The problem of defining utopias has long occupied utopian scholars. For Northrop Frye, the utopia ‘presents an imaginative vision of the telos or end at which social life aims.’Footnote ¹ But there are many routes to that end. Broadly speaking, two main categories can be distinguished. The first is what Lewis Mumford describes as ‘utopias of escape’:Footnote ² imaginary, paradisiacal lands, where people live in harmony, without pain or toil. Ian Ruffell refers to this group as ‘Edenic’ utopias, as Christian ideas of Eden played a major part in their post-classical development.Footnote ³ The second category is that of political or (in Ruffell’s term) ‘constitutional’ utopias: projected ideal societies, whether imaginary or potentially real, typically conceived of as distant (temporally or geographically), difficult of access, and wary of outsiders who may disrupt the smooth running of their superior systems, whether social, political, or moral. Unlike Edenic utopias, constitutional utopias often posit a hypothesis for social change or improvement. Terminologies and definitions differ, and many utopias have elements of both types, but this kind of broad distinction is widely agreed upon.

Eschatological utopias undoubtedly fall into the first group. They share such characteristics as the absence of pain and toil, plentiful and self-supplying food and drink, the company of one’s peers, a delightful garden setting, and so forth. While most scholars broadly agree that constitutional utopias embody a conscious exploration of systemic change in order to construct a different (and usually better) way of life, there is less consensus as to whether Edenic utopias offer anything more than escapist fantasy. But Ruth Levitas’ comment that ‘utopia expresses and explores what is desired . . . The essential element in utopia is not hope, but desire – the desire for a better way of being’ is equally applicable to both kinds of utopia.Footnote ⁴ Paul Ricoeur characterised the utopia as a ‘glance from nowhere’ which reflects on the society that produced it: ‘the best function of utopia is the exploration of the possible’, which of course sometimes means defining the impossible.Footnote ⁵ In this article, I will suggest that Greek eschatological utopias were indeed rooted in desire – but also reflected a sharp awareness of where the limits of the possible lay.

Before I turn to eschatological utopias in detail, however, let me first take a look at the surprisingly meagre Greek utopian tradition for the living. Notwithstanding its rich vein of political idealism, ethnographic literature, and travel accounts, ancient Greece did not produce much in the way of political utopias before Plato’s remarkable (albeit rather grim and authoritarian) Republic.Footnote ⁶ The earliest candidate is arguably the land of the Phaeacians in the Odyssey, but there is subsequently something of a hiatus until the fourth century.Footnote ⁷ We do find practical attempts at creating the ideal society: Plato and Dion in Syracuse, the Pythagoreans in Croton.Footnote ⁸ These did not end well.

By contrast, escapist utopias emerge early and continue to flourish. These are places at the borders of the world with what Rhiannon Evans describes as ‘the labourless abundance of easy primitivism, demonstrating excessive fertility and mystical plenty’.Footnote ⁹ Typical of such ideal people were the long-lived Ethiopians and the Hyperboreans, beloved of Apollo, a byword for good fortune and inaccessibility.Footnote ¹⁰ It is characteristic of Greek cultural geography that such a place should be remote and impossible to find: ‘the loveliest regions of the world are the furthest away’, as Herodotos says.Footnote ¹¹ This remoteness is a feature of utopias in general; they are projected, as Louis Marin puts it, ‘into an unsituatable ‘other place’ – ‘other’ both in terms of historic time and geographic space’.Footnote ¹² Hence their name, ou-topia, ‘no-place’. For the purposes of this article, I will refer to such foreign ideal places as ‘border utopias’.

Greek border utopias were ways of thinking about what a desirable society might look like, but it was a distinctive feature of these societies that the peoples who inhabited them were not Greek. Beyond the boundaries of the Greek world, things get strange, and people are barbaric, with customs which, attractive though they might be on the surface, are nonetheless undermined by their great misfortune in being foreign. Even the most desirable life lacks something crucial if one does not live it as a Greek. Border utopias are placed on (or beyond) the border of the known world geographically and ethnographically: they occupy a liminal space where a deeply desirable life may mix uneasily with concerns about the luxurious life of the barbarian or pride in the toughness of the Greek land and character. In fact, arguably the first paradisiacal utopia allegedly accessible to living Greeks was Panchaea, invented by Euhemeros in the third century BC – and even then it was not an ethnically Greek land.Footnote ¹³ It had aspects of a political utopia – Euhemeros envisioned an idealised society without slavery and with little private property – but it also included abundant natural fertility and consequently offered a life of minimal toil.

