The long classical tradition, from Homer to Byzantium, fascinated the Victorians in its own terms. It was contemplated, and studied with a new rigor, in an increasingly international context that involved European hopes and fears in the aftermath of the French Revolution, German (and sometimes American) philological, textual and historical scholarship, French neoclassical taste and its various transformations, and the archaeological discoveries of many nations.
Less rigorously, selective and often ahistorical and idealized readings of the matter of ancient Greece and Rome also continued to provide modern writers and artists, liberal humanists, statesmen, and a rapidly expanding reading public with literary models, matter for dreams and fantasies, versions of civility and successful living, and metaphors and allusions to describe and reflect on contemporary life and thought. Alfred Tennyson, Poet Laureate since 1850, wrote poems on Homeric themes and was deeply influenced by the language and themes of Latin poetry, particularly Vergil, Horace, Catullus, and Lucretius (Markley 2004). Matthew Arnold’s narrative poem Sohrab and Rustum (1853) embodied his perception of the grandeur and rapidity of Homer, which he discussed at length in On Translating Homer (1861). The painter J. M. W. Turner and others presented classical ruins and Roman history in terms of the romantic sublime, while Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema devised visually opulent ways of imagining and depicting the cultural and domestic life of classical times (Liversidge and Edwards 1996: 38-53; Becker 1996). William Gladstone, four times Prime Minister, quoted Vergil in the House of Commons and published substantial studies on Homer in the intervals of public life (Bebbington 2004). Parallels and differences between the empires of Rome and Great Britain were debated at length in the later years of Victoria, controversially proclaimed Empress of India in 1876.
But earlier postclassical appropriations and transformations of classical material, constituting an already rich and complex tradition, contributed significantly to Victorian classicism. Tennyson’s poem ‘‘Ulysses’’ drew on Dante’s Ulysses as well as Homer’s Odysseus. The classically trained sculptor, designer, and illustrator John
Flaxman (1755-1826) had prepared designs illustrating the Iliad and the Odyssey in the 1790s. This mode of visualizing Homer was still current when, in his novel Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Thomas Hardy alluded to Flaxman’s group of the suitors of Penelope in the Odyssey John Henry Newman’s long essay on Cicero in the first volume of his Historical Sketches (1872), originally an encyclopedia article published in 1824, drew extensively on Conyers Middleton’s much-reprinted History of the Life of M. Tullius Cicero (1741, new edn. 1837). The tendency of Matthew Arnold and other Victorians to belittle Vergil by comparison with Homer can be traced back to the taste of the late eighteenth century and romanticism, which privileged original genius. Victorian versions of the Romano-British hero Caractacus derived from several centuries of British theatrical tradition as well as from classical sources. The discovery of everyday Roman life preserved forever in the buried ruins of Pompeii led to Bulwer Lytton’s novel The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) and later dramatic and operatic treatments of the same theme (Mayer 1994: 19-20; Vance 1997: 278-9), and to Edward Poynter’s heroic painting of a Pompeian sentinel, Faithful unto Death (1865), but this was an eighteenth-century discovery, dating from 1748.
World History
