Greek Epigram in Reception: J. A. Symonds, Oscar Wilde, and the Invention of Desire, 1805-1929 (Classical Presences)

Greek Epigram in Reception is a chronological survey of the reception history of the Greek Anthology, a Byzantine collection of ancient Greek short poems known as epigrams. Tracing the strange evolution of the Greek Anthology from the early nineteenth century to the years after the first World War, the volume analyses the complex webs of rhetoric that are spun as writers and translators bring their different agendas to bear on the Anthology's text, pruning it to meet their needs. As so little was known about its poets, and because it stood for the "Anthology" of the Greeks and their culture, the text became the battleground during the 1870s-90s on which normative and dissident interpretations of Ancient Greece were fought out. An emergent mass readership became caught between opposing and rhetorically loaded accounts, casting the Anthology and thus the ancient race on whom the British were supposed to be modelling themselves as patriots and doting spouses or lovers of male Beauty, like the Decadent sensation Oscar Wilde. The after-effects of this cultural war were to stretch into the 1920s, and still echo today. Cover 1 Greek Epigram in Reception: J. A. Symonds, Oscar Wilde, and the Invention of Desire, 1805–1929 4 Copyright 5 Acknowledgements 6 Contents 8 Introduction 10 1. GREECE AND THE VICTORIANS: HERITAGE, MEMORY, TRAUMA 10 2. CONTESTING MEMORY: THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY AND RADICAL CLASSICS 19 3. THE ANCIENT GENRE, ITS TRANSMISSION, AND ITS PUBLICATION 21 4. CHUNKING THE ARCHIVE: EPIGRAM BETWEEN READERSHIPS 25 5. FRAGMENTARY LIVES: DOMESTICATING THE ANTHOLOGY 30 6. SEX, ART, AND DEATH: GREEK EPIGRAM IN AND OUT OF POMPEII 32 7. EPIGRAM AS SOCIAL PRACTICE AND POLITICAL STATEMENT 34 8. CONTROVERSY AND DISCIPLINE: A STATEMENT OF METHOD 37 9. SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST: HOW THE ANTHOLOGY WAS FRAMED 43 Part I: The Descent from Olympus 46 1: The Miscellanies of Bland and Merivale 48 1. ‘BE MINE TO WREATHE’: FROM ANTHOLOGY TO MISCELLANY 48 2. ‘SOME WITHER’D SHRUB, OF POW’R MALIGN’: PREFACE AND PROLOGUE 52 3. ‘A GUILTY EXCESS’: REDEEMING MELEAGER IN THE PREFACE 57 4. ‘POOR LOST ELIZA!’: THE ANTHOLOGY IN ENGLISH DRESS 64 5. REVIEWING THE ANTHOLOGY 67 6. ANTHOLOGIZING THE REVIEWS 76 7. ‘A SIFTING COLLECTION’: EPIGRAM’S CHANGING WORLD 80 2: Three Mid-Century ‘Anthologies’ 86 1. ‘A FAULTY AND INJUDICIOUS ARRANGEMENT’: SIZES AND SCHEMES 86 2. ‘FRUSTRATED BY VAGUENESS’: THREE MID-CENTURY HISTORIES OF GREEK LITERATURE 87 Talfourd, Blomfield, et al., History of Greek Literature (2nd edn, 1850) 87 Browne, A History of Classical Literature (1851–3) 89 Mure, A Critical History of the Language and Literature of Antient Greece (1850–7) 89 3. ‘A PUBLIC EVIL’: WELLESLEY’S ANTHOLOGIA POLYGLOTTA (1849) 91 4. AN ETON MESS: GEORGE BURGES’S GREEK ANTHOLOGY (1852) 105 5. ‘A HARD CLOG’: ROBERT MACGREGOR’S GREEK ANTHOLOGY (1864) 112 6. CONCLUSION 117 Part II: Wilde’s Meleager 122 3: ‘The Most Precious Relic’ 124 1. ‘THIS WORLD OF PHANTOMS’: ET IN ATTICA, EGO 124 2. SYMONDS AS OXFORD CLASSICIST 130 3. AESTHETICS OF DESIRE: SYMONDS, PATER,AND ‘WINCKELMANN’ 137 4. BEATING THE CURVE: STUDIES, PASTORAL, AND EPIGRAM 142 5. ‘THE MOST VALUABLE RELIC’: POETS IN A NEW LANDSCAPE 147 6. ALPINE CONNOTATIONS 1: THE NORTH FACE OF AESCHYLUS 156 7. THE ANTHOLOGY MEETS ITS PUBLIC 159 8. STYLES OF EROS: MELEAGER, STRATO, RUFINUS 164 9: ALPINE CONTEXTS 2: ‘THE SOUL GROWS CLOTTED BY CONTAGION’ 171 10. CONCLUSION: ONWARD AND UPWARD 174 4: ‘The True Liber Amoris at Last’ 180 1. EPIGRAM FOR QUEEN AND COUNTRY: LORD CHARLES NEAVES, THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY (1874) 183 2. SWELLING AND BURNS: DOCTORING THE ANTHOLOGY 193 3. TRUTH, BEAUTY, AND THE WORDSWORTHIAN WAY 201 4. SAME TEXT, DIFFERENT BOOK: THE EDITIONS OF STUDIES 207 5. WILDE TIMES: STUDIES AND THE FIN DE SIÈCLE 215 6. MELEAGER TAKES THE STAND 223 7. BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL? 229 Part III: ‘The Book of Greek Life’ 236 5: Responses to Symonds 238 1. ‘INTO A PURER AIR’: JEBB’S GROWTH AND INFLUENCE (1893) 240 2. ‘ALL THE BEST’: MACKAIL’S SELECT EPIGRAMS 246 3. GATHERING IN THE WHEAT 252 4. MACKAIL’S GOSPEL: THE NEW BOOK OF LIFE 257 5. THE WHOLE LYRE OF PASSION? MACKAI LAND GREEK LOVE 262 6. EPIGRAMS AND EMPIRE: MACKAIL’S LEGACY 265 7. LOST BOYS: ‘OSWALD’ AND RODD 272 The Anthology in Evolution 281 6: Reed and Girdle: The Anthology in the 1920s 290 1. ET IN ARCADIA . . . 