The Hellenistic period seems to be the heyday for such detailed presentations of far-off utopian lands: Greek novels are heavily predicated on them, and Iambulus and Euhemeros both produce detailed utopias.Footnote ¹⁴ But Old Comedy is also rich in them: in Birds, for example, Pisthetairos and Euelpides flee civilisation in their effort to find (or found) a better society. Comic utopias tend naturally to be more absurd, and are usually a means to an end rather than an end in themselves, and the apparent desirability, or conversely absurdity, of such barbarian or invented outsider societies was a useful way for writers of comedy to indicate disapproval of aspects of Athenian society.Footnote ¹⁵

Between the Odyssey and the comedies, however, Greek culture exhibited other utopias in the form of eschatological utopias. It is interesting that much of Greece’s earliest utopian literature (the Phaeacians aside) is placed not among the living, but among the dead.Footnote ¹⁶ The notion of a paradisiacal existence for selected heroes after death is widespread in Greek thought, going back at least as far as Hesiod, and appearing in such diverse sources as Pindar, the gold leaves, Attic comedy, and Lucian.Footnote ¹⁷ In the Iliad and Odyssey, everyone (except Menelaos) has the same afterlife – dank, gloomy, and boring – but this soon gives way to a variety of more desirable after-death residences. Initially, such afterlives are confined to heroes; but even as early as the fifth century BC, the roads to the better parts of Hades are increasingly accessible to the ordinary punter as well.

In the Odyssey, Menelaos is destined to go, not to Hades, but to the Elysian plain, ‘where life is easiest for men’:

This is a brief account, but it does provide some attributes of eschatological utopias that recur frequently. First, it is far distant, at the edges of the world. Elysion, as often, occupies an ambiguous space between afterlife for the dead and residence for the immortalised hero – although there is remarkably little difference between the two groups.Footnote ¹⁹ Second, like the homes of the gods, the weather is lovely, in a perpetual summer with cool breezes.Footnote ²⁰ Third, life is easy: in other utopias, as we shall see, crops and food are abundant. Fourth, entry is restricted: Menelaos may enter because he is Zeus’ son-in-law, but his delightful fate also serves to underline the gloom awaiting everyone else.Footnote ²¹ And finally, Rhadamanthys lives there and presumably rules there.

In later sources, Rhadamanthys is a judge among the dead.Footnote ²² Rhadamanthys is also found administrating a utopia in Pindar Olympian 2, where the good:

Weaving garlands may seem too frivolous a pastime to be the object of Rhadamanthys’ ‘just counsels’, but we should see Rhadamanthys here as emblematic of the nature of the place and the high moral character of its inhabitants, rather than as being needed to enforce the rules. In Homer’s version also, therefore, we may take it that Rhadamanthys’ presence signifies justice and piety. Although Menelaos’ entry is secured by nepotism, the presence of Rhadamanthys nonetheless indicates that a certain moral standard is implicit: the denizens of this land are just and upright.

The presence of Kronos in Pindar’s version, however, makes the picture more complex. Kronos as ruler harks back to the Golden Age, in which men and gods mingled more freely together. It offered an idyllic pastoral life, without cares, without injustice, as exemplified most famously in Hesiod’s myth of the five ages, when he describes the Golden Age:Footnote ²⁴

