The 'Islands of the Blest', originally the winterless home of the happy dead for Homer, Hesiod and Pindar, are mentioned by Pliny and described by Horace. The islands were fertile without being cultivated, and free from illness, extremes of temperature and all forms of disease and blight. Everything was in abundant supply.
In the Renaissance the myth of the Islands of the Blest was frequently used as a vehicle either for satire or, as in More's Utopia, as a tentative means of exploring personal and social aspirations, in which form it later blended with the idea of Arcadia and become embedded in the pastoral tradition.