Religion

Archaeological evidence of Roman religious practice in Britain had also survived. A chapel of Mithras, for example, had been found in 1852 at Housesteads (Borcovicus) on Hadrian’s Wall. The Romans in Britain were not usually Christian, and Christianity spread among the Greek-speaking people of the Mediterranean long after the classical period usually studied at school and university. Despite other points of contact, this tended to mark the classical world as distinctly ‘‘other’’ in a self-consciously religious age, increasingly defensive about its faith in the face of new scientific and historical challenges to it. But the challenges of scientific modernity, often aggressively presented as a war on outmoded superstition, could be paralleled in antiquity. The poet Lucretius, dismissed as a ‘‘filthy dog’’ by John Calvin but admired for his scientific materialism and his impatience with the old gods by Karl Marx, could be enlisted among the moderns. Tennyson’s ingeniously allusive poem ‘‘Lucretius’’ (1868) reinstates a tradition of hostility stemming from Jerome and early Christianity by representing the great rationalist as dying a madman’s death (Vance 1997: 83-111).

For orthodox Victorians a sense of difference from Roman religion - or the lack of it - could be used as a mode of cultural and moral self-congratulation. For all their military and political achievements, the Romans who colonized Britain had not seen the light of the gospel and had depended on and upheld the institution of slavery, which had (since 1834) been abolished throughout the British empire after a religiously inspired crusade against slavery. The moral severity associated with early Rome and exemplary figures such as Horatius or Virginia, celebrated in Lord Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome (1842), had its uses in the Victorian schoolroom. But archaeological discoveries of luridly decorated Samian ware or Pompeian wall paintings suggested that by the time of the Empire Roman morality, particularly sexual morality, knew little of the decency and restraint Christianity encouraged. It was recognized by prudent and prudish schoolteachers that some Latin texts such as the erotic poems of Catullus or the probably satirical Satyricon of Petronius needed to be approached with considerable caution. W. E. H. Lecky, the austere Victorian historian of European morals, was disgusted by the Satyricon and observed that even at its best, during the Roman Republic, the Roman religion, unlike Christianity, was never an ‘‘independent source of moral enthusiasm.’’ Under the Empire amoral luxury ‘‘rose to excesses which the wildest Oriental orgies have never surpassed’’ (Lecky 1897: 1:215n, 168-9).

For this and other reasons, it could be argued, the eventual decline and fall of Rome and of Greco-Roman civilization was inevitable and well deserved. The visionary radical William Blake, unimpressed by classical religion, morality, and mythology, hostile to the tradition of Roman imperial tyranny and its imitations in later kingdoms and empires, had complained that ‘‘The Greek & Roman Classics is the Antichrist’’ (Blake 1967: 825). But for Victorian rebels such as the poet Algernon Swinburne, that was part of the attraction. His poem ‘‘Hymn to Proserpine,’’ nostalgic for the harsh but colorful paganism of the classical world before Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, regretted the gray, conventionally Christian modern world that had taken its place. Thomas Hardy’s self-taught hero Jude, in the novel Jude the Obscure (1895), comes to experience an impossible tension between the classical and the Christian components ofBritish higher education. Swinburnian paganism and the tragic vision imparted by his classical studies ran counter to the official pieties and the Christian hope espoused by the Church of England. In moments of despair bleak snippets of Greek tragedy came to his lips rather than the consolation of the Scriptures.

