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Marilyn Gaull

Romans and Romanticism Author(s): Marilyn Gaull Source: The Wordsworth Circle, Vol. 36, No. 1, ROMANTIC ANTIQUITIES: Papers delivered at

NASSR, 2004, Boulder, Colorado (Winter, 2005), pp. 15-20Published by: Marilyn GaullStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/24044991Accessed: 28-10-2015 11:22 UTC

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two strands of modernity - mechanized printing and impe

rial archaeology in Egypt - come together in what may be an

eerie postscript to Byron's association of Egyptian relics and

his paper legacy. In May, 1825, Thomas Galloway, a British

engineer, was in Egypt, talking with Mohammad Ali Pasha

(Byron's old acquaintance from his visit to Turkey in 1809)

about the modernization of Egypt. Ali Pasha was interested in

building a paper mill on the banks of the Nile, and wanted

some advice about how to accomplish it. According to Gallo

way, in a letter to his father published in the London Times,

"They [Ali Pasha and his prime minister Kio Bey] wish to

know. . .as a great quantity of linen-rag is found upon all the

mummies, and as it contains a great portion of the acid used

for the preservation of the bodies, if it can be applied to the

purpose of paper-making" (Oct. 15, 1825; 2). This bizarre

idea of making paper from mummy-wrappings (one that

gained further currency in the Victorian era) would almost

certainly have appealed to Byron, and one can just about im

agine stanzas from Don Juan on the subject.4 Whether such

mummy paper was ever fabricated, its constitutive impulses

are evident in Byron's work where concerns about his paper

legacy appear in relation to the remnants of ancient Egypt.

The operative question - what will the world make of what I

leave behind? - resonates through the passages I have ex

amined here, written in the great age of paper and archaeol

ogy that Byron's era inaugurated. On paper, the nineteenth

century author engages a newly-configured territory of mem

ory, shaped by scientific, industrial, and imperial advances

and occupied by fears of error, mockery, and loss.

WORKS CITED

Baker, Nicholson. Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper

(Random House, 2001), 54-64; Byron, George Gordon,

Lord. Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand. 13 vols.

(John Murray, 1973-1994); Byron, George Gordon,

Lord. The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome McGann.

7 vols. (Clarendon, 1980-1993); Clarke, Edward Daniel.

The Tomb of Alexander; A Dissertation on the Sarcophagus

brought from Alexandria and now in the British Museum

(Cambridge, 1805); Coleman, D.C. The British Paper In

dustry, 1495-1860: A Study in Industrial Growth (Claren

don, 1958); Dane, Joseph A. "The Curse of the

Mummy Paper," Printing History 34:2 (1995), 18-25; Er

ickson, Lee. The Economy of Literary Form: English Litera

ture and the Industrialization of Publishing 1800-1850

(Johns Hopkins, 1996); Hansard, Thomas C. Ty

pographia: An Historical Sketch of the Origin and Progress of

the Art of Printing (London, 1825); Horace. Odes, trans.

James Michie (Penguin, 1964); Hunter, Dard.

Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient

Craft (Dover, 1974); The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers,

1816-1878, 2 vols. ed. Hyder E. Rollins (Harvard Univ.

Press, 1948); Klancher.Jon. The Making of English Read

ing Audiences, 1790-1832 (Univ. of Wisconsin Press,

1987); Leask, Nigel. Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel

Writing, 1770-1840 (Oxford Univ. Press, 2002); Murray,

John, Practical Remarks on Modem Paper (1829; rev. of

1823 article), ed. Leonard B. Schlosser (Bird & Bull

Press, 1981); The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (Norton, 1997); St. Clair, William. The

Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (CUP, 2004);

Wood, Marcus. Radical Satire and Print Culture, 1790

1822 (Clarendon, 1994); Wordsworth, William. The

Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Wordsworth, Abrams,

and Gill (Norton, 1979).

