Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T22:34:04.192Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

To Make a New Thermopylae: Hellenism, Greek Liberation, and the Battle of Thermopylae*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

Ian Macgregor Morris
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In the eighteenth century, attitudes towards ancient Greece were changing from an antiquarian interest in literature and art, into a wider emotional affiliation that permeated many aspects of artistic and political life. With this new attitude came an interest in contemporary Greece and an awareness of and concern about her state under Turkish rule which, by the early nineteenth century, culminated in growing sympathy for the cause of Greek liberation. Of all the characters and incidents of ancient Greek history, none played such a central part in this tradition as those involved in the Battle of Thermopylae of 480 B.C., so that by the very eve of the Greek revolution in 1821 Byron could call on his contemporaries to ‘make a new Thermopylae’. The history of Thermopylae in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is, in many ways, the history of contemporary hellenism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , October 2000 , pp. 211 - 230
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. George Saintsbury claimed that it would be ‘difficult to imagine, and would hardly be possible to find, even in the long list of mistaken ‘long poem’ writers of the last two centuries, more tedious stuff than his’ (The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. X (1913), 149)Google Scholar; Tillyard, E. M. W. goes so far as to redefine epic poetry itself, and specifically excludes Leonidas (The English Epic and its Background (1968), 6, 494)Google Scholar. However neither critic supports his claims. William Cowper once wrote that The Athenaid, Glover's sequel to Leonidas, was ‘condemned I dare say by those who have never read the half of it’ (letter to Lady Hesketh, 4 Feb 1789), and his words can be taken for the vast majority of modern critics’ attitudes to Glover's work in general. See my article on Glover in P. N. Review (forthcoming).

2. Collins, J., The Greek Influence on English Poetry (1910), 63Google Scholar.

3. Simpson, Joseph, The Patriot (1785)Google Scholar; Roberdeau, J. P., Thermopylae, or Invasion Repulsed (1792)Google Scholar.

4. May 31, 1737. See Works of Swift, ed. Scott, (1824), 73Google Scholar.

5. Warton, J., Essay on the Genius of Pope (1782), ii. 401nGoogle Scholar; Scott, J., Poetical Works (1782) 207Google Scholar; Southey, R., Joan of Arc (1794)Google Scholar, preface; letter to Bedford, H. W., 13 November 1794 (in The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. Southey, Charles (London, 1849), i. 191)Google Scholar.

6. Fielding, H., A Journey From this World into the Next (1742) c. 7Google Scholar. Goldgar argues that Fielding's praise of Glover is a ‘remnant of his anti-Walpole partisanship’, a vestige of the faction – of which both Fielding and Glover were a part – that sought to depose Robert Walpole's ministry (Weslyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding: Miscellanies Vol. II, ed. Goldgar, B. A. (1983), 37 n. 2)Google Scholar. However, the work was completed after Walpole's fall from power, and as Fielding felt free to criticize many of his former colleagues in the faction (ibid, xxv), any praise that remains is surely not such a ‘remnant’.

7. Letter to John Hanson, April 2, 1807; see Byron's Letters and Journals, vol. I, ed Marchand, L. A. (1993), 113Google Scholar.

8. The only case in which he deviates from the sources is in having Leonidas as the last of the Greeks to die, a necessary device for the central hero of an epic poem.

9. For example Arnold, T., The English Poets, ed. Ward, (1889), 239Google Scholar; Minto, W., Literature in the Georgian Era (1894), 75Google Scholar; Percival, , Political Ballads (1916), 144Google Scholar; Rothstein, E., Restoration and 18th Century Poetry (1981), 205Google Scholar; Sutherland, L., Politics and Finance in the 18th Century (1984), 78Google Scholar; Gerrard, C., The Patriot Opposition to Walpole (1994), 80Google Scholar.

10. Henry, Pemberton wrote the work of literary criticism Observations on Poetry, Especially the Epic, Occasioned by the Late Poem Upon Leonidas (1738)Google Scholar, pointing out at great length Glover's Homeric qualities. Poets, too, made the connection. See, for example, Matthew Green, who described Glover as:

This, this is he, that was foretold

Should emulate our Greeks of old.

(From The Spleen (1737); see Chamlers, Alexander, The Works of the English Poets (1810), xv. 167)Google Scholar. Similarly, William Thompson wrote to Glover that ‘Homer's Self revives again in thee’ (From To the Author of Leonidas: A Poem, An Epistle (1757), line 37).

11. Ram, T., The Neo-classical Epic 1650–1720 (1971)Google Scholar.

12. Ibid., 182.

13. Ibid., 8–14, 32ff.

14. Wood, R., A Comparative View of the Antient and present State of the Troade. To which is prefixed an Essay on the Original Genius of Homer (1767)Google Scholar; later republished as An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer, with a Comparative View of the Ancient and present State of the Troade, ed. J. Bryant (1775).

