Jenkyns is an Oxford fellow, well versed in his ancient Greek and Latin originals, but also British literature and history. The book begins with the initiation of Greek revival architecture in the England of the 18th century following the “rediscovery” of Athens from within the Ottoman domain. Ionic, doric, and corinthian columns soon became the vogue. Many Victorians saw clear lines of descent from Greek democracy and liberty to their pinnacle in Albion. John Stuart Mill even suggested, “that battle of Marathon even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings.” Oscar Wilde recommended skipping from ancient Athens past the next couple thousand years to Victorian England, “whatever…. is modern…. we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is anachronism is due to medievalism.” And it was primarily Greek tragedy and poetry that captivated the hearts of so many Victorian writers. In fact, poets from Byron to Tennyson to Arnold to Shelley despaired in writing their own epics for perfection had already been reached, to be unmatched, by Homer. Roman history, poetry, and literature were viewed as poor copies of the Greek originals (as Virgil and Cicero would have readily acknowledged). Even the Aeneid was poor copy of the Greek master. Gladstone remarked, “Homer walks in the open day, Virgil by lamplight… from Virgil back to Homer is a greater distance, than from Homer back to life.”
The Victorians were also fond of their dichotomies- the rugged, industrious North contrasting with the languid, pleasant South and the aesthetics of Athens contrasting with the spirituality of Jerusalem. However, Victorians also strained to place the Greek tragic dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides into their world as pre-Christians, who either espoused proto-Christian morals or at least presaged the way for the Christian epoch. There was many a Victorian vicar who knew his Prometheus Bound, his Oedipus and his Medea, as well as his New Testament. Cardinal Newman went so far as to suggest, “pagan literature, philosophy, and mythology…. were but a preparation for the Gospel. The Greek poets and sages were in a certain sense prophets.” Even in myth, Victorian believers strained for connections. Alford, when thinking of Prometheus, claimed, “this benefactor of human kind…. thus crucified on high- bears he not a dim resemblance to the One other whom we know?” Gladstone compared Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades to the Holy Trinity.
Novels of the period were often interspersed with ancient Greek in their original alphabet. It was a mark of sophistication, but also a common way to denote good breeding in a character. One of George Eliot’s characters declares, “No man is held worthy of the name of scholar who has merely the …. derivative literature of the Latins;…. the Romans themselves…. frankly replenished their urns at the fountainhead.” Victorians were also fond of Greek sculpture, in no small part because of their nakedness. They found in them something safely erotic, but also simple and childlike. S. C. Hall suggested that “French nudes looked as if they had taken their clothes off, Greek ones as if they had never thought of clothes.” But it was Homer and Plato who towered above the rest in the Victorian imagination. On the Albert Memorial it is Homer, not Shakespeare, who is given pride of place. Mathew Arnold claimed, “Homer has not Shakespeare’s variations: Homer always composes as Shakespeare composes at his best.” From radicals like Shaw to Whigs like Macauley to arch-Tories like Carlyle the verdict was the same.
Until the Victorians, Aristotle had commanded the high ground in Oxbridge philosophy. He was clearheaded and rational. However, the Romantics did much to tilt the scales towards Plato and along with him Socrates. When an Italian peasant asked Symonds, “who was Socrates?” He replied, “he was the Jesus Christ of Greece.” Arch-Anglican Thomas Arnold did his best to place Plato in the pantheon of the prophets, “not the wildest extravagance of atheistic wickedness in modern times can go further than the sophists of Greece went…. whatever audacity can dare…. to make the words “good” and “evil” change their meaning, has already been tried in the days of Plato, and by his eloquence…. and faith unshaken, has been put to shame.” Even the agnostic John Stuart Mill suggested, “Christ did not argue about virtue, but commanded it; Plato, when he argues about it, argues for the most part inconclusively, but he resembles Christ in the love which he inspires for it, and in the stern resolution never to swerve from it.” It is not so much Plato’s conclusions, but his method that appealed to questioning Victorians such as Mill. “I have ever felt that the title of Platonist belongs by far better right to those who have been nourished in, and have endeavored to practice Plato’s mode of investigation, than to those distinguished only by the adoption of certain dogmatical conclusions.” Victorians, even as their empire grew abroad to resemble Rome, sought at home to emulate the liberty, democracy, and love of literature and learning they so admired in ancient Greece.
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