William Ewart Gladstone’s writings about antiquity deserve more attention than they have received. Among his contemporaries the four-times Prime Minister of the United Kingdom achieved some celebrity for his scholarship. One of his Homeric works, and a minor one at that, was acclaimed in grandiloquent style by Heinrich Schliemann, the excavator of Troy. ‘This work’, he told its author, ‘the masterpiece of the greatest scholar of all ages, will for ever remain classic and will for ever be considered as the pearl of all that has been written or may still be written about Homer’ (Schliemann to Gladstone, 8 May 1876, Gladstone Papers, British Library, Add. MS [hereafter GP] 44450, f. 25). Schliemann’s praise, a symptom both of his extravagant personality and of his hopes of continued support from the statesman, was wide of the mark. Even in his own day some of Gladstone’s theories created incomprehension or astonishment among classicists in the mainstream of scholarship. Thus Jane Harrison of Newnham College, Cambridge, remarked soon after the statesman’s death that, though two of his works were extraordinarily good, he had ‘gone dotty’ in some of his ideas about Homer (Stewart 1959: 66). Gladstone was in the older tradition of the gentleman amateur who spun theories of his own devising and lamented the regular distractions from scholarship forced on him by his profession. But the effect of the disdain of the experts has been to encourage writers about Gladstone to treat his classical endeavours with wry amusement. Lord Jenkins, for example, writes of his main campaign of work on Homer as ‘one of the most bizarre of all his intellectual exercises’ (Jenkins 1995: 181). Likewise Sir Philip Magnus compares his efforts on the Greek poet to the attempts to decipher the hidden message of the Great Pyramid (Magnus 1964: 124). It is true that Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones has offered a sympathetic appreciation of the statesman’s Homeric scholarship, but he treats the enterprise solely in the context of the history of classical learning (Lloyd-Jones 1975: 15-17). The possibility that Gladstone’s classical studies helped mould his politics, both in theory and in practice, is often tacitly ignored.
Certain historians would probably go so far as to claim that Gladstone’s politics could not have been affected by his work on Greece and Rome. The so-called ‘high politics’ school of interpretation would argue that the classics, along with religion, formed a dimension of the ideology that he was careful to keep apart from his public career (Cooke and Vincent 1974: 53). That understanding of Gladstone, however questionable on broader grounds, is dealt a mortal wound by Frank M. Turner’s admirable examination of the statesman’s contributions to Homeric study, the predominant aspect of his work on antiquity. Turner shows that Gladstone is a prime example of the common tendency of the Victorians to use the ancient world as a cockpit for the struggles of their own day. Gladstone allowed his reading of Homer to be shaped by the preoccupations of a mid-nineteenth-century politician (Turner 1981: 234-44). That interpretation of Gladstone’s scholarship will be followed here. Yet Turner misses a dimension of Gladstone’s examination of Homer that carries considerable significance for his political life. Of the commentators on Gladstone’s intellectual concerns, in fact, only Agatha Ramm has noticed that the statesman’s views on Homer changed over time (Ramm 1989-90: 14-17). Far from remaining constant, his estimate of the poet underwent substantial transformation. The analysis that follows attempts to bring out the implications of the development in Gladstone’s understanding of the Homeric poems. At the same time it tries to do greater justice than has hitherto been done to other aspects of the statesman’s debt to the classics. It will become apparent that the direction of influence that Turner has identified, of Gladstone’s politics on his classical researches, does not stand alone. The classics also impinged on his politics.
World History
