Greek & Roman Classics in the British Struggle for Social Reform (original) (raw)

Syme's Roman Revolution - and a British one.

K. Ascani & V. Gabrielsen, Ancient History Matters: Studies presented to Jens Erik Skydsgaard on His 70th Birthday (2002), 297-303., 2002

Much has been made of the parallel between Augustus and Mussolini in Ronald Syme's classic The Roman Revolution (1939). This essay argues that the parallel plays only a minor and purely superficial role as contemporary inspirational backdrop to Syme’s conception of the fall of the Roman Republic. Much more profoundly and pervasively, Syme's contemporary inspiration (though he never directly admitted to it) derived from British political history in the years immediately after The Great War, when Syme first came to Oxford from New Zealand in 1921. British political culture was commonly perceived to have gone through a parallel revolution at this time, as a new class of self-made ‘hard-faced men’, ruthless social climbers with new money, came to supplant the benevolent gentlemen politicians of inherited wealth and old aristocratic lineages.

Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire

('Classical Presences' series), 2010

This volume brings together scholars of modern and ancient culture to explore historical, textual, material and theoretical interactions between classics and imperialism during the heyday of the British Empire from the late eighteenth through to its collapse in the early decades of the twentieth century. It examines the multiple dialogues that developed between Classics and colonialism in this period and argues that the two exerted a formative influence on each other at various levels. Most at issue in the contexts where Classics and empire converge is the critical question of ownership: to whom does the classical past belong? Did the modern communities of the Mediterranean have pre-eminent ownership of the visual, literary and intellectual culture of Greece and Rome? Or could the populations and intellectual centres of Northern Europe stake a claim to this inheritance? And in what ways could non-European communities and powers – Africa, India, America – commandeer the classical heritage for themselves? In exploring the relationship between classics and imperialism in this period, this volume examines trends that are of current importance both to the discipline of Classics and to modern British cultural and intellectual history. Both classics and empire, this volume contests, can be better understood by examining them in tandem: the development of classical ideas, classical scholarship and classical imagery in this period was often directly or indirectly influenced by empire and imperial authority, and the British Empire itself was informed, shaped, legitimised and evaluated using classical models.

British Romantic Literature and the Emerging Modern Greek Nation

British Romantic Literature and the Emerging Modern Greek Nation makes an original contribution to the field of British Romantic Hellenism (and Romanticism more broadly) by emphasizing the diversity of Romantic-era writers’ attitudes towards, and portrayals of, Modern Greece. Whereas, traditionally, studies of British Romantic Hellenism have predominantly focused on Europe’s preoccupation with an idealized Ancient Greece, this study emphasizes the nuanced and complex nature of British Romantic writers’ engagements with Modern Greece. Specifically, the book emphasizes the ways that early nineteenth-century British literature about contemporary Greece helped to strengthen British-Greek intercultural relations and, ultimately, to situate Greece within a European sphere of influence.