15. Collvil, R., ‘The Caledonian Heroine’, line 355, in Occasional Poems (1771)Google Scholar; Scott, J., ‘The Muse’, lines 48–9, in The Poetical Works of John Scott (1782)Google Scholar; Boyd, H., ‘The Helots – A Tragedy’, lines 313–15, in Poems (1793)Google Scholar.

16. Pococke, R., A Description of the East, vol. I (1743), 42Google Scholar.

17. In 480 B.C. the Pass of Thermopylae, sandwiched between the mountains and the sea, was wide enough only for two carts to pass one another. A gradual deposit of silt has now created a plain some four miles wide, although it has been estimated that in the early nineteenth century it was considerably less than that (Szemler, G. et al. , Thermopylai: Myth and Reality in 480 B.C. (Chicago, 1996)Google Scholar, Map I).

18. Dodwell, E., A Classical and Topological Tour Through Greece during the Years 1801, 1805 and 1806 (London, 1819), ii. 66Google Scholar.

19. Dodwell, E., Views of Greece (London, 1821)Google Scholar, preface.

20. Ibid, Description to Plate of Thermopylae.

21. Clarke, E., Travels in Various Countries, vol. 4 (London, 1812), 238Google Scholar.

22. Ibid., 251.

23. Ibid., 251–2.

24. Ibid., 240–1.

25. Lines 103–13 and 126–33.

26. Dandoulakis, G., The Struggle for Greek Independence: the Contribution of Greek and English Poetry, Dissertation, Loughborough University of Technology (1985), 305Google Scholar.

27. The idea of comparing Leonidas with Jesus appeared in The Athenaid, Glover's 30–book sequel to Leonidas. Although Herodotus records that Xerxes had the Spartan's head erected on a pole, Glover has the Persian king crucify Leonidas' corpse. The passages make an implicit comparison with the crucifixion of Jesus and the idea of self-sacrifice. See The Athenaid 15.244–87, 17.327–34, 20.246–355, 24.292–97, 26.145–48 and 313–22.

28. Coburn, K. (ed.), The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London, 1973), vol.3, no. 3637Google Scholar.

29. Arnold von Winkelried, a Swiss national hero who died at the battle of Semprach in 1386 against the Hapsburgs. Coleridge describes how he ‘with his bundle of Spears turned towards his Breast in order to break the Austrian Pike-men’ (Coleridge, Notebooks, vol. 3, no.3312)Google Scholar sacrificed his life to win Swiss freedom. See Adams, F. and Cunningham, C., The Swiss Confederation (London, 1889) 6Google Scholar, and Thurer, G., Free and Swiss (London, 1970), 36Google Scholar.

30. At the battle of Talavera in 1809 the 23rd Dragoons charged the French guns, and although the charge was broken by an unseen watercourse they continued the attack, heroically if somewhat pointlessly, losing over half their complement in the process. See Fortescue, J., The History of the British Army (London, 1912), vii. 251–1Google Scholar, who claims the dragoons attacked ‘without any word of command’ and describes the charge as a ‘mad exploit’ (p.253).

31. The Mamalukes (or Mamelukes) were Egyptian mercenaries. Coleridge, (Notebooks, vol. 3, no. 3312)Google Scholar relates the story of one who, when his horse refused to charge the French lines, backed the animal onto the enemy, killing himself in the process.

32. Notebooks, vol. 3, no. 3312.

33. It should be noted that Coleridge's definition of the Dragoons’ actions is not as harsh or negative as that of the Mamaluke, although the motivation behind those actions - violent instinct rather than moral excellence –dash; is similar.

34. The Courier, 13 January 1809.

35. Aeneid 4.625.

36. Canto II, stanza 73.

37. Terence Spencer wrote that ‘of all the philhellenic poets of the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the one who was most cruelly crushed out of existence by the reputation of Byron was William Haygarth… [his poem] was published, a splendid quarto, in 1814 – too late; for the sun of Byron was already above the horizon.’ (Fair Greece, Sad Relic, 2nd ed., 1974, 281). The effect of this ‘crushing’ out of existence seems all the harsher when one discovers that Haygarth wrote much of his poem in 1811 while still in Greece, before Byron completed Childe Harold, and did not publish until 1814 merely because of what he described as ‘the natural apprehension which the Author feels for the fate of a first performance’ (Greece, a Poem, preface, v).

38. Greece, a Poem, in three parts; with Notes, Classical Illustrations, and Sketches of the Scenery (London, 1814), Notes p. 276Google Scholar.

39. Canto III, stanza 86, verse 7 (lines 725–30).

40. Age of Bronze(1823), stanza 13, line 552.

41. Translated by Dandoulakis, G., op. cit., 278Google Scholar.

42. Translated by Keeley, E., Passions and Ancient Days (1972)Google Scholar.