Romans and Romanticism

Marilyn Gaull New York University

Romantic classicism usually refers to Latin survivals Linnaean system of classification. During the Napoleonic and Hellenic inventions, a text-based Roman culture, which wars and the nationalism they provoked, Latin, Greek and

was authentic, and a Hellenic one, based on artifacts, which the rhetorical study that accompanied them were gradually was not. The native and authentic classicism of Roman Brit- overcome by an evolving standard English in which street

ain, however, which lasted four hundred years and survived slang was a more fashionable refinement than French, and

in a combination of texts and artifacts, was, until recently, Latin served as comic relief: monkish buffoons and hapless either overlooked or disregarded as irrelevant to British cul- scholars spouted it on stage, in gothic novels such as The

ture and identity. Monk or in parodies such as Nightmare Abbey.

Reading and writing Latin, and by extension the publi- In periodic revivals, Latin and the Roman values it con

cation of Latin texts, was, by 1800, like Gibbons' history, a veyed served an array of social, religious, legal, scientific and

tale of declining empires, surviving among poets, novelists, aesthetic functions. However, when manufacturing and en

tutors, the clergy, children, naturalists, physicians for diseases trepreneurial classes shaped education to their own needs

and body parts, and scientists for stars, strata, fossils, and the during the 18th century, classical languages declined and En

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glish became the language of the British. Studied from mili- alism behind English life, of orthodox religion and tradi

taristic or theological texts, Latin and Greek were, as Blake tional study (Webb, Ogilvie).

observed, identified with conflict: "it is the Classics & not

Goths nor Monks, that desolate Europe with Wars" (On Ho- Originating in the Italian excavations at Pompeii and

mer's Poetry.) Rome was Napoleon's model, but Latin was also Herculaneum, essentially Neapolitan/Greek settlements de

the elitist language of the Roman Catholic church. Educated strayed in 79AD, Hellenism was a social event as much as an

women such as Mary Wollstonecraft or Maria Edgeworth aesthetic code. It inspired travels, clubs, collections, architec

could, if they chose, write translations, textbooks, poems on tural publications, and raucous dinner parties. Many, like

Greek and Roman themes, teach languages, how to spell, Shelley, who should have known better, thought that the

pronounce, and write them in an attractive hand, but re- Greek golden age was to be found in Naples: "if such is Pom

frained from using Greek and Latin in public (Pearson). In peii, then what was Athens?" (Letters, II, 73) As silent and

The Governess, Sarah Fielding, herself an acclaimed translator mysterious as Keats's Grecian Urn, the reliques took on the

of Xenophon, ridiculed the classically trained female as "Mrs. values of those who discovered them, reflected the interests

Classic," a pedant. While gifted and intelligent women such of the wealthy, hedonistic, and sexually preoccupied British

as Mary Robinson identified with Sappho, she was the model gentlemen such as the Dilletanti who collected and recorded

for a victimized female poet suffering from unrequited love them,

whose reputed suicide by jumping off a cliff was considered

as "sublime" as her surviving verse (Reynolds). Shifting from texts to artifacts, from words to things,

from monuments to ruins, Hellenic classicism also turned

the Roman heroic and militaristic tradition to an erotic one.

In place of the Apollonian, Hellenists enjoyed such Bacchic

works as Sir William Hamilton's Account of the Remains of the

, . Worship of Priapus (1777), Richard Payne Knight's Discourse chitecture, and education reflected and extended the dying ,

' ,, _0_. , _ . , , ' on the Worship of Priapus (1786), and Erasmus Darwin s Loves

The Anglo-American colonists, the displaced aristo

crats who became the founders and shapers, created the new

country in the old Roman style: the philosophy, rhetoric, ar

European system the colonialists were rebelling against. Ro

man influence was so profound that it survives in the coin

age, government buildings, the legal and educational

institutions such as the Latin schools of Boston (founded in

of Plants (1789). From the damaged and weathered statues

in the Vatican, Winckelmann created in Germany an ideal

ized Greek heroic tradition, preparing for the still unresolved

debate over the Elgin marbles: who was the better guardian 1635 and teaching Latin and Greek without interruption ex- . „ , j • , r of Greek art, the embattled Greeks who owned it or the oc cept from 1776 to 1778, when classes were suspended to beat

off the British invaders, to whom, these Latinate rebels were

insurgents). Even in the 21st century, nowhere, except per

cupiers who stole it (St. Clair). The Romantic cultural imagi

nation reconciled these diverse and contradictory concepts

of Greece, the real and the imaginary, the political and the haps the Vatican, is Latin pursued with more fervor than in , , , ,. . , , r r

aestheuc, the heroic and the popular, the traditional and America, an instrument of control, regulation, exclusivity, „ , . __ ,, . °

