Finally, an anticipation and a warning. In our journey through the utopias of the past we shall not rest content when we have traversed the whole territory between Plato and the latest modern writer. If the story of utopia throws any light upon the story of mankind it is this: our utopias have been pitifully weak and inadequate; and if they have not exercised enough practical influence upon the course of affairs, it is because, as Viola Paget says in Gospels of Anarchy, they were simply not good enough. We travel through utopia only in order to get beyond utopia: if we leave the domains of history when we enter the gates of Plato’s Republic, we do so in order to reenter more effectively the dusty midday traffic of the contemporary world. So our study of the classic utopias will be followed by an examination of certain social myths and partial utopias that have played an important part in the affairs of the Western World during the last few centuries. In the end, I promise, I shall make no attempt to present another utopia; it will be enough to survey the foundations upon which others may build.
In the meanwhile, our ship is about to set sail; and we shall not heave anchor again until we reach the coasts of Utopia.
II
How the Greeks lived in a New World, and utopia seemed just round the corner. How Plato, in The Republic, is chiefly concerned with what will hold the ideal city together.
I
Before the great empires of Rome and Macedonia began to spread their camps through the length and breadth of the Mediterranean world, there was a time when the vision of an ideal city seems to have been uppermost in the minds of a good many men. Just as the wide expanse of unsettled territory in America caused the people of eighteenth century Europe to think of building a civilization in which the errors and vices and superstitions of the old world might be left behind, so the sparsely settled coasts of Italy, Sicily, and the Aegean Islands, and the shores of the Black Sea, must have given men the hope of being able to turn over a fresh page.
Those years between six hundred and three hundred BC were city-building years for the parent cities of Greece. The city of Miletus is supposed to have begotten some three hundred cities, and many of its fellows were possibly not less fruitful. Since new cities could be founded there was plenty of chance for variation and experiment; and those who dreamed of a more, generous social order could set their hands and wits to making a better start “from the bottom up.”
Of all the plans and reconstruction programs that must have been put forward during these centuries, only a scant handful remains. Aristotle tells us about an ideal state designed by one, Phaleas, who believed like Mr. Bernard Shaw in a complete equality of property; and from Aristotle, too, we learn of another utopia which was described by the great architect, city planner, and sociologist—Hippodamus. Hippodamus was one of the first city planners known to history, and he achieved fame in the ancient world by designing cities on the somewhat monotonous checkerboard design we know so well in America. He realized, apparently, that a city was something more than a collection of houses, streets, markets, and temples; and so, whilst he was putting the physical town to rights, he concerned himself with the more basic problem of the social order. If it adds at all to our sense of reality in going through utopia, let me confess that it is ultimately through the inspiration and example of another Hippodamus—Patrick Geddes, the town planner for Jerusalem and many other cities—that this book about utopias came to be written. In many ways the distance between Geddes and Aristotle or Hippodamus seems much less than that which separates Geddes and Herbert Spencer.
When we look at the utopias that Phaleas and Hippodamus and Aristotle have left us, and compare them with the Republic of Plato, the differences between them melt into insignificance and their likenesses are apparent. It is for this reason that I shall confine our examination of the Greek utopia to that which Plato set forth in The Republic, and qualified and broadened in The Laws, “The Statesman,” and “Critias.”
II
Plato’s Republic dates roughly from the time of that long and disastrous war which Athens fought with Sparta. In the course of such a war, amid the bombast that patriotic citizens give way to, the people who keep their senses are bound to get pretty well acquainted with their enemy. If you will take the trouble to examine Plutarch’s account of the Laws of Lycurgus and Mr. Alfred Zimmern’s magnificent description of the Greek Commonwealth you will see how Sparta and Athens form the web and woof of the Republic—only it is an ideal Sparta and an ideal Athens that Plato has in mind.
It is well to remember that Plato wrote in the midst of defeat; a great part of his region, Attica, had been devastated and burned; and he must have felt that makeshift and reform were quite futile when
