Utopia
Glossary
"
- "Sheep... Devour Men"
- Hythloday's indictment, delivered at Cardinal Morton's table, of English landlords converting farmland to pasture for the profitable wool trade: "your sheep, which are naturally mild, and easily kept in order, may be said now to devour men and unpeople, not only villages, but towns." He argues this enclosure, not laziness, is what drives the poor to theft and then to the gallows.
- Related: Cardinal Morton, Book One: England
A
- Abraxa
- The original name of the island before Utopus conquered it, separated it from the mainland by an artificial channel, and renamed it Utopia — a detail underscoring that the commonwealth is a deliberately engineered political creation, not a natural paradise.
- Related: Utopus, Utopia (the Island)
- Amaurot
- The chief city of Utopia and seat of its supreme council, described in detail as representative of all fifty-four Utopian towns, which Hythloday says are so alike that "he that knows one of their towns knows them all." Its name derives from Greek for "dim" or "shadowy," echoing the island's own "nowhere" naming joke.
- Related: Utopia (the Island), Syphogrant
B
- Book One: England
- The dialogue that precedes the description of Utopia proper, in which Hythloday surveys the injustices of contemporary Europe — capital punishment for theft, standing armies, enclosure, corrupt counsel to kings — establishing the grievances that the imagined commonwealth of Book Two is built to answer.
- Related: Sheep Devouring Men, Raphael Hythloday
C
- Cardinal Morton
- The English statesman at whose dinner table Hythloday recalls debating the causes of theft and vagrancy in England, drawing out his most famous critique of enclosure — the conversation that opens Book One's indictment of Tudor England before the account of Utopia itself begins.
- Related: Sheep Devouring Men, Book One: England
- Christianity in Utopia
- The account of how Hythloday and his companions introduced Christianity to the Utopians, who received the doctrine, the moral life it demanded, and above all the story of the martyrs' willing sacrifice with striking enthusiasm — Hythloday declines to say for certain whether this was divine grace or simply the natural fit between Christian communalism and Utopia's own way of life.
- Related: Utopian Religious Pluralism
- Common Storehouses and Market-Places
- The system by which goods produced by Utopian families are brought to central market-places in each city quarter and distributed to whoever needs them without payment or exchange, since "there is nothing to be sold" and no household lacks for necessities — the practical mechanism of Utopia's abolition of private property.
- Related: Utopian Family and City Structure, Contempt for Gold
- Contempt for Gold and Silver
- Utopia's deliberate policy of devaluing precious metals by making chamber pots and close-stools of gold and silver and forging slaves' chains and badges of infamy from the same metals, so that citizens feel no temptation to covet what other nations treasure — a striking reversal Hythloday reports "will scarce gain belief among us who value gold so much."
- Related: Common Storehouses, Utopian Slaves
P
- Peter Giles
- More's real-life friend and a city official of Antwerp who, in the book's fiction, introduces More to Raphael Hythloday and helps prompt the long conversation from which the account of Utopia emerges.
- Related: Thomas More (the Character), Raphael Hythloday
- Prince (Utopian Ruler)
- The elected head of a Utopian city, chosen for life by the Syphogrants from a list of four candidates put forward by the people, but removable if suspected of aiming at tyranny — Hythloday's answer to the question of how a commonwealth can have strong leadership without risking despotism.
- Related: Syphogrant, Tranibore
R
- Raphael Hythloday
- The Portuguese traveler and philosopher who narrates nearly the entire book, having sailed with Amerigo Vespucci and discovered the island of Utopia. His surname, invented by More from Greek, means roughly "dispenser of nonsense" — a wink at readers over how seriously to take his account, even as his critiques of Europe read as entirely earnest.
- Related: Thomas More (the Character), Peter Giles, Utopia (the Island)
S
- Syphogrant (Philarch)
- A local magistrate elected annually by every thirty families, called Syphogrant in the old tongue and Philarch in the new — the base unit of Utopian civic administration, responsible chiefly for ensuring "that no man may live idle, but that every one may follow his trade diligently."
- Related: Tranibore, Prince (Utopian Ruler), Amaurot
T
- The "Utopia" / "No Place" Pun
- More's title itself is a Greek coinage — ou-topos, "no place" — deliberately homophonic with eu-topos, "good place." The pun runs through the whole work: readers are left to decide whether the commonwealth Hythloday describes is a serious political ideal, an impossible fantasy, or a satirical mirror held up to More's own England.
