Archéologie de l’utopie

The “Utopian propensity” by which men long for an ideal society where neither need nor struggle would occur, where even death is gentle, is noticeable in early Archaic Greek poetry. Because of the fluidity of myths, the distinction is to some extent blurred between this longing for a possible future and the return to an impossible golden age or the evocation of an afterlife that is inaccessible anyway to men of the iron age, i. e. to the poets’ contemporaries; however around the 8th century B.C., Homer and Hesiod did wonder whether an harmonious community was possible. In two fundamental texts, Odyssey, 19, 108-114 and Works and Days, 225-237, the political dimension of human life is presented as the only frame of utopia, far from the myth of the Good Savage; the statement that justice and prosperity are bound together is highlighted as a precondition for every utopia.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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