, fashionable, as Hellenism, whether, to quote Keats on îmagi and profound prejudice, summed up neauy, too neatly, by . , „. . , , _ „ , r r j > r / ii native truth, it existed before or not (Ferns, who called E.Christian Kopf in The Devil Knows Latin: Why America Needs __ „ „ , , , , „ t , , . . V. , Hellenism both a model and curse ).

the Classical Tradition (1999). Indeed, just as in England, com

mitted classicists in the 18th century believed that a love of _ , ' From the grammar school curnculum (Clancy), or Latin would lead to a love of England, so in Amenca, the . .. _ , . , ... , . , . ... , , , ° from reading Colendge(Halmi, above), Wordsworth, and founders and their disciples believed that a knowledge of ,, , , . _ , , _ r

Shelley, among others, who were fluent in Greek, and De Latin was the beginning of patriotism (Colley). . _ . , ° ° r

Quincey who translated the morning paper into it, one

would assume that facility in Greek was commonplace during

To be a Hellenist or even an anti-Hellenist during the the period. But Hellenism was always in English, occasionally

Romantic period did not require literacy in any language, Italian. John Bell, the great serializer, produced a multi-vol

not even Greek. A mixed bag of fractured statues, opaque ume Pantheon (1790), and Godwin, The Pantheon or Ancient

drapery, furniture, coiffure, and mythic allusions, Hellenism, History of the Gods of Greece and Rome (1806), a reference work

the enthusiasm for the art, architecture, style, mythology, for children in which, as a concession to parents, he modestly

philosophy, and literature of an ancient Greece, was a primi- draped the naked statues. Even Plato was belatedly trans

tivist fiction, a counter culture, a refuge for those who, like lated and Hellenized: Plato did not enter the curriculum at

Wordsworth, would prefer to be "a Pagan suckled on a creed Cambridge until 1820, and Oxford in 1847. In 1787, Thomas

outworn" than deal with contemporary life. Politically liberal, Taylor published the first translation since 1604, turning

sexually emancipated, Hellenism affirmed a past golden age Plato into a mystic, prophet, theologian, in prose that was so

of innocence (and, sad for publishing, illiteracy), or the con- opaque and tortured that Coleridge observed he had turned

temporary pastoral tradition, the noble savage. Theologically, "difficult Greek into incomprehensible English." By 1807, in

it was anti-clerical, either atheistic or overtly pagan, advocat- the third edition of A New System; or, An Analysis of Ancient

ing nature worship, and even Unitarianism. Hellenism, with Mythology, thirty years after publishing the first edition, Bry

many faces and forms, was an implicit critique of the industri- ant himself translated the Greek passages and citations ex

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plaining in the Preface that, lamentably, the audience for Bulwer Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), con

Greek myth could not read Greek, and he hoped that "better eluded this phase of Hellenism in Great Britain. Like Gib

days may perhaps come; when the Greek language will be in bons's Decline and Fall (1776-78), the novel warned against

greater repute." the political pride and commercial excess that these ancient

societies had inspired. In the intermittent years, while Greek

However artificial and unsupported by either texts or and Roman style dominated taste and fashion, English had

experience, this Hellenism was inescapable (Harding). became the language of elegance, social exchange, business,

Keats, knowing no Greek himself, "hoped it was not too late a and religion, while Latin became even more exclusive and

day" to "touch... the beautiful mythology of Greece," revived excluding: to lawyers and physicians, it defined and affirmed

the "happy pieties" of the Ode to Psyche, struggled with the their elitist identity, while, ironically, scientists still used this

Hyperions, submitted to the silence and mystery in the Ode moribund language to describe their living world, to regulate on a Grecian Urn, and became the inspiration for Shelley's and confirm their revolutionary knowledge about it. Briefly,

