Greek poet Hesiod, around the 8th century BC, in his compilation of the mythological tradition (the poem Works and Days), explained that, prior to the present era, there were four other progressively less perfect ones, the oldest of which was the Golden Age. Scheria Perhaps the oldest Utopia of which we know, as pointed out many years ago by Moses Finley, is Homer’s Scheria, island of the Phaeacians. A mythical place, often equated with classical Corcyra, (modern Corfu/Kerkyra), where Odysseus was washed ashore after 10 years of storm-tossed wandering and escorted to the King’s palace by his daughter Nausicaa. With stout walls, a stone temple and good harbours, it is perhaps the ‘ideal’ Greek colony, a model for those founded from the middle of the 8th C onward. A land of plenty, home to expert mariners (with the self-navigating ships), and skilled craftswomen who live in peace under their king's rule and fear no strangers. Plutarch, the Greek historian and biographer of the 1st century, dealt with the blissful and mythic past of humanity. Arcadia From Sir Philip Sidney's prose romance The Old Arcadia (1580), originally a region in the Peloponnesus, Arcadia became a synonym for any rural area that serves as a pastoral setting, a locus amoenus ("delightful place"). The Biblical Garden of Eden The Biblical Garden of Eden as depicted in the Old Testament Bible's Book of Genesis 2 (Authorized Version of 1611): According to the exegesis that the biblical theologian Herbert Haag proposes in the book Is original sin in Scripture?, published soon after the Second Vatican Council, would indicate that Adam and Eve were created from the beginning naked of the divine grace, an originary grace that, then, they would never have had and even less would have lost due to the subsequent events narrated. On the other hand, while supporting a continuity in the Bible about the absence of preternatural gifts () with regard to the ophitic event, Haag never makes any reference to the discontinuity of the loss of access to the tree of life. The Land of Cockaigne The Land of Cockaigne (also Cockaygne, Cokaygne), was an imaginary land of idleness and luxury, famous in medieval stories and the subject of several poems, one of which, an early translation of a 13th-century French work, is given in George Ellis' Specimens of Early English Poets. In this, "the houses were made of barley sugar