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13-07-2015, 20:27

Politics

Gladstone’s classical scholarship, like Trollope’s, led to some carping from more learned if less readable professional scholars in an increasingly professional age. But his understanding of the ancient world was informed by and in turn illuminated his knowledge of contemporary politics. The inviolable rights of a Roman citizen under the empire were invoked during the Don Pacifico debate in 1850 in the House of Commons, when it was suggested that the (technically) British citizen Don Pacifico should enjoy similar protection from imperial Britain. But Mr. Gladstone knew too much about ancient as well as modern empires to be entirely happy with the parallel, suggesting that lofty notions of citizenship on the Roman model entailed potential injustice to others.

As Gladstone acknowledged, however one interpreted them, many of the key terms in the political vocabulary of the nineteenth century derived from the classics.

‘‘Empire’’ {imperium), ‘‘liberty,’’ and ‘‘republic’’ came from the Latin. ‘‘Politics’’ itself, originally the affairs of the polis or city-state, came from the Greek, as did ‘‘oligarchy,’’ ‘‘tyranny,’’ ‘‘aristocracy,’’ and ‘‘democracy.’’ ‘‘Aristocrat’’ and ‘‘democrat,’’ first noted in English about 1790, came not directly from the Greek but from the French, and popular views of aristocrats, democrats, and democracy continued to be influenced by attitudes towards the French Revolution of 1789. Whatever one might think of democrats, the Greeks had also given English the word ‘‘demagogue,’’ with more or less worrying examples to go with it.

The political battles of the nineteenth century were easily projected onto ancient history. The still-visible ruins of imperial Rome and of other ancient empires could be read as evidence of catastrophe, but they assured European revolutionaries that even the greatest tyrannies would come to an end. Rome had not always represented tyranny. Republican Rome, represented as a repository of political virtue and ideal liberty in the nostalgic rhetoric of Tacitus, was the supreme imaginative resource of revolutionary France. Roman heroes, such as the Gracchi, who had championed the people against the patricians, became honorary Jacobins. But counterrevolutionary writers such as Edmund Burke and, later, Thomas Carlyle became adept at giving an ironic twist to Roman analogies. Carlyle’s The French Revolution {1837) is a kind of prose epic that alludes to Vergil’s Aeneid, the great Roman epic of nation-building, but only to suggest that the revolutionary project of building an anti-aristocratic nation might be not so much epic as tragic farce.

Hostility to revolutionary politics on the French model colored English political thinking, and perceptions of Roman history, for much of Victoria's reign. Thomas Arnold of Rugby, an authority on both Greek and Roman history, liberal rather than radical in politics and with a headmaster's attitude towards insubordination, allegedly summed up his attitude towards the popular political disturbances of his own day by commending the Roman practice of flogging the rank and file and flinging the ringleaders from the Tarpeian Rock. Rick-burning and civil unrest associated with demands for parliamentary reform in the 1820s and early 1830s had prompted classically educated parliamentarians to brood darkly on the Roman experience of revolutionary conspiracy such as that of Catiline or of actual or threatened civil war. Debates on the Corn Laws promoted reflection on the disastrous {though rather different) Roman Corn Laws that the Gracchi had tried to reform. Spartacus, the Thracian gladiator who led an almost-successful slave revolt in Rome, became a popular figure in radical circles. Chartist agitation for further parliamentary reform in the 1840s stimulated interest in earlier heroes of the people, and the Chartist Ernest Jones included Spartacus in his extended discussion of ‘‘The Gladiators of Rome,’’ published in 1852 {Vance 1997: 46).

The main events of Greek history and the different forms of political organization in different Greek city-states were also read in the light of postrevolutionary Europe. Connop Thirlwall complained, unavailingly, about the modern writers who used Greek history to talk about ‘‘questions of modern politics, which never arose in the Greek republics’’ {Thirlwall 1845: 464). Defeating tyrants such as Napoleon was all very well, but what exactly was a tyrant? For the Greek historian William Mitford, as for the Greeks themselves, a tyrant was not necessarily either evil or oppressive but simply a citizen who had by whatever means acquired the power of sovereignty over other citizens, a power that could be used for good or ill. Democracy on the Athenian model had had rather mixed success, Mitford felt, and was not necessarily a good thing, as it could take the form of corrupt populism, unbalancing the constitution. But political liberals, and campaigners for parliamentary reform and more representative government in Britain, preferred a different reading of Greek history. Macaulay reviewed Mitford, unfairly, with political as much as scholarly hostility. George Grote, a more liberal historian of Greece, writing in the 1840s and 1850s, spoke for the philosophical radicals of his generation and his vision of British constitutional politics when he suggested that the troubles of Athens derived not from too much democracy but from too little (Turner 1981: 192-207; 213-22).