Adonais, the elegy casting him as a Greek god. Shelley, who Victorian aristocrats revived Roman models of colonial ex

could read the original Greek and Latin texts, was caught up pansion, identifying with the conqueror, Hingley argues in

in the artifice of Hellenism, concluding in Prometheus Un- Roman Officers and British Gentlemen, but not with their con

bound (1822), "We are all Greeks": "the human form and quered British ancestors,

human mind attained a perfection in Greece. . .whose very

fragments are the despair of modern art" (Wallace). On the As the conquered, the British had an authentic native

other hand, his mentor, Peacock, who was so fluent in Greek classical history which literally, like unidentified fossils, lay that he was called "Greeky Peaky," was among the few who around their feet: the roads, barrows, settlements, villas,

ridiculed Hellenic excesses, observing in The Four Ages of Po- walls, mosaics, sculptures, and names. Older and nearer

etry (1820) that "there are no Dryads in Hyde Park," "no Na- than Pompeii and Athens, these artifacts were treasures

iads in Regent's canal, "

and poets who invoke them, he said, which antiquarians for different reasons and at different

are "wallowing in the rubbish of departed ignorance," "rak- times attempted to recover but which never had the impact

ing up the ashes of dead savages," in a "compound of frip- of Hellenism or Roman history on British lives or politics,

pery and barbarism." One reason for excluding the Roman British past may be that

the surviving textual history was Roman, written by Caesar,

The most lasting and characteristic expression of Hel- Tacitus, Strabo, and Dio Cassius, proving that whoever tells

lenism was visual, in architecture and fashion. James Stuart the story gets to own it. These histories belittled defeated

and Nicholas Revett's Antiquities of Athens (1762 tol830) had native tribes with whom the modern British identified—al

inspired banks, museums, country houses, government build- though such an identification would be as puzzling as mod

ings, even churches, in the form of idealized pagan Greek ern Americans' identifying with the native American tribes

temples. Theaters where actual Greek drama was never per- the colonists overcame,

formed were named the Palladium and the Lyceum, with bas

relief façades and murals of Greek Muses and Aeolian harps. Roman Britain began with two failed invasions by Cae

Thomas Hope's Household Furniture and Interior Decoration sar in 55-54 BC, another bizarre failure by Caligula in 40 AD

(1807) and Costumes of the Ancients (1809), useful sources when he ordered his legions to attack the English Channel,

then as now for stage scenery, brought Hellenism into the subdue the waters and recover seashells in payment, and, fi

parlor and the fashion magazines. Even British eating habits nally, Claudius's success in 43 AD, with legions drawn from

were influenced by Hellenism: in a factory called Etruria, the all over the Roman Empire, an "occupation" that ended in

Wedgwoods made their blue pottery ornamented with artful 410 AD, when Honorius, unable to protect Briton from in

Greek designs for British dining rooms which were inexpen- vading "barbarians" stopped collecting taxes, minting coins,

sive enough for political radicals practicing ancient Greek and withdrew his legions to protect what was left of his em

vegetarian philosophy to eat their sprouts from (Morton). pire from barbarians of his own. Collectively, Roman writers

depicted the mosdy Celtic natives as mud-covered blue

Although these Hellenic allusions implicitly rejected savages, adorned with tattoos, iron rings, animal skins, a

industrialism and commercialization, the style depended on short red-haired bow-legged race of polygamists who raised

them, proliferated because of them, came to represent their children in common, tortured and ate their enemies,

whatever was modem, mechanized and duplicated: simpli- lived in caves and marshes, and unlike the Gauls who had

fied lines, single dimensions, arabesques and curves, were been conquered first and participated in the Roman inva

commercially successful, easily reproduced, translating into sion, ran away when they were confronted. By 61 AD, in one

materials as diverse as Flaxman's designs for Wedgwood's of the last battles, the Romans faced the Druids who had

pottery or John Nashe's wrought-iron balustrades, plaster taken refuge on the Isle of Mona: "Women were seen run

statues, and crescents of stucco-coated townhouses in Bath ning through the ranks in wild disorder; their apparel fu

and Regency London, which Robert Rosenblum memorably neral; they hair loose to the wind, in their hands flaming called in the title of his book The International Style of 1800 torches, and their whole appearance resembling the frantic

