than for the people,’’ and justice is lost. The Utopians, on the other hand, have
abolished private property andWnd it shocking that ‘‘a dunderhead who has
no more brains than a post... should command a great many wise and good
men, simply because he happens to have a big pile of gold coins’’ (More 1995 ,
155 ). Accordingly, the Utopians enjoy the rule of the wise, and government is
reserved exclusively for those who ‘‘from childhood have given evidence of
excellent character, unusual intelligence, and a mind inclined to the liberal
arts.’’ This elite rules over the commonwealth, we are told, like parents over
children—an image no Roman writer would ever use to describe citizens,
because children are not considered to besui iuris(under the guidance of
their own sovereign will) (More 1995 , 147 ). The goal of Utopian life is not
glory, which the Utopians disdain, but rather ‘‘happiness’’ (felicitas)—and life
is organized so that ‘‘all citizens should be free to devote themselves to the
freedom and culture of the mind. For in that, they think, lies the happiness of
life’’ (More 1995 , 135 ).
At the bottom of this scale of values, then, is an uncompromising claim
about the relationship between property and justice. Private property, we are
told, must be abolished if the wise are to rule and the state is to fulWll its
nature; indeed, More writes explicitly that attempts to regulate and moderate
private property will not succeed in preventing the wealthy from dominating
oYces ‘‘which ought to go to the wise’’ (More 1995 , 103 ). Yet More’s later
acolytes, although they fully accepted his equation of justice with the rule of
the best men, were reluctant to embrace the outright abolition of private
ownership, and were attracted instead to another model we have already had
occasion to discuss: the Roman agrarian laws. As we have seen, the surviving
Roman sources had uniformly negative things to say about these laws, and the
attitude of these ancient writers was replicated throughout the Italianquat-
trocento. Yet a radically diVerent view of the same subject could be found in a
second set of ancient sources which had entered widespread circulation only
in the middle of the sixteenth-century: the Greek historians of Rome, in
particular Plutarch. 14 For Plutarch, himself a Platonist, the Roman view of the
agrarian movement was entirely unacceptable. He styled the Gracchi as ‘‘men
of most generous natures’’ who ‘‘tried to exalt the people... and tried to
restore an honorable and just civil polity,’’ only to be frustrated by ‘‘the hatred
of the powerful men, who were unwilling to relax their usual rapacity’’
(Plutarch 1914 , 7 ). Indeed, on his account, the Gracchi are to be faulted, not
14 On the availability of classical historians during the Renaissance, see Burke ( 1966 , 135 – 52 ).206 eric nelson