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