Thomas More's On the Best State of a Commonwealth and on the New Island of Utopia (or just Utopia as the work is most commonly known) was first published in 1516 at Louvain. A second edition appeared in 1518. It was written in Latin for a relatively small readership of international, humanist scholars and was heavily promoted by More's friend Desiderius Erasmus, the celebrated Dutch humanist. Utopia takes the form of a dialogue supposedly held by a group of More's friends and in which a fictionalized version of More himself takes part. Insofar as it is a dialogue, the work is modeled on the dialogues of Cicero rather than on those of Plato (though it glances back to Plato's Republic); in other words, More's …
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