This age has a great deal in common with the utopian afterlives: fine weather, lack of care, lack of toil. And like the afterlives, it is far off and inaccessible; H.S. Versnel points out that Kronos’ kingdom is always distanced, in the mythical past, or in the farthest west, or in the afterlife.Footnote ²⁶ For Versnel, Kronos, the beneficent, just ruler of the Golden Age, cannot be considered in isolation from the cruel, murderous despot; he argues that the Golden Age can only exist because it is not reality. Human societies are defined by their laws and customs; Kronos’s Golden Age has none of these.Footnote ²⁷ The Golden Age either ignores, or in some cases overturns, the existing social structures that are essential to civic order, such as slavery.Footnote ²⁸ The possibility of its delightful, pastoral anomia, which necessarily entails a lack of normal social hierarchies, opens the gate also to the darker side of such societal formlessness and to the possibility of serious disorder: ‘what is possible in the fairy-tale is undesirable – and even threatening – in real life’.Footnote ²⁹ The total freedom embodied by Kronos may lead to abundance or to lawlessness and chaos.Footnote ³⁰ The presence of Rhadamanthys in Pindar’s version indicates that, in this case, the former situation will prevail; but the presence of Kronos arguably has unsettling connotations. There is an interesting corollary to this in Protagoras’ fable of the creation of mankind: when all the animals are created, Prometheus steals Hephaistos’ and Athena’s arts, so that men have the skills to live, but until Zeus gives them dikē and aidōs they are unable to live together in cities since they lack civic arts (politikē technē) and therefore they are scattered and perish, destroyed by wild beasts.Footnote ³¹ This fable draws on the darker side of the Kronian utopia to demonstrate the necessity of social structures.

Hesiod’s own eschatological utopia, the Isle of the Blessed, comes from the same ‘myth of ages’ section, from the account of the age of heroes, and is also (possibly) ruled by Kronos:Footnote ³²

There are two significant differences between this realm and the Golden Age. First, the Golden Age is not an afterlife, and its inhabitants are not dead. Its approach to property is therefore different: Golden Age heroes own many good things, and are ‘wealthy in sheep’, whereas the denizens of utopian afterlives do not appear to have lands or possessions of their own. Second, while both ages provide food in plenty, there is a difference in the level of generosity and, implicitly, in the method of production. For the denizens of the Golden Age, the earth gives crops without toil and without stint, αὐτομάτη πολλόν τε καὶ ἄφθονον. As Moses Finley argues, early utopias accepted scarcity as a given, and regularly involve plentiful food.Footnote ³⁴ The heroes, on the other hand, are restricted to a comparatively stingy thrice-yearly crop, and it is not clear that they do not have to work to get it. Given the close tie between agriculture and justice in the Works and Days,Footnote ³⁵ it is possible that Hesiod has in mind not so much no labour at all, but a maximum amount of reward for an easy and minimal amount of work: a generous harvest three times a year and taking the unpredictability and potential for disaster out of farming may have seemed to Hesiod to be a sufficiently carefree and easy way of life, even if the harvest still needs to be reaped. On the other hand, utopias in Greek thought are not averse to the owning of slaves, so even if Hesiod is expecting some labour to be done, it is unlikely that he expects his heroes to do it.Footnote ³⁶

Pindar’s Olympian 2 offers two utopian afterlives. As well as the realm of Kronos mentioned above, there is also one where ‘good men receive a life of less toil’, ἀπονέστερον ἐσλοὶ δέκονται βίοτον, and do not need to work for a living.Footnote ³⁷ As we have seen, lack of toil is implicit also in the realm of Kronos, and while it is not specified in the Odyssey’s brief description, it is probably safe to assume it: it is difficult to imagine Menelaos suddenly taking to ploughing. Given the topos that toil, and particularly agricultural labour, is one of the most oppressive aspects of mortal life, it is only to be expected that utopias will do away with it. Another fragment of a Pindaric thrēnos mentions ‘toil-relieving rites’; the word is λυσιπόνων, which likely refers to release from the miseries of life in general but could also be speaking of release from physical labour more specifically.Footnote ³⁸

If there is little or no labour, what do the dead do in their lovely rural setting? In Pindar’s thrēnos, denizens spend their time riding and exercising and playing music and board games. Their inhabitants spend their time in the pleasant pastimes they had when alive. Moreover, not only do they not labour, but also they do not fight. Hesiod’s heroes have spent their lives fighting, but need do so no more.

