Among scholars of Classics the study of utopian themes in the Greco-Roman world tends to focus on those ideal states imagined by philosophers like Plato or Zeno, utopian novellas such as those of Iambulus and Euhemerus; those near-utopias of the legendary past imaged by Plutarch and Dio of Prusa, the primitive or mythical paradise appearing in Hesiod's Golden Age and among Homer's Ethiopians and Pindar's
Hyperboreans, plus the comic utopias of Aristophanes and other satirists.
Of great interest and value too is the supplement entitled "Utopian Prototypes, Developments, and Variations." Collected here are excerpts from works describing the Elysian Fields, the Isles of the Blessed, and the distant habitats of the
Hyperboreans, the Ethiopians, and the Amazons.
When in book 2 Green describes the "wolf-light" at Thynias, he captures, in English verse, some of the marvel and awe induced in the exhausted heroes by the appearance of dawntime Apollo, and produces one of the translation's finer passages: At that moment when darkness is ebbing, yet light's divine brightness has not yet come, when an impalpable glimmer suffuses the night, what waking men call wolf-light, they entered the harbor of Thynias, barren island, and stumbled ashore, exhausted by their grievous labors; and here there appeared before them Apollo, Leto's son, on his way back from Lykia to the swarming
Hyperboreans; and golden, framing either cheek, the clustering curls outfloated as he strode.
They were said to live among the
Hyperboreans. The golden apples were also guarded by the dragon Ladon, the offspring of Phorcys and Ceto.
(10.) The conventional boundaries of mortal achievement include the
Hyperboreans (0l.
Aldhelm and Bede, Cuthbert and Dunstan, Willibrord and Boniface - so many
hyperboreans who wrote so much and so well of pride as the root of license and licentiousness, grace as the source of freedom of the will.