining. Clay
and Purvis
composed
this collection for a course on ancient and modern
utopias
that
Clay
has
taught
for
many years.
While
published
editions of
major
works from More's
Utopia
onward are
readily
available,
there
was,
the authors
explain,
a need for a
good,
coherent,
recently
translated collection of
early prototypes
from the Greek tradition. What
they
have
come
up
with includes the
Timaeus/Critias
material on
Atlantis,
Euhemeros's
Panchaia,
lamboulos' Island of the
Sun,
a brief
excerpt
from Lucian's True
History,
selections on
the
Elysian
Fields and Islands of the
Blest,
the
Hyperboreans, Ethiopians,
Amazons,
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460 International
Journal of
the Classical Tradition
/
Winter 2002
and Francis Bacon's New
Atlantis,
presumably
included as a course selection of man-
ageable
scale.
First it should be
plainly
declared that this book
performs
a remarkable service in
bringing together
under one cover a number of
important
(and less
important)
ancient
texts that
one,
teaching
a course like
Clay's,
would work
long
and hard to
reproduce.
And the authors have taken scholars' care with the
project:
texts are
carefully
docu-
mented, introduced,
and
annotated;
there are
maps,
illustrations,
appendices, bibliog-
raphy,
and an
adequate
index. The whole is introduced
conscientiously
with an abun-
dance of detail.
Finally,
the
translations,
without
being
adventurous,
read
very
well;
their
lucidity
suits their
purpose
in this collection and students should read them with
enjoyment.
One could
quibble
with the
appearance
of the text and
reproductions
(surely
Focus can
produce
a more
elegant typeface
and
layout
than
this),
but I would
have no hesitation in
using
this for a course of
my
own.
My only
substantial reservation about the text section of this book is the
straight-
faced
uniformity
of treatment in what turn out to
be,
despite
their not uncontroversial
identities as 'island
utopias,' quite
different sorts of texts.
Annotation, when it offers
more than context or
explanation,
often seeks to make thematic connections with
Plato, Hesiod,
or Homer as if their essential raison
d'etre
were to
map
out an extended
but
largely
consistent
utopian
idea. Euhemeros to lamboulos to
Lucian,
with
scarcely
a
word to mark the
passage
of 450
years,
a
good
deal of historical
event,
changes
in
interest,
sensibility,
and taste. Students
meeting
lamboulos' islanders with their divid-
ed double
tongues capable
of
imitating
bird
songs
and
"every variety
of sound" as
well as
being
able to
carry
on two conversations
simultaneously, speaking
out of both
sides of their
mouths,
will
quite properly
smile at the lunatic
fantasy,
but won't be able
to
place
it into the context of the
post-Alexandrian
taste for fabulous
travelogue
nor
the less
strictly utopian
tradition of
travel, "scientific,"
and
ethnographic
literature.
Finally,
Bacon's New Atlantis seems here offered as an
endpiece
to Plato's
Atlantis,
and
it is
undeniably
an
important
text. But its historical and intellectual
bearings
are
vastly
different from those of other texts
represented.
Its House of Salomona
(University
of
Science) stands,
to
twenty-first century eyes,
as
something
of a
dystopian cautionary
tale of
theocracy
and science run amock-here is
genetic engineering
before the fact
offering
a full
array
of
'improvements'
over
nature;
but these issues deserve treatment
and
comparison
with other Renaissance
utopian
visions,
and fit ill here.
Obviously
a central
purpose
of this book is to stimulate
thinking
about
utopias,
and the
long
introduction seeks to set the terms for that
project.
Here the authors
orient their
readings, stressing
the
place
of island
geography,
with
respect
to
major
works not included: More's
Utopia,
Hesiod's
Works and
Days,
Homer's
Odyssey,
Aris-
tophanes'
Cloudcuckooland of the Birds, Plato's
Republic.
This is a
necessary
task that
might
have been
managed
more
coherently
and
invitingly.