It is Old Comedy, not surprisingly, which takes the labourless crop motif furthest, developing it into an ever-ready harvest of cooked foods. Ian Ruffell refers to these as ‘automatist utopias’, as things grow by themselves (αὐτόματος), as in Kratinos, frag. 172: αὐτόματα τοῖσι θέος ἀνίει τἀγαθά, ‘the god caused good things to go up to them of their own accord’.Footnote ³⁹ Most of these are border utopias, but there are also two afterlife versions.Footnote ⁴⁰ In Aristophanes’ Tagenistai (Fry-Cooks), someone notes that Hades is called Plouton, ‘Wealthy One’, because the underworld has the best of everything: the dead are perfumed and laid out wearing garlands so that they can start drinking as soon as they arrive below.Footnote ⁴¹ In later versions the abundance of food takes increasingly absurd forms, with cakes and rolls fighting to be eaten.Footnote ⁴² Pherekrates, in the Metallēs (Mine Workers), describes the underworld (into which the miners wish to make a tunnel) in terms of rivers made of soup with croutons and cheese-filled bread, with sausages in place of shells on the shore, and roast thrushes flying down people’s throats.Footnote ⁴³ The strong emphasis on cooked food in Old Comedy distinguishes the comic utopias from earlier versions; John Wilkins points out that these are the foods of the ordinary Athenian, not nectar and ambrosia – and equally not the newly-harvested, as-yet-unprocessed crops implied by Hesiod.Footnote ⁴⁴ Food is presented for the pleasure of eating, not for the requirements of nourishment. The comic writers conceive of a better (lazier, greedier) version of this life, rather than something radically different: ‘a desire for civilization without its discontents’, as David Konstan puts it.Footnote ⁴⁵ Although such automatist utopias have a range of different functions, depending on the play of which they are part, they are all, in one way or another, tools to think about the life of and in the city.Footnote ⁴⁶

This is not true of earlier utopias, as is clear from their setting. In comedy the underworld is chosen primarily as a place that is ‘other’ and inaccessible: no great distinction is drawn between border utopias and eschatological utopias in this group, and as we have seen, the food by which such utopias are chiefly characterised is the food of the city – and the setting is often urban as well. But Pherekrates, the only one to provide us with a detailed topographical description, evokes a lovely pastoral setting for his underworld, quite unlike any of the other automatist utopias, ‘in a meadow full of the lotus flower, beneath the tree vines, walking on soft buckthorn and dewy galingale and a garden of chervil and tender violets and clover’, ὑπ᾿ ἀναδενδράδων ἁπαλὰς ἀσπαλάθους πατοῦντες ἐν λειμῶνι λωτοφόρῳ κύπειρόν τε δροσώδη, κἀνθρύσκου μαλακῶν τ᾿ ἴων λείμακα καὶ τριφύλλου.Footnote ⁴⁷ Similar traits are also found in Pindar’s Olympian 2, in which both land and sea in the Isle of the Blessed are full of flowers of gold.Footnote ⁴⁸ Pindar describes another similarly paradisiacal afterlife in a fragment of one of his thrēnoi.Footnote ⁴⁹ This land is explicitly described as fragrant, because of the offerings on the gods’ altars; it also contains roses and frankincense trees to perfume the air. Similarly, in the gold leaves, initiates journey to the λειμῶνας τε ἱεροὺς καὶ ἄλσεα Φερσεφονείας, ‘holy meadows and groves of Persephone’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Affiliated with the glorious setting is the lovely weather which is a constant feature. Fine weather and cooling breezes are implicit or explicit in almost every eschatological utopia, as is only to be expected: rain and snow would spoil the effect. Gardens are not only closely connected with paradises – the Sumerian garden-paradise dates to the third millennium BCFootnote ⁵¹ – but also with the dead: there is some likelihood that the Kerameikos may have included tomb gardens.Footnote ⁵² The word ‘paradise’ itself derives from Greek παράδεισος (‘park, orchard’), which in turn derives etymologically from the Persian pairidaēza (‘secluded garden’).Footnote ⁵³ They are also, of course, connected with the divine.Footnote ⁵⁴ Perhaps more to the point, they are not cities; Pindar uses the word προάστιον.Footnote ⁵⁵ The fortunate dead do not live in urban areas.Footnote ⁵⁶

This is not solely because of the connotations of gardens and the associations of eschatological utopias with the Golden Age. It is also about the removal of their inhabitants from the sphere of human (that is, political) action. The gods, although they have the same delightful weather, live in halls and houses near each other; Olympus is envisaged as a built-up civic area, indicative of the gods’ continual concern with their own and with human affairs. The extra-urban garden setting, on the other hand, is by definition removed from the busy heart of political life, obligations and exchanges, in which the city consists.

