This volume brings together a team of scholars from across disciplines, periods and nations to tackle the generalisations and preconceptions in literary criticism that Romanticism was hostile to classical Rome. Traditionally the romantic was seen in opposition to the classical; Romanticism, as M.H. Abrams conceived it in The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), being a movement away from the Neoclassical focus of the eighteenth century. While definitions of romantic and Romanticism have shifted significantly since the time of Abrams, there has been little revision of the traditional dialectic of romantic and classical. Additionally, while there are many studies of Romantic engagement with Medieval literature and with other major predecessors such as Milton, Spenser and Shakespeare, very few have examined engagement with Roman writers. This book, along with a few other emerging works on the subject, seeks to give a long overdue reassessment of the relationship between Romans and Romantics.
The book is ambitious in scope, with 20 articles (if the introduction and afterword by distinguished scholars P. and G.W. Most are included) written by Classicists and Romanticists from History, Classics and Literature and from a wide range of countries, focusing on Romantic writers from across Europe and America. The book clearly strives to be interdisciplinary, cross-period and international. Rather than centring on the familiar British Romantics, it also seeks to advance other definitions of Romanticism by opening up its study to authors from Russia, America, Switzerland, Norway and the Netherlands as well as those of Britain and Germany. Thematically it examines not simply Romantic engagement with Roman literature, but politics, philosophy and travel as well.
One of the primary assumptions that the book seeks to challenge (which comes to a head in the article by Saunders) is that Romantic writers saw all things Roman as pale imitations of Greek originals. While many articles show that this notion certainly existed at the time, Romantic writers steeped in a Latin Classical education in fact had a much more complex relationship with ancient Rome than this dismissive suggestion would imply. Two of the articles (by Skoie and C.J. Richard) look at school and university curricula to demonstrate the extent of Latin learning, pointing out that students came to Latin before Greek and, in the course of their education, studied far more Roman than Greek writers. They often cited large passages of Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Cicero, Cato, Livy and many others by heart simply in passing conversation, so it can be little wonder if there is significant Roman influence in their writing.
Probably one of the most important articles for this reassessment, the first in the book, written by J. Sachs, argues that Romantic writers did not simply stereotype the ‘Roman’, but rather differentiated Roman republicanism from imperialism, and between various rulers and epochs. Sachs shows how Roman republican writing was drawn upon heavily for familiar allusions during and following the French revolution, particularly in times of high tension when it was often dangerous to criticise Britain's monarchy or to show favour for the republic in France. J.M. Sejersted picks up a similar thread in his article on the Norwegian Romantic Henrik Wergeland.
The majority of the articles, as one would expect, examine the influence of Roman writers on Romantic poetry and prose. H. Jordheim outlines the romantic and classical dialectic in German writers, particularly Herder, Winckelmann, Goethe and the Schlegels, before providing an examination of Jean Paul's Titan, in which he argues that the text navigates a path between the classical and romantic (p. 57). G. Liveley examines Ovid's myth of Narcissus in Shelley and others, S. Gillespie examines Wordsworth's imitation of Juvenal, while J.C. Pellicer explores the influence of Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics on Charlotte Smith's Beachy Head, and J. Børtnes looks at Pushkin's engagement with Ovid. Others explore the influence of Roman philosophy, particularly Stoicism, on Romantic writers including Wordsworth (B. Graver) and Henrik Wergeland (Sejersted).
Shifting the focus partially away from influence, some of the articles (particularly those by C. Edwards, T. Webb, C.J. Richard, E. Prettejohn, S. Evangelista and P.) explore imaginative engagements with the city of Rome as travellers on the grand tour viewed the ancient monuments, felt the presence of the classical history they had studied, and wrote about it in their correspondence and their literature, including two of the most influential of such works, De Staël's Corinne and Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Readers are given a real sense of the place of ancient Rome in the Romantic imagination through Webb's excellent article on the Shelleys and Byron, particularly when he depicts Mary Shelley reading Virgil's Georgics sitting at the same window looking out on the same view that Virgil did when he wrote it which, she says, ‘has made me enjoy his poem, more, I think, than I ever did any other’ (p. 210). Such glimpses into the travels of Romantic writers can give balance to the better known attacks like that of Byron who, in Webb's words, devoted ‘three stanzas of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage to an attack on “the lyric Roman” whom he primarily associates with “the daily drug” of a classical education, causing his narrator to exclaim in climactic rejection: “Then farewell, Horace; whom I hated so”’. As Webb points out, it is worth remembering that Byron is considered one of the most Augustan of the Romantic poets and even ‘initiated his own poetic career with Hints from Horace’ (p. 218).
The final section of the book continues with writers in Rome, but takes it forward into later periods and Romantic ‘Receptions’ with articles on the imaginative engagement of Carel Vosmaer (Prettejohn), Walter Pater (Evangelista) and Thomas Hardy (P.). The final two articles move away from the book's emphasis on literature to explore the Romans in Romantic opera (E. Sandmo) and the romanticism of Romans in Italian cinema (P. Garofalo).
The volume offers an important new assessment of Romantic engagement with ancient Roman literature, politics, history and culture. It provides a wide array of themes, stances and authors, challenging both the traditional view of Romanticism as opposed to the classical, and the centring of Romantic studies on British poets through its wide scope. A book this wide-ranging and eclectic, however, must of necessity lose something in depth. It can at times seem an odd mix of obscurities where readers may well wish to pick and mix which articles will be relevant to them. Despite the magnitude and scope of the book, one does not leave with a thorough and comprehensive understanding of all the ways in which the Romantics engaged with the Romans. Most articles have a specific focus on just one or two works by that author, and there is no examination of the vast influence of Virgil's Aeneid, for example, or any mention of Shelley's re-envisioning of Cicero's ‘Dream of Scipio’ in Queen Mab, or De Quincey's engagement with Roman politics, to name just a few of the more obvious exclusions. So much more could still be said. And yet this is the importance of such a study. Very few studies like this exist, and this book clearly demonstrates how significant and extensive the topic is. This is an interesting survey of a topic that is in much need of enquiry.