295 2. HATING DAN CUPID: AN ANTHOLOGY FOR ROUTLEDGE 299 3. THE ANTHOLOGY AND THE NEW CRITICS 306 4. ‘NEARER PAN’S GREAT SOUL’: WALLACE RICE’S PAGAN PICTURES (1927) 309 PAN PIPES 309 HELIODORA DEAD 313 5. ‘THE GREAT ROLLING STONE OF GREECE’: SHANE LESLIE’S GREEK ANTHOLOGY (1929) 313 6. PROLEPSIS: MELEAGER AND THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR 320 7. CONCLUSION: THE HIGHGATE CAROLLER; LESLIE’S EVIL TWIN 325 Conclusion 332 1. PAN’S AFTERMATH: THE ANTHOLOGY IN LATER TRANSLATIONS 333 i. ‘Goodbye, Vile Canting Puritan’: The return of Strato 333 ii. Ghost Flowers: Translating and explaining the Anthology in the later twentieth century 336 2. HOW TO BURY A POET, SPEAKING FIGURATIVELY 342 3. GREEK GENIUS ON DEMAND: POSTMODERN ANTHOLOGY 344 ENVOI 348 APPENDIX: Symonds and the Language of Gems 350 References 354 Index 392 This book develops a case study of a single ancient Greek verse genre, epigram, in its modern reception from 1805 to 1929. Previously exclusive to an educated elite for whom it served time-honoured functions in pedagogy and social exchange, epigram in the nineteenth century became an important site of contestation between mainstream and dissident Hellenisms in the public sphere. Its principal literary repository, the Greek Anthology, was hailed as a unique social document which gave unmediated access to ancient private lives. Picking and choosing from its thousands of poems let translators and literary historians string together any story they wanted about the Greek ‘Genius’, the national and racial spirit which was widely felt to live again through modern British character and achievement; so these stories were potentially about ‘us’, or about who ‘we’ might become in future. One book of the Anthology, however, stuck out as alien: the twelfth, dedicated to the love of men for handsome youths. Subcultural appropriations of the Anthology thus became an important tool in forging an honourable genealogy for male homosexual desire. In turn, these appropriations provoked a backlash by conservative critics, the after-effects of whose rhetoric of containment is still with us in epigram studies today. By tracking this one ‘minor’ genre through a century and more of (mis)representation, Greek Epigram in Reception therefore throws new light on the complex processes by which ancient literary works are received in translation, selection, and exegesis, and on how these processes forever change the texts on which they operate This book is a chronological survey of the reception history of the Greek Anthology, a Byzantine collection of ancient Greek short poems known as epigrams. Tracing the strange evolution of the Greek Anthology from the early nineteenth century to the years after the first World War, the volume analyses the complex webs of rhetoric that are spun as writers and translators bring their different agendas to bear on the Anthology's text, pruning it to meet their needs. As so little was known about its poets, and because it stood for the 'Anthology' of the Greeks and their culture, the text became the battleground during the 1870s-90s on which normative and dissident interpretations of Ancient Greece were fought out. An emergent mass readership became caught between opposing and rhetorically loaded accounts, casting the Anthology and thus the ancient race on whom the British were supposed to be modelling themselves as patriots and doting spouses or lovers of male Beauty, like the Decadent sensation Oscar Wilde. "This book is a chronological survey of the reception of the Greek Anthology (a Byzantine collection of ancient Greek short poems known as epigrams). Tracing the strange evolution of the Greek Anthology from the early nineteenth century to the years after the first World War, the volume analyses the complex webs of rhetoric that are spun as writers and translators bring their different agendas to bear on the Anthology's text, pruning it to meet their needs. As so little was known about its poets, and because it stood for the Greeks and their culture, the text became the battleground during the 1870s-90s on which normative and dissident interpretations of Ancient Greece were fought out. An emergent mass readership became caught between opposing and rhetorically loaded accounts, casting the Anthology, and thus the ancient race on whom the British were supposed to be modelling themselves, as patriots and doting spouses or as lovers of male Beauty, like the Decadent sensation Oscar Wilde." from dust jacket