Pericles’ funeral oration has played a significant public role, especially in Anglophone countries, over the last century. Renaissance humanists had valued it simply as a masterful piece of oratory, to be studied for its literary qualities. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was seen primarily as a source of historical information about Athenian culture, with no present significance. The great change came in the early nineteenth century, when radical and liberal thinkers in Britain, for whom democracy was no longer a threat but a promise, focussed increasingly on the contents of the speech. Cultural achievement was, they argued, intimately bound up with the participation of the people in public life. For them, the proof was in Pericles’ praise of Athens and its institutions. Ancient and modern democracy were now elided, and the words of this funeral speech were thus made available for politicians seeking to celebrate their own societies, from the United States of America to the European Union. These readers of the funeral oration as a celebration of democracy almost entirely ignored the original context of the speech. Developments in modern warfare as well as the rise of the mass citizen army changed this.

The major fault-line in Victorian engagement with the Bible and antiquity lay between believers and unbelievers, across a wide array of perspectives. Something of this is traced here, from the rationalistic legacy of Bentham to Pusey’s consciously reactionary repudiation of his own early immersion in German scholarship.Consequently, literature about the Bible and antiquity could be polemical, but solvents could be found, not least ones that were associational and personal. Most importantly, friendship could provide such a bond: this chapter traces that which began at Charterhouse School between George Grote and Connop Thirlwall and which ended only with their deaths. Grote is now much better remembered than Thirlwall, but both wrote important histories of ancient Greece that would be translated into German, a great tribute given their own indebtedness to German scholarship. In a review of Curtius’s history of ancient Greece, Arnold criticised both Grote and Thirlwall for failing to reach the new standards set by more recent German scholarship. Within a year of the death of Thirlwall, Anglo-German classical scholarship was being written in an altogether new key.

Barrell concludes by arguing that the utilitarians’ conscription into an ahistorical Enlightenment is doubly misconceived, first, because they opposed only the crudest forms of historical enquiry, and, second, because the eighteenth-century Enlightenments were neither systematically ahistorical nor neatly superseded by Romantic, organic, and historicist ideas. If, therefore, these new historical perspectives were both products and unruly offshoots of Enlightenment, then the utilitarians’ intellectual history assumes a more fluid shape. This new shape, Barrell suggests, may force us to rethink the utilitarians’ place within the intellectual history of the nineteenth century; the history of historical writing; and the history of philosophy.

This chapter examines contemporary responses to utilitarianism as a political tradition, and, contrary to accepted wisdom, argues that Bentham’s theory of utility was circumstantially and thus historically relative. It asks why Bentham has been perceived as both an ahistorical and an antihistorical thinker, despite his engagement with the ‘Enlightened’ historicisms of the eighteenth century: with Montesquieu, Barrington, Kames, and others. While he denied that history possessed an independent value that could determine or even effectively structure politics, we should not mistake these arguments for an unwillingness to contemplate politics historically, or to make occasionally significant concessions to time and place. Bentham’s point, rather, was that historical truths were categorically distinct from philosophical ones, and that sciences historiques observed the past while sciences philosophiques appraised it. The chapter also addresses Bentham’s overlooked work as a ‘historiographer’ who performed recognisably historical tasks, including the examination of evidence and the passing of historical judgements