Less abrasively, in Culture and Anarchy (1869), Matthew Arnold had tried to find a route round and beyond what he saw as ‘‘Hebraism,’’ the narrowness and moral censoriousness of much of Victorian religion, by balancing it with an idealized and simplified ‘‘Hellenism. ’’ This was a harmonious and rational wisdom for life developed from J. J. Winckelmann’s notions of the serenities of Greek art and a selective reading of Homer, Sophocles, and the Stoic philosopher Epictetus that could be presented as prior to and independent of the later development of Christianity. Richard Jebb (1841-1905), Professor of Greek at Cambridge, the great Victorian editor of Sophocles, felt that there need be no real antagonism between the more liberal versions of Christianity and Arnoldian Hellenism (Turner 1981: 33). But Jebb, great-nephew of an Irish bishop, was in some ways old-fashioned. Such antagonisms were ceasing to matter very much. The sometimes-awkward cohabitation of classicism and Christianity in schools and colleges was now less of a problem because Oxford and Cambridge were becoming more secular places. Jebb’s Cambridge colleague A. W. Verrall (1851-1912), Fellow of Trinity College, was one of the new breed of nonclerical dons. His interests, unconfined by religious orthodoxy, included the work of the Society for Psychical Research, of which his wife was an active member. An authority on Euripidean tragedy, he controversially but influentially developed a view of Euripides as rationalist skeptic that resonated with late-Victorian agnosticism.

Verrall’s Euripides was attractive without being too disconcerting. It was different in Germany. Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (1872), dissatisfied with the classicism of Winckelmann, was much more radical and much less comfortable reading, proposing the origins of tragedy in a synthesis of the rational or Apollonian and darkly irrational or Dionysiac energies. But post-Christian Hellenism in Victorian

Britain was largely unaffected. It developed into an influential agnostic aestheticism in the work of Walter Pater, in the essays eventually collected as Plato and Platonism (1893) and Greek Studies (1895) and in his earlier book The Renaissance (1873), which included a substantial essay on Winckelmann. A controversial ‘‘Conclusion,’’ tactfully omitted in the second edition, quoted Heraclitus on the perpetual flux of things and outlined a philosophy of heightened aesthetic consciousness as the supreme good in a world deprived of the certainties of Christianity and the hope of resurrection. In his only novel, Marius the Epicurean (1885), subtitled His Sensations and Ideas, Pater follows his hero through a range of sensations and systems of belief in the Rome of Marcus Aurelius and leaves him, uncommitted and dying, on the threshold of Christianity, which can be seen as possibly just another set of sensations and beliefs. Perhaps the Greek or Greco-Roman world could provide an alternative, even an antidote, to Victorian orthodoxies in religion and morality. Like Pater’s work, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson’s The Greek View of Life (1896) and John Addington Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets (1877-9) and A Problem in Greek Ethics (1883), a pioneering discussion of homosexuality, were in a sense agnostic explorations, extended essays in non-Christian or post-Christian ethics and aesthetics. In his early poetry and in his life, Oscar Wilde presented himself as part of the same tradition. He had studied the classics in Dublin and Oxford and traveled in Greece with his mentor, the legendary Irish classicist J. P. Mahaffy: his eloquent if ultimately unavailing courtroom defense of male love as an ennobling mode of personal identity rather than a crime invoked Plato and the Greeks as well as Michelangelo and Shakespeare (Dowling 1994: 1-3).

If Plato could shake hands with Shakespeare, then perhaps Greek life and thought were not, after all, completely alien from (formally) Christian Britain. Connop Thirl-wall, the Cambridge ancient historian and religious liberal who became Bishop of St. David’s, was disposed to take a fairly tolerant view of Greek religion in his History of Greece (1835-44). It all began as nature-worship, which sometimes involved debased conceptions of divine nature, but he felt there was some evidence of reverence for a superior being and a growing sense of divine unity that could sometimes at least indirectly encourage moral behavior (Thirlwall 1845: 217-22).

Swinburne’s mentor and friend Benjamin Jowett, Oxford Professor of Greek and later Master of Balliol, had worked on the Greek texts of Plato and of St. Paul and developed a liberal, idealist, theological outlook accommodating cultural change that owed much to them both. The synthesis was, however, vulnerable and unstable: Jowett’s contribution to the controversial Essays and Reviews (1860), ‘‘On the Interpretation of Scripture,’’ was widely attacked by more conservative churchmen.