As it is, the introduction is
dry, dogmatic,
ballasted with
unnecessary detail, sometimes too
scholarly,
sometimes
too
elementary
(do readers
really
need to be told that
Odysseus
is
Ulysses'
name in
Greek?). A more serious
problem
is raised
by
the authors'
dogmatism
about the
very
idea of
utopia. They brusquely
state that the
popular
notion of an ideal
community
in
(perhaps)
an ideal
place
is "unexamined." Their examined version is terse: a vision
"invented in order to direct the reader's critical
gaze
back on his or her own
society"
(2). Alas, the examined notion is never
really
examined here, though
it is
repeated
several times, despite
its
vagueness
and
inadequacy
as a
descriptor
of even the limited
set of texts included in the volume. Diverse texts of various
literary pedigrees
and
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Book Reviews 461
traditions are reduced to a
single, problematic
dimension;
works that
might open
regard
to the multivalent
potentials
of
utopian thinking
are read as acts of social
didactic. Social criticism is
undeniably
an essential
part
of More's and
many
later
utopias,
but once that element becomes
comprehensively
normative,
the
imaginative
nuance of even
Utopia
is blunted. And where is the criticism of the criticism?
Utopian
thinking
is
compounded
of
fascinating, tail-biting intrigue,
and these Greek texts de-
serve a less
procrustean interpretive setting
than
they
are
given.
Yet from this intro-
duction and valuable collection of texts the
good
student
can,
with
patience
and care-
ful
reading,
learn a
great
deal about the
imaginative delights
of
utopian
fiction and
something
of its
self-betraying representations
of
parti pris
and interest
politics.
With
luck and wider
reading
(in
Shakespeare,
not
least),
he or she will learn
something
of
the richer
paradoxes
of
utopian
constructions,
imperfectly
fashioned
'perfections'
(Ba-
con's
close: "The Rest was not Perfected") that are never
innocent,
for all their
preten-
sions of island isolation from the bad old world.
D. M.
Hooley
Department
of Classics
The
University
of Missouri
Jehan
Desanges, Toujours Afrique Apporte
Fait Nouveau:
Scripta
Minora,
ed. Michel Red-
de with
preface by
Jean Leclant,
ser. De l'Arch
ologie
a
l'Histoire (Paris: De
Boccard,
n.d.
[1999]),
VI + 405
pp.
Jehan
Desanges occupies
a
unique place among contemporary
French ancient
historians. He is first and foremost an African historian
and, second,
an historian of
Greece and Rome. French interest in the ancient
history
of Africa dates from the
establishment of the first French colonies in North Africa in the
early
nineteenth centu-
ry.
The
study
of the
region's antiquities
flourished
throughout
the
history
of France's
African
empire.
Scholars established
archaeological
services and carried out extensive
archaeological investigations,
edited and collected
inscriptions,
built
museums,
re-
stored
monuments, and founded learned societies devoted to the
study
of the
region's
ancient
history.
Works on ancient North Africa
by
scholars such as
Stephane
Gsell and
Charles
Diehl
rank
among
the finest
products
of French classical
scholarship.
This
scholarship emphasized
not the
history
of North Africa's native
cultures,
but
rather that of Greek
and,
especially,
Roman
activity
in the
Mahgrib-a history
which
French
imperialists
saw themselves as
resuming
after an interval of over a thousand
years.
In that
history,
the
region's
native
populations
either
appeared
as barbarians to
be controlled or as beneficiaries of the
civilizing process
of Romanization. Not
surpris-
ingly,
decolonization was
quickly
followed
by
the
appearance
of an
historiography,
whose most
prominent representative
is Marcel
B nabou,
that reversed this
picture by
emphasizing
not
only
the resistance of the
region's
Berber
population
to Roman
impe-
rialism, but also the
persistence
of native traditions under a
superficial
veneer of
Romanization.
During
his almost
half-century long scholarly
career,
Professor
Desang-
es has
sought
to avoid these two extremes and to
lay
the foundations for a
genuinely
African
history
of ancient North Africa.
He was well
prepared
for this task. To a
thorough training
in classical
philology,
ethnology,
and the
history
of
religion,
he added extensive African
experience, having
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