- Related: Utopia (the Island), Raphael Hythloday
- The Six-Hour Workday
- The Utopian labor system in which every citizen — trained in agriculture from childhood and one additional trade besides — works only six hours a day, three before and three after a midday rest, leaving the remainder for sleep, meals, and free intellectual pursuit, since universal labor makes the burden on any one person light.
- Related: Syphogrant
- Thomas More (the Character)
- The narrator's fictionalized version of himself, introduced as Henry VIII's ambassador to Flanders, who meets Hythloday through his friend Peter Giles in Antwerp and spends the book's two parts drawing out, and occasionally pushing back against, Hythloday's account of the ideal commonwealth.
- Related: Raphael Hythloday, Peter Giles
- Tranibore (Archphilarch)
- A senior magistrate presiding over ten Syphogrants and their families, called Tranibore in the old tongue and Archphilarch in the new. The two hundred Syphogrants of a city choose the Prince from a shortlist of four candidates nominated by the people.
- Related: Syphogrant, Prince (Utopian Ruler)
- Travel Passports
- The system requiring any Utopian who wishes to travel between towns to obtain leave from the local Syphogrants and Tranibors and carry a passport from the Prince specifying a return date; anyone found traveling without one is treated as a runaway and punished, though travel for legitimate purposes is otherwise granted easily.
- Related: Syphogrant, Amaurot
U
- Utopia (the Island)
- The crescent-shaped island commonwealth Hythloday describes at length, whose name More coined from Greek to mean "no place" — a pun (via the near-homophone "Eutopia," or "good place") that runs through the entire book: is this an ideal to strive for, or a place that, by definition, cannot exist?
- Related: Utopus, Amaurot, Raphael Hythloday
- Utopian Attitude to War
- Utopians "detest war as a very brutal thing," believing there is "nothing more inglorious than that glory that is gained by war," and prefer to hire foreign mercenaries — the warlike Zapoletans — to fight on their behalf rather than risk their own citizens, even while training every citizen, male and female, in military discipline as a defensive precaution.
- Related: Zapoletans
- Utopian Family and City Structure
- Utopian households are capped between ten and sixteen persons, with excess children reassigned to smaller families and excess citizens periodically relocated to found new towns, keeping every city near a fixed population — a deliberately engineered demographic policy meant to prevent both overcrowding and depopulation.
- Related: Amaurot, Syphogrant
- Utopian Marriage Custom
- Utopian law forbids marriage before eighteen for women and twenty-two for men, punishes premarital sex severely, and — in one of the book's most startling practical details — requires the prospective bride and groom to view each other naked before a wedding is finalized, on the reasoning that a horse buyer would never purchase sight unseen, so why should a lifelong marriage be different.
- Related: Utopian Slaves
- Utopian Religious Pluralism
- Utopia tolerates many different faiths — worship of the sun, moon, planets, or deified ancestors — while the "greater and wiser sort" privately worship a single eternal, invisible, incomprehensible deity called Mithra. Utopus's founding law forbids any citizen from being punished merely for their religious opinion, on the theory that truth, given free rein, will naturally prevail.
- Related: Utopus, Christianity in Utopia
- Utopian Slaves
- Unlike most slaveholding societies of More's era, Utopia enslaves neither prisoners of war nor the children of slaves; its slaves are exclusively Utopian citizens condemned for serious crimes, or foreigners already condemned to death elsewhere in the world whom Utopian merchants purchase cheaply and put to labor instead — a system framed as more humane than execution while still resting on forced, unfree labor.
- Related: Contempt for Gold, Utopian Marriage Custom
- Utopian Voluntary Euthanasia
- For those suffering incurable and excruciating disease, Utopian priests and magistrates counsel — but never compel — the option of a voluntary, assisted death, framed as a release rather than a burden, distinguishing it explicitly from suicide committed without such sanction, which is punished by denial of burial rites.
- Related: Utopian Religious Pluralism
- Utopus
- The legendary conqueror-founder of Utopia, who subdued the island's original inhabitants (then called Abraxa), dug a fifteen-mile channel to separate it from the mainland, and "brought the rude and uncivilised inhabitants into such a good government" that they came to surpass the rest of humanity — notably making his own soldiers labor alongside the natives on the channel so as not to seem to treat them as slaves.
- Related: Utopia (the Island), Abraxa
Z
- Zapoletans
- A fierce, mercenary neighboring people whom the Utopians hire to fight their wars for them, considering it a reasonable trade to spend money — which they hold in contempt — on the lives of hardened foreign soldiers rather than risk their own citizens in combat.
- Related: Utopian Attitude to War