Moreover, as a corollary of the lost Golden Age, there is an assumption of the inevitable decline of human societies. Hesiod’s ages decline unevenly until he reaches the present age, that of iron, when men ‘will not cease from toil and distress by day, nor from being worn out by suffering at night, and the gods will give them grievous cares’, οὐδέ ποτ᾿ ἦμαρ/ παύσονται καμάτου καὶ ὀιζύος οὐδέ τι νύκτωρ/ τειρόμενοι χαλεπὰς δὲ θεοὶ δώσουσι μερίμνας.Footnote ⁵⁷ More specifically, the declining quality of life and of the societies of the living is characterised as much by instability and unpredictability, as by increasing hardship: Hesiod predicts a breakdown in relationships, amongst families and between men and gods, with a consequent collapse in social structures until only bitter sorrows are left, and ‘there will be no safeguard against evil’, κακοῦ δ᾿ οὐκ ἔσσεται ἀλκή.Footnote ⁵⁸ Similarly Bernabé suggests that Orphic utopias are a reaction against the injustice, inequality, and violence of the polis structure by which an individual is constrained.Footnote ⁵⁹ The Golden Age, and therefore the eschatological utopias with their hero denizens, are contrasted explicitly or implicitly with an urban landscape of political instability and decline.

It is not surprising, then, that all these utopian afterlives also have in common one aspect that is more often associated with the first kind of utopia – the political utopia – than the escapist version, and that is the restriction on entry. Political utopias commonly have selective and restricted citizenship; only upright citizens need apply, and many are altogether closed to outsiders. Careful and limited recruitment of its members is an essential part of every political utopia.Footnote ⁶⁰ It is a common topos of utopian literature that the account is given by a visitor, who was tolerated for only a limited amount of time, and eventually leaves or is thrown out (and is thus able to carry his account back to the wider world). This is very much the model followed by Odysseus’ sojourn among the Phaeacians. This principle of exclusive membership also applies to our eschatological utopias – although the requirements for entry may vary. In epic, Menelaos attains Elysion and Achilles Leuke through nepotism; and the absence of the Trojan and foreign heroes from the Greek afterlife has often been noted.Footnote ⁶¹ Although we do not know who was permitted entry to the afterlife of Pindar frag. 129, Plutarch, who cites the fragment, says that Pindar is speaking περὶ τῶν εὐσεβῶν ἐν Ἅιδου, ‘about the pious in Hades’.Footnote ⁶² Even though they relate to different cults, the Orphic gold leaves and Pindar’s Olympian 2 have in common that only initiates may enter. Pindar and the gold leaves are particularly interesting in this respect, as they seem to offer evidence for two levels of better afterlife: Olympian 2 offers ‘a life of less toil . . . a tearless existence’ to those who are ‘good men’, who ‘joyfully kept their oaths’, ἀπονέστερον ἐσλοὶ δέκονται βίοτον . . . οἵτινες ἔχαιρον εὐορκίαις ἄδακρυν νέμονται αἰῶνα.Footnote ⁶³ The delightful realm of Kronos, however, is reserved for those who have been through the cycle of life and death three times, ‘keeping their souls free from all unjust deeds’, ἀπὸ πάμπαν ἀδίκων ἔχειν ψυχάν – those whom Johnston refers to as the ‘good-plus’.Footnote ⁶⁴ The good-plus in Pindar, on arrival, find themselves not only in the company of their peers but also that of traditional heroes, such as Achilles – embodying a very different kind of aretē – and also of the judges of the dead, here perhaps mediators between heroic aretē and more recent criteria for the deserving dead.