(1976) rage of the Furies. The Druids were ranged in order, with

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hands uplifted, invoking the gods, and pouring forth horri- young or as benighted savages who practiced human sacri

ble imprecations. The novelty of the fight struck the Romans fice. The Romans, however, were worse—decadent, effete,

with awe and terror. They stood in stupid amazement, as if preoccupied with "soul-subduing vice, /Heart-killing luxury,"

their limbs were benumbed, riveted to one spot, a mark for "

Fair houses, baths, and banquets delicate":

the enemy. . . .The Druids perished in flames, which they

themselves had kindled. The island fell. . . . the religious Shun the insidious arts

groves, dedicated to superstition and barbarous rites, were That Rome provides, less dreading from her frown

leveled to the ground. In those recesses, the natives [stained] Than from her wily praise, her peaceful gown,

their altars with the blood of their prisoners, and in the en- Language, and letters;— these, tho'fondly viewed

trails of men explored the will of the gods. . ." (Tacitus, The As humanizing graces, are but parts

Annals, Book XIV) And instruments of deadliest servitude.

Sonnet 8, "Temptations from Roman Refinements"

For the past two decades, historians, archaeologists, even the BBC, among others, have tried to refute the tena- Curiously, ever since Hume, although writers lamented the

cious myth that the Romans, all of them, after four hundred decline of classical learning, they nonetheless resented the

years, just left, an "ethnic cleansing," as Salway calls it, of Romans who originally brought it to British shores

monumental proportions. Following this line of thought,

some influential British historians dismissed the Roman oc- Other British historians, antiquarians, archaeologists,

cupation as a four-hundred-year interruption in the develop- basing their studies on material remains, believed, as William

ment of British culture and identity—although there seems Camden had claimed in Britannia (1586), that the Britons

to have been very little culture, identity, or civilization before and Romans had assimilated and that the British were "ge

the Romans arrived. Even the distinguished R. G. Colling- netically Roman" (Ayres 86), an idea that coincided with a

wood, as recently as 1936, dismissed the art of Roman Britain new Roman invasion in Shakespeare's plays and in heaps of

in a few sentences and claimed, without evidence, "Before Latin texts revising British history to separate it from the Ro

the Roman conquest the Britons were a race of gifted and man Catholic church (Curran). Such syncretic thinking was

brilliant artists: the conquest, forcing them into the mould of visible in the 18th century recreation of Bath: an eclectic his

Roman life with its vulgar efficiency and lack of taste, de- torical reconstruction, a city both festive and diseased, erotic

stroyed that gift and reduced their arts to the level of mere and religious, a collage of Celtic, Roman, and Christian histo

manufactures"(247). ries. This comprehensive and materially based view of Ro

man Britain captures the diversity of the early population:

The history of Roman British history, the rise and de- for four hundred years, waves of Roman legions, traders, ad

cline, peaks and caves, has fluctuated over sixteen hundred venturers, farmers, hunters, miners, retired generals, priests,

years between material and textual protocols, between pilgrims, exiles, arrived by sea or through Europe, citizens of

images of patriotism and of victimization. Even Roman reviv- a vast empire who were Greek, Persian, Egyptian, German,

als overlook Roman Britain. In the 18th century, for exam- French, natives of whatever proto-nation the Romans had

pie, while Lords Burlington and Pembroke and their circle conquered, who setded and assimilated with the native Celtic

funded antiquarian research to find "Roman models of civic culture: the sun god Sul became Minerva/Sul in Bath; the

virtue" after the Revolution of 1688 (Ayre), they did not con- Maumbury Rings in Dorset that were sacred circles became

sider the Roman British either as ancestors or models of be- the site of sacred Roman games; the Cerne Giant, carved into

havior. Instead, in England they funded the Druid the sandstone became a heroic and later fertility figure, bur

researches (Thorpe above) and gothic follies, which they be- ial mounds became amphitheaters, and, according to some, a

lieved reflected their indigenous history. Roman general became King Arthur, the hero of England's

founding myth. Christianity, legalized throughout the Ro

In The History of England (1778), the Scottish David man Empire in 313AD, was only part of the diverse Roman

