topothesia

1. The description of an imaginary place. A kind of enargia. (Silva Rhetoricae)

2. Topothesia, a fained description of a place, that is, when the Orator describeth a place, and yet no such place: As is the house of envy, in the 6. booke of Metamorphosis, the house of sleepe in the eleventh booke, or else when the place is not such a one as is fained to be, as is heaven and hell. In the fourth booke of Aeneidos. This figure is proper to Poets, and is seldom used of Orators: and because the use hereof is rare and of small utilitie in Rhetorike, I do omit both the observation of the use, and Caution. (Peacham)

The island of the Utopians is two hundred miles across in the middle part where it is widest, and is nowhere much narrower than this except toward the two ends. These ends, drawn toward one another as if in a five-hundred-mile circle, make the island crescent-shaped like a new moon. Between the horns of the crescent, which are about eleven miles apart, the sea enters and spreads into a broad bay. Being sheltered from the wind by the surrounding land, the bay is never rough, but quiet and smooth instead, like a big lake. Thus, nearly the whole inner coast is one great harbor, across which ships pass in every direction to the great advantage of the people. —Thomas More, Utopia