Similarly restricted in entry is the afterlife for initiates evoked by the Orphic gold leaves.Footnote ⁶⁵ They offer many of the same features we have already seen, where there are feasts (13a) and wine (7a-b). Of greater importance, and far more prominent in the tablets, are the criteria for entry. The tablets themselves may have functioned as something like an entry pass to the underworld (some are mnemonic tablets, to remind the dead of what to say; others are proxies, to speak for themFootnote ⁶⁶ ) and they frequently refer to the status of the dead: ‘I am the son of Earth and starry Heaven, but my race is heavenly’, Γᾶς υἱός εἰμι καὶ Οὐρανοῦ ἀστερόεντος· αὐτὰρ ἐμοὶ γένος οὐράνιον (6, and elsewhere); ‘I too boast that I belong to your blessed race’, καὶ γὰρ ἐγὼν ὑμῶν γένος εὔχομαι ὄλβιον εἶναι (10a-b). The reward is also highly visible, even if it is not always clear what it is: ‘you will be a god, from the mortal you were’, θεὸς δ’ ἔσηι ἀντὶ βροτοῖο (9); going along the sacred road with other initiates (1), or reaching the ‘dwelling of the limpid ones’, ἕδρας ἐς εὐαγέων (10a-b).Footnote ⁶⁷ Or more confusingly: ‘a kid, I fell into the milk’, ἔριφος ἐς γάλ’ ἔπετον (9; cp. 7a-b).Footnote ⁶⁸ There may also be a warning to the uninitiated: ‘[let him] recall and get this grav[ed on gold, lest] the murk cover [him] and lead [him] down in dread’, [ἐν χρυσίωι] τόδε γραψ[άσθω μεμνημένος ἥρως, μή μίν γ’ ἐκ]πάγλως ὑπά[γ]οι σκότος ἀμφικαλύψας (3).Footnote ⁶⁹

The differences between these groups of inhabitants – the difference in entry criteria, so to speak – are crucial, because they mark not only a change over time but a change in accessibility. Alberto Bernabé has argued in connection with Orphic utopias that they differ from almost every other utopia in being available not to everyone but only to Orphic initiates. This means that they are available to an actual existing group of people instead of an ensemble of mythical heroes. (This may, of course, also be true of the afterlife in Olympian 2.) The bone tablets from Olbia (controversially) suggest that existence after death is regarded as (another?) life.Footnote ⁷⁰ Whether life or death, the initiate will find happiness and equality and the reward for virtue in the company of the divine, in a privileged and lovely destination, open only to his peers.Footnote ⁷¹ Undeserving individuals are forced back into the cycle of reincarnation.Footnote ⁷²

Bernabé argues that the individual is subsumed in the group, the thiasos of initiates.Footnote ⁷³ He or she, answering the guardians, must abandon his or her former identity: name, parents, polis affiliations and even gender are left behind, and only the identity as initiate is carried through to the new ‘life’. Sarah Iles Johnston, on the other hand, sees the purpose of the drink from the Lake of Memory as helping the initiate to keep his or her recollection of life and identity.Footnote ⁷⁴ Such consciousness of self is one of the foremost desires of the dead in many eschatologies; note the dead in the Odyssey, desperate for a drink of blood in order to restore them, however briefly, to their mortal identities. And there is no suggestion that the heroes in our eschatological utopias have forgotten who they are: surely the mortals who share their afterlife will be similarly retentive of their former identities up to the moment of their death. In fact, a number of the surviving tablets give the name of the initiate: ‘Poseidippos, a pious mystēs (greets) Persephone’, Φερσεφόνηι· Ποσείδιππος μύστης εὐσεβής.Footnote ⁷⁵

That the retention of identity is important in all of these afterlives is significant. Just as admission to such an afterlife may only be attained by those who are worthy, so it also stands as testimony to the value of the life that has been lived. For the heroes in the earlier afterlives, it is the final piece of evidence of the outstanding nature of their deeds and aretē. It plays into the common Greek topos of judging the worth of a man’s life only after his death: the paradisiacal afterlives reserved for the worthy and/or initiated invert the usual implications of the topos, in which the living who are left behind are able to assess the life of the deceased. In these afterlives, it is the deceased themselves who can comprehend their own true worth over the span of their life, through their ability to be reckoned among the worthy.

Eschatological utopias, then, are not simply fantasies of escape with no grounding in political reality. It is true that they are shaped by the tribulations of mortal life – hunger, toil, illness, and even bad weather. But their escapism is undermined by an awareness of their problematic and unreal nature. Kronos exemplifies not only an idyllic existence but the inherent dangers of anomia. Eschatological utopias provide food – but, unlike the utopias of Old Comedy, the labour of harvesting and preparing it is still implicit. The selectivity of admission into utopias and the frequent presence of Rhadamanthys entail a moral standard for those who are judged worthy of admission, and consequently often – implicitly or explicitly – a dystopia for those who are judged unworthy. But the fact that an individual can preserve his or her identity during the transition from the living to the dead is perhaps the most important feature of the eschatological utopias; they constitute a testimony to the worth of the living, thinking, conscious individual, and a promise that that consciousness will not fade into the darkness of death.