This chapter is focused on a battle in the Athenian law-court between two great orators. Aeschines was trained as a tragic actor who worked in a mask, and brought the skills of the stage to the democratic arena. He argued for making peace with the new rising imperial power, Macedon, and tried to persuade the jury to position themselves as authentic democrats. Demosthenes was a skilled writer who wrote speeches for others, and later learnt how to present himself as a public speaker. He won the debate for two reasons. He persuaded the jury to position themselves in nationalistic terms as Athenians, and he also persuaded them that he was sincere while his opponent was merely acting. The reputation of Demosthenes has undergone many changes, and it was only in the nineteenth century that he emerged as an archetypal democrat. In Demosthenes’ day the drive for sincerity was tied to a shift from communitarian thinking to a higher degree of individualism, in a political context where the city was losing its power of self-determination. I end by drawing on Peter Brook’s minimalist definition of theatre to create a definition of democracy.

This chapter looks at how Victorians constructed a genealogical relation to antiquity and the Bible, forming both as a cultural, intellectual and spiritual origin for modernity. It shows how philology was the discipline which linked theology and classics as disciplines, and how historiography and archaeology were mobilized to understand the present as the outcome of the past. In particular, it looks at how William Gladstone, Matthew Arnold, Brooke Foss Westcott, Charles Kingsley, and Henry Montagu Butle, used translation, Homeric studies, historical fiction and cultural history to forge a contentious and contested relation between the biblical and classical pasts and modernity.

Like Newman’s troubled journey towards Rome, Gladstone’s agonized change of mind in 1845 over the Maynooth grant for the training of Catholic priests in Ireland is charted in letters that reveal his vulnerability and uncertainty, and a nervousness that is uncannily reflected in the mechanics of the uniform penny post. One of Browning’s letters was left in the Barretts’ letterbox and one of Newman’s was dropped on the road. In Gladstone’s case, heightened tension leads to the blunder of a unsealed ‘secret’ letter being sent to the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel. And with a blizzard of such correspondence surrounding Gladstone’s concerns about the Maynooth grant, it seems to have been a leaked letter that enabled The Times to report his imminent resignation from the cabinet. This Gladstonian drama is played out in two acts, the first in private, the second in public through printed open letters regarding Maynooth.

This chapter considers John Henry’s Newman’s correspondences from when he turned his face Romeward, in 1843, through to his conversion to the Roman Catholic Church in 1845. First, I relate the six-year delay in his converting both to his late release of news of his true religious opinions to three close friends and colleagues and to the way in which, when finally written, the most painful letters enact delay syntactically. Behind these delays lay a reluctance to inflict pain on others by leaving what he called ‘the English Church’, abandoning the struggle to reclaim its catholic identity through the Oxford Movement, attaching himself to what many regarded as the Antichrist and thus cutting off his closest friends and relations. Second, I contrast two correspondences that came to a head in 1844 and 1845, one with two of his disciples, the other with his sister Jemima. Finally, I examine some letters from the time of Newman’s reception. Intimacy involves honesty, and in the letters of 1843–45 Newman was torn between confiding in a correspondent and endangering their own settlement of mind. He warned his friend Henry Edward Manning, the other future ‘convert cardinal’, about engaging in a ‘dangerous correspondence’.