Explore "The Story of Utopias" by Lewis Mumford on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
How the Greeks lived in a New World, and utopia seemed just round the corner. How Plato, in The Republic, is chiefly concerned with what will hold the ideal city together.
Before the great empires of Rome and Macedonia began to spread their camps through the length and breadth of the Mediterranean world, there was a time when the vision of an ideal city seems to have been uppermost in the minds of a good many men. Just as the wide expanse of unsettled territory in America caused the people of eighteenth century Europe to think of building a civilization in which the errors and vices and superstitions of the old world might be left behind, so the sparsely settled coasts of Italy, Sicily, and the Aegean Islands, and the shores of the Black Sea, must have given men the hope of being able to turn over a fresh page.