Four Island Utopias: Being Plato's Atlantis, Euhemeros of Messene's Panchaia, Iamboulos' Islandof the Sun, Sir Francis Bacon's New Atlantis by Diskin Clay; Andrea PurvisReview by: D. M. HooleyInternational Journal of the Classical Tradition, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Winter, 2002), pp. 459-461Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30224233 .

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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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