Mr. Gladstone’s quite extensive Homeric researches, starting with his three-volume Studies in Homer (1858), criticized at the time but still of interest to modern scholars, represented a development of his deep-seated religious convictions. The Old Testament testified to God’s presence in the life of ancient Israel, but Homer’s account of ancient Greece in the heroic age, the earliest surviving narratives of civilized society, could be read as evidence of a parallel if partial revelation to the Greeks. Such a reading required Homer to be substantially true, a single author rather than an ahistorical composite of multiple layers of tradition as Lachmann and others had suggested, as accurate on matters of fact and as generally reliable as the Bible was expected to be by literal-minded precritical readers. Gladstone’s version of Homer and Homeric geography led him in the 1870s into uncritical opportunist endorsement and appropriation of Heinrich Schliemann’s reckless archaeological claims after investigating allegedly Homeric sites. But it is now accepted that even if Schliemann and Gladstone got it quite badly wrong in detail, there are probably traces of an actual rather than a purely fictional history and geography behind the Homeric poems.

It was easier and less contentious to apply Roman materials to Christian purposes. There were parallels to Victorian missionary activity in Africa and India in the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire. The gospel account of the crucifixion by the Roman authorities in Palestine, St. Paul’s missionary journeys and detention in Rome, and the subsequent persecutions of Christians by the Roman emperors Nero and Diocletian dramatically brought the matter of Rome and the matter of Christianity together. Could ancient Britain be linked with this early Christian Roman world? Paul had Christian friends in high places, ‘‘saints in Caesar’s household’’ (Philippians 4:22), and one of them might have been Pomponia Graecina, wife of Aulus Plautius, who had conquered Britain in the time of the emperor Claudius. Perhaps Pomponia persuaded Paul to visit Britain? There was also a tradition, uncomplicated by hard evidence, that Joseph of Arimathea, a disciple of Jesus, eventually settled at Glastonbury. Seductive but unscholarly speculation and legend linking early Christianity with Roman Britain, invoked by Anglican apologists such as Bishop Stillingfleet in Origines Britannicae (1685), could be revived in historical fiction if not in serious critical history. Claudia and Pudens, mentioned in the New Testament as friends of St. Paul, might - or might not - have been the same as the British Claudia and Pudens mentioned in the poetry of Martial. F. W. Farrar, Dean of Canterbury and a serious biblical scholar, decided they were not, except for the purposes of his novel Darkness and Dawn; or, Scenes in the Days of Nero (1891).

There was evidence that Caractacus, leader of British resistance to the Roman occupation, had been carried off as a prisoner to Rome, and that provided a model for fictions such as G. J. Whyte-Melville’s Gladiators (1863) and G. A. Henty’s Beric the Briton (1893), which linked proto-British heroism with the majesty of imperial Rome. Religiously inflected Roman melodramas of courage and martyrdom were established in British popular culture well before the American Lew Wallace’s novel Ben-Hur; or, The Days of the Messiah (1880) and the films based on it. Shakespeare’s frequently revived Roman plays Julius Caesar and Coriolanus provided a kind of model that could easily be Christianized. Bulwer Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii, which helped to set the fashion for nineteenth-century novels of Roman life, had included a little liberal Christianity in the last of its five books, corresponding to the five acts of a Shakespearean drama, when Glaucus and his wife Ione become Christians. Knowledge of the later Roman Empire derived from a classical education could be usefully combined with more specifically religious concerns by popular novelists with axes to grind. Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia (1853), an anti-Catholic novel criticizing fifth-century Alexandrian monks, was answered by the now-Roman Catholic John Henry Newman’s early-Christian conversion-novel Callista: A Tale of the Third Century (1855). The recently investigated catacombs beneath the city of Rome and the saints and martyrs of the early fourth century, the time of the persecutions of Diocletian, were brought together in fictional form in Cardinal Wiseman’s novel Fabiola (1855). In an early example of what Hollywood was to call ‘‘novelization,’’ Wilson Barrett rewrote his Christians-and-lions martyr-play The Sign of the Cross as a novel in 1897, the same year that Wiseman’s Fabiola was dramatized as From Cross to Crown. Edwin Long’s popular painting Diana or Christ? (1889) shows a Christian maiden at the edge of a Roman arena, obviously about to choose Christ and encounter martyrdom.