Ideal Commonwealths

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Ideal Commonwealths

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Ideal Commonwealths, by Various This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: Ideal Commonwealths
Author: Various
Editor: Henry Morley
Release Date: June 20, 2006 [EBook #18638]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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IDEAL COMMONWEALTHS
PLUTARCH'S LYCURGUS
MORE'S UTOPIA
BACON'S NEW ATLANTIS
CAMPANELLA'S CITY OF THE SUN
AND A FRAGMENT OF
HALL'S MUNDUS ALTER ET IDEM
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HENRY MORLEY
LL.D., PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON
FIFTH EDITION
LONDON GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS, LIMITED BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL GLASGOW, MANCHESTER, AND NEW YORK
1890
MORLEY'S UNIVERSAL LIBRARY.
1. Sheridan's Plays.
2. Plays from Molière. By English Dramatists.
3. Marlowe's Faustus and Goethe's Faust.
4. Chronicle of the Cid.
5. Rabelais' Gargantua and the Heroic Deeds of Pantagruel.
6. Machiavelli's Prince.
7. Bacon's Essays.
8. Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year.
9. Locke on Civil Government and Filmer's "Patriarcha".
10. Butler's Analogy of Religion.
11. Dryden's Virgil.
12. Scott's Demonology and Witchcraft.
13. Herrick's Hesperides.
14. Coleridge's Table-Talk.
15. Boccaccio's Decameron.
16. Sterne's Tristram Shandy.
17. Chapman's Homer's Iliad.
18. Medi?val Tales.
19. Voltaire's Candide, and Johnson's Rasselas.
20. Jonson's Plays and Poems.
21. Hobbes's Leviathan.
22. Samuel Butler's Hudibras.
23. Ideal Commonwealths.
24. Cavendish's Life of Wolsey.
25 & 26. Don Quixote.
27. Burlesque Plays and Poems.
28. Dante's Divine Comedy. LONGFELLOW'S Translation.
29. Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, Plays, and Poems.
30. Fables and Proverbs from the Sanskrit. (Hitopadesa.)
31. Lamb's Essays of Elia.
32. The History of Thomas Ellwood.
33. Emerson's Essays, &c.
34. Southey's Life of Nelson.
35. De Quincey's Confession of an Opium-Eater, &c.
36. Stories of Ireland. By Miss EDGEWORTH.
37. Frere's Aristophanes: Acharnians, Knights, Birds.
38. Burke's Speeches and Letters.
39. Thomas à Kempis.
40. Popular Songs of Ireland.
41. Potter's ?schylus.
42. Goethe's Faust:
Part II. ANSTER'S Translation.
43. Famous Pamphlets.
44. Francklin's Sophocles.
45. M.G. Lewis's Tales of Terror and Wonder.
46. Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.
47. Drayton's Barons' Wars, Nymphidia, &c.
48. Cobbett's Advice to Young Men.
49. The Banquet of Dante.
50. Walker's Original.
51. Schiller's Poems and Ballads.
52. Peele's Plays and Poems.
53. Harrington's Oceana.
54. Euripides: Alcestis and other Plays.
55. Praed's Essays.
56. Traditional Tales. ALLAN CUNNINGHAM.
57. Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity. Books I.-IV.
58. Euripides: The Bacchanals and other Plays.
59. Izaak Walton's Lives.
60. Aristotle's Politics.
61. Euripides: Hecuba and other Plays.
62. Rabelais--Sequel to Pantagruel.
63. A Miscellany.
"Marvels of clear type and general neatness."--Daily Telegraph.

INTRODUCTION.
Plato in his "Republic" argues that it is the aim of Individual Man as of the State to be wise, brave and temperate. In a State, he says, there are three orders, the Guardians, the Auxiliaries, the Producers. Wisdom should be the special virtue of the Guardians; Courage of the Auxiliaries; and Temperance of all. These three virtues belong respectively to the Individual Man, Wisdom to his Rational part; Courage to his Spirited; and Temperance to his Appetitive: while in the State as in the Man it is Injustice that disturbs their harmony.
Because the character of Man appears in the State unchanged, but in a larger form, Plato represented Socrates as studying the ideal man himself through an Ideal Commonwealth.
In another of his dialogues, "Critias," of which we have only the beginning, Socrates wishes that he could see how such a commonwealth would work, if it were set moving. Critias undertakes to tell him. For he has received tradition of events that happened more than nine thousand years ago, when the Athenians themselves were such ideal citizens. Critias has received this tradition, he says, from a ninety-year-old grandfather, whose father, Dropides, was the friend of Solon. Solon, lawgiver and poet, had heard it from the priests of the goddess Ne?th or Athene at Sais, and had begun to shape it into a heroic poem.
This was the tradition:--Nine thousand years before the time of Solon, the goddess Athene, who was worshipped also in Sais, had given to her Athenians a healthy climate, a fertile soil, and temperate people strong in wisdom and courage. Their Republic was like that which Socrates imagined, and it had to bear the shock of a great invasion by the people of the vast island Atlantis. This island, larger than all Libya and Asia put together, was once in the sea westward beyond the Atlantic waves,--thus America was dreamed of long before it was discovered. Atlantis had ten kings, 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