By the 1870s political concerns had shifted from parliamentary reform to imperial debate. France had already shown how ancient and modern empires could interact. Charles-Augustin Saint-Beuve, appointed to the College de France by the emperor Napoleon III, lectured in 1855 on Vergil, the poet of Roman imperialism sponsored by the emperor Augustus, though anti-imperial sentiment caused the lectures to be discontinued. It is tempting to assume that enthusiasm for empire in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain was universal and uncontroversial and that Roman analogies were explored only to ensure the better running of the British empire. There is some evidence that seems to support this view, such as Lord Cromer’s lectures to the Classical Association on Ancient and Modern Imperialism (1909) and Sir Charles Lucas’s Greater Rome and Greater Britain (1912). But the analogies, sometimes difficult or troubling, highlighting problems of rights and of overextension, could serve to articulate misgivings about the idea of empire. Vergil’s Aeneid, anticipating a time when Rome would rule the known world, might sustain dreams ofempire, but it also dramatized the pain and the human costs of empire-building. The Victorian historian E. A. Freeman, committed to the essential continuity of ancient and modern European history, insisted that ‘‘The true glory of the Latin tongue is to have become the eternal speech of law and dominion’’ (Freeman 1872: 39), but Freeman himself was uneasy about the imperial Roman model of ‘‘dominion,’’ an English version of the Latin imperium, not to mention the imperator or emperor who might wield such power. J. M. Robertson summed up a tradition of radical dissatisfaction with the legacy of empire on the Roman model when he insisted that ‘‘The imperial people was ipso facto a community diseased. . . with the imperator comes in due time the decadence of empire, the humiliation and paralysis of the spirit that had aspired to humiliate its kind’’ (Robertson 1899: 155, 157).

The most effective critique of empire was possibly the refusal of politics and the retreat into the alternative empire of art represented by the late-nineteenth-century cult of ‘‘decadence.’’ Both France and England had had experience of modern imperialism, but particularly after the collapse of the French Second Empire in 1870, French and English writers looked increasingly to the art rather than the politics of Greco-Roman civilization. Particularly in the theatre, French taste had stayed close to the classics until challenged by Victor Hugo and the romantics. Critics such as Desire Nisard, hostile to the new French romanticism, praised the Roman poets who flourished when Rome was at its best and condemned their ‘‘decadent’’ successors, with the implication that France, like Rome, could not be depended on to maintain standards of taste (Nisard 1834).

It was often suggested or implied that the sometimes-spectacular dissipations and the long, slow, political and moral decline (or decadence) of imperial Rome and its outposts in the great cities of Alexandria and Byzantium, not really helped by torpid, institutionalized Christianity, fostered different and inferior kinds of writing, brittle, self-consciously literary, artificial, with strange forms and a vocabulary that was more exotic and colorful, or for the purists more polluted, than the lexicon of Cicero. In fact, dissipated conduct could be found even in the early days of the Empire, and moral decline, political decline, and literary decline did not collude as neatly as the myth-makers might have wished.

Even so, poets and writers seeking to shock or challenge the values of their own age evinced a perverse fascination with the decadent culture of a dying Empire. Leconte de Lisle had celebrated the Alexandrian philosopher Hypatia, not as an historical figure so much as an emblem of the beleaguered beauty and truth to be embraced by the artist at all costs (Dzielska 1995). In his poem ‘‘Langueur’’ (1883) Paul Verlaine identified himself with the Empire at the end of the decadence. The surviving minutiae of classical art had perhaps more enduring value than the political legacy of imperial Rome. J. K. Huysman’s impossibly decadent fictional hero Des Esseintes had the same taste for overelaborate late-Roman poetry as Verlaine and Mallarme. The Irish writers George Moore and Oscar Wilde, strategically French rather than English in their tastes, made the shocking new aesthetic of‘‘l’art pour l’art’’ available to English audiences in Portrait of a Young Man (1889) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891).

In a sense the Victorian chapter in the history of the classical tradition drew to an end with ‘‘Ars Victrix,’’ Austin Dobson’s neat translation of Theophile Gautier:

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