Hume drew an analogy between the Roman invasion of an- religious legacy which included all the nationalities of the

cient Briton and contemporary British colonizations in Africa Empire from the Egyptian Isis and Osiris cults to the Persian

and North America (indeed, without even a mention of Scot- Mithras cult, signs of which still survive,

land) observing that the "savage races" had all lamentably ex

changed their freedom for civilization, for comforts and Unfortunately, through much of British history, this

regulation, trade, literacy, agriculture, therapeutic baths, a founding myth of conquering armies and submissive tribes

monetary system, for religious, commercial, and domestic or- was unacceptable— even when the British were the conquer

der Similarly, Wordsworth in Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822) de- ors and the submissive tribes were in North America, India,

picted the Roman occupation as an uneven exchange of Australia, and Africa. Especially in periods of nationalism,

freedom for comfort. Although, as Richard Gravil explains such as when Hume, Wordsworth, and Collingwood were

in his monumental Wordsworth's Bardic Vocation (2003), even writing, a vision of the Roman "occupation" as an assimilative

Wordsworth wavered between depicting the Druids as wise success was unthinkable. Although following Roman models,

men in long white robes reading the stars and educating the the British had invaded, overcome, and appropriated other

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native populations, had imposed Christianity, political orga- Chop the breast from off the mother, dash the brains

nizations, coinage, and language on them, for themselves, ra- of the little one out,

cial purity and cultural independence were essential to their Up my Britons, on my chariot, on my charges,

national identity. In 1831, the assimilative view of Roman- trample them under us.

British history was literally staged at Stonehenge with a disas

trous but ideologically sound conclusion: a performance of In 1902, a huge bronze statue of her, originally cast by

Bellini's Norma, relating a love affair between a Druid Priest- Thomas Thornycraft in 1850, in Grecian drapery, standing in

ess and a Roman soldier during Caesar's first occupation in her chariot drawn by giant prancing horses was installed as a

50 BC, a strange coincidence of a French play, in a British lasting inspiration on the Victoria Embankment by the

setting, expressing Mediterranean passions, in the Italian lan- Houses of Parliament (her body reputedly buried under

guage, set to music played on German instruments, which either tracks nine or ten at King's Cross)—photos of the

ends with the principal characters immolating themselves. statue appear on the internet among other great London

tourist destinations. As a symbol of fierce independence,

The legend of Boadicca or Boadicea expresses all the resistance, and, with Victoria on the throne, female power,

contradictions of Roman Britain. When Boadicea's husband, Boadicea's unconscionable brutality seems incidental.

King of the Iceni, died in 60AD, he left a part of his kingdom Certainly she inspired the feminists, and perhaps, when

to Rome and the rest to his daughters and his widow, Queen England was under attack in Word War II, the British; but

Boadicea. Threatened, even insulted, by this division, the lo- one is not sure about the rest of her legacy, how she came to

cal Roman authorities responded by taking the land, raping represent British nationalism, and a permanent rebuke to

the daughters, and publicly flogging the Queen— an exten- the Roman invaders, any invaders, or the declining fortunes

sion of the Emperor Nero's brutality. Boadicea took her re- of the British empire,

venge: with an army of over 100,000, she burned Roman

settlements and slaughtered 70,000 civilians and soldiers, wo- In 2000, archaeologists working on remains in

men and children. Her contempt for Roman men was ex- Colchester revealed that Boadicea had methodically

plicit: "if, indeed we ought to term those people men who massacred an entire settlement of defenseless civilian

bathe in warm water, eat artificial dainties, drink unmixed Romans (Jason Burke, The Observer, December 3, 2000),

wine, anoint themselves with myrrh, sleep on soft couches which extended her already wide popular appeal. Instead

with boys for bedfellows, —boys past their prime at that, — someone who tortured the innocent and plundered

and are slaves to a lyre-player and a poor one too." She was setdements that were the origins of British urban life, she is

most brutal, however, to the capdve women, who, according depicted as a heroine in films, in a children's biography, in

to Dio Cassius, "they hung up naked the noblest and most historical fiction, including a whole series by Mandy Scott,

distinguished women and then cut off their breasts and and, along with Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, and Margaret

sewed them to their mouths, afterwards they impaled the wo- Thatcher, among Antonia Fraser's Warrior Queens (2002).

