You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In his Utopia, Sir Thomas More has Peter Giles introduce the narrator Raphael Hythloday as follows:
his sailing has not been like that of Palinurus but that of Ulysses or, rather, of Plato. Now this Raphael—for such is his personal name with Hythlodaeus as his family name—is no bad Latin scholar, and most learned in Greek.2
The surface meaning of the introduction is, of course, to liken the sailor and political theorist Hythloday to Odysseus and Plato, while contrasting him to Aeneas' ill-fated pilot Palinurus who fell overboard. It seems to me, however, that this introduction serves yet another, more subtle, function. For, with the surname of the visitor to Utopia, “Hythlodaeus,” i.e., “nonsense-peddler,” being parenthetically mentioned within the sailing-imagery, the comparison could at the same time be a device on More's part to warn the reader to take the comparison with a grain of salt—and to be on guard in the evaluation of everything the political theorist Raphael will say in his account of Utopia.
It is not the purpose of this study to examine whether Palinurus was really a poor and Plato really a successful sailor— Palinurus was the sacrifice Neptune had demanded so that Aeneas could lay the foundations for the Roman Empire, and Plato's voyage to Syracuse, where the philosopher tried to put the ideas of his Republic into practice, was ill-fated—nor do I intend to investigate what effect the result of such an examination