Slavery in the classical utopia: A comparative study.

摘要

The literary genre of utopia arose out of two main source elements in classical antiquity. These can be differentiated by their divergent approaches to slavery and enslavement, and reflect, respectively, the attitudes of slaves, or of masters towards concepts of ideal societies. Therefore, the terms are derived: servile perspective utopia, dominant perspective utopia, and "hybrid utopia", a combination of the two. The servile perspective is characterized by an idealization of release from compulsion, a transformation of the natural order, and the undermining of socio-political order. Examples of it include the mythology of the Age of Kronos and the god Dionysos, the fragments and complete works of Old Comedy, the literature connected with Cynic philosophy, the New Comic works of Plautus, and the Augustan Elegiac poets. The dominant perspective represents the ideal society as internalizing the value of compulsion and mastery, accepting nature as it is in reality, and establishing and maintaining socio-political order. Examples of it include Plato's Republic, Laws , and his myth of Atlantis, Aristotle's Politics, Xenophon's Cyropaedia, and literature on the "real-life" utopianists the Pythagoreans and the Spartans. Hybrid utopias are ideal societies that internalize the value of compulsion as well as that of release, and promise a transformation of nature as a reward for the establishment and maintenance of socio-political order. These include: Travelogues such as the accounts of Herodotus' Ethiopians, Iambulus' Islands of the Sun, where alteration of Nature takes place in the context of political virtue. Apuleius' Metamorphosis involves an inverse transformation of Naure, where servile values are eventually subsumed into dominant. Real-life hybrid utopias include the communities of Essenes, who absorb the Cynic and comic ideal of the primacy of Nature, but follow dominant values, and the accounts of ancient slave rebellions, which utilize both servile and dominant utopian techniques.