men on sharp skewers. . .to the accompaniment of sacrifices, Several web-sites are devoted to her, one headed with a quote

banquets, and wanton behavior [in] sacred places. . (Epit- from Thomas Jefferson: "Resistance to Tyranny is Obedience

orne LXI, History of Rome). Captured, reputedly she commit- to God."

ted suicide, but perhaps not.

At the moment, this assimilative reading of Roman

In spite of such brutal incidents, or because of them, Britain prevails, material, eclectic, revived by what one TLS

her life was adapted to plays through the Renaissance reviewer called "New Romanists." The decade of the 1990's,

(Kalachki), and, later, in 1753, by Richard Glover, as Bodicea, according to Greg Woolf, in "Ruled Britannia" (April 12,

published repeatedly by Bell after 1791, and, in an evening of 1996) produced a generation of archaeologists who without

"Killer Queens, "

performed along with Medea in 1794, about classical backgrounds, "

dig and interpret the huts and

which Southey commented: "The Romans are treated too re- rubbish pits. . .as they do Iron Age and medieval ones" [or as

spectfully" (V:45). In 1864, Tennyson also celebrated her Romantic Hellenists in Pompeii], "barbarians by conviction,"

brutality posing her against the decadent Romans, drinking who reject the surviving Roman and Greek texts, the literary

"in cups of emerald, there at tables of ebony lay,/Rolling in evidence in favor of the archaeological, "cultural practice

their purple couches in their tender effeminacy": and ritual," "art and the gods."

Burst the gates, and bum the palaces, break the In the past decade, in part because of these new

works of statuary, Romanists, a British law protecting archaeological sites

Take the hoary Roman head and shatter it, hold it (Salway 9), new technologies for interpreting the remains,

abominable, the pan-European orientation of British culture, the

Cut the Roman boy to pieces in his lust and Government and the European Union have establish many

voluptuousness, of the Roman ruins as World Heritage sites. The mosaics, the

Lash the maiden into swooning, me, they lash'd and coins, the statues, and remarkable inventions from running

humiliated, water to indoor heating, legacies from Christianity and

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writing to urban life, country houses, beef, wheat, and shoes,

are being acknowledged, itemized, catalogued, all over

England in books, museums, festivals and BBC specials

broadcast late at night in the US, a web-site called

RomanBritain.org., even learned societies with their own

journals. But the role of Roman Britain in British history

remains as controversial and undefined as it was for

Wordsworth.

In 1997, when the Western Gallery of Roman Britain

opened in the British Museum, adding to the cultural

inventory keys, locks, frying pans, a birthday invitation, a

curse tablet, and a "bronze clamp" used to castrate the priests

of Cybele, the TLS reviewer, Peter Stewart asked; "Is Roman

Britain our heritage?" (Sept 5, 1997) "Is this a gallery of

classical or 'native' culture? Whose side are we on? The

Romans or the Britons? Was it an 'admirable cultural melting

pot' or a watered-down imitation of classical civilization?"

After 1600 years, the question is still being posed: "But is it

British"?As a corollary, I would add: how and why did

artificial classicisms during the Romantic period, indeed the

equally alien Gothicism as well, displace an authentic, native,

and evident Roman British one?

I began writing about Romantic Hellenism in English

Romanticism: The Human Context (1988), from which some of

this material is drawn. Roman Britain has been on my mind

for some time: inspired by Molly Lefebure's excursions to

Hadrian's Wall, a meeting with Malcom Todd during a

lecture at Durham Unversity, 1998, and a paper on classical

texts in the Romantic period at Columbia University,

September, 2002. For this essay (NASSR conference,

Boulder, Colorado, 2004), I extended the historical issues,

the balance of texts and material culture, added the figure of

Boadicea, and the current revival of interest in Roman

British History.

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Hellenic Inheritance and the English Imagination. 1989:

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