2016 was the centenary of the Easter Rising in Ireland, the event that precipitated the birth of Ireland as a modern nation in 1922, and to commemorate such events the Irish government named the years 2012-2022 as a “Decade of Centenaries.” This is the context for a conference on “Classics and Irish Politics” held in June, 2016, which formed the basis for this collection of revised and commissioned chapters. In juxtaposing “classics” and “Irish politics,” the volume deftly situates itself in relation to several well-established fields: Irish political history gains a new dimension not treated in such detail before; classical reception studies can point to yet another cultural domain infused with echoes and refractions of antiquity;[1] and in places, even the classics themselves gain a mirror which reflects a new light back upon them.
The editors’ introduction masterfully surveys events, themes, figures, previous bibliography. Above all, it highlights the need for a study of classics’ political ramifications rather than of how they “functioned as points of literary inspiration for the titans of twentieth-century Irish literature” (2). The Table of Contents gives a sense of the range of the “political” that is treated through different thematic perspectives.
Section I on the politics of revolution has as its leitmotif the “reception and rejection” of classical paradigms, which in 1916 were strongly associated with the ethos of empire. Exploring the Irish case of how classic works can “shape public policies based on their cultural explanations of the world” (27), Kiberd sketches how Irish debates about what is “classic” ambivalently oppose an “SPQR mentality” (evident in Victorian classicism, Irish state pedagogy of Latin and Irish, T.S. Eliot’s vision of British civilisation) with an alternate “Irish Classicism” (discoverable in Irish bardic poetry, the Roman Church, Joyce’s Ulysses, Thompson’s Blasket Islands, Corkery). McGing and Moloney turn more specifically to the reluctant and mixed classicism of two leaders of the 1916 Easter Uprising. McGing homes in on Patrick Pearse and his oration at the funeral of O’Donovan Rossa, exploring its politico-cultural roots and tracing some of its rhetorical flourishes back to Thucydides’ epitaphios logos, via Lincoln. Perhaps even more complex is Thomas MacDonagh (Pearse’s fellow teacher, critic, poet, and rebel), whose writings (Moloney shows) in fact range across the European tradition, and whose little-known translations of Catullus’ Lesbia lyrics reveal how intimately that classic voice informed his personal, literary, and political selves. Thus, of revolutionaries like MacDonagh and Pearse, McGing can conclude: “beneath their green uniform, the classical toga still showed through” (58).
Section II turns to the politics of language. 1920s Ireland saw heroic efforts to promote Irish as the nation’s first language and as a vehicle of “higher” culture, whether Gaelic or cosmopolitan or both. To this end, the government initiative AnGúm oversaw from 1927-1939 a range of translations from Greek and Latin into Irish. Ní Mhurchú’s chapter collates details about such translations over a generation by Fr Pádraig de Brún, George Thomson, and some six other professors and priests. Their de facto audience were students at second and third level—leading naturally to Moran’s history of the Ancient Classics department in University College Galway (UCG), and its now-defunct BA degree through Irish alone. Most well-known here is George Thomson (the Aeschylus scholar) but Moran focusses on Margaret Heavey, whose forty-year career spans many politico-linguistic controversies of mid-century Ireland. An Appendix compiled by Ní Mhurchú and Moran “lists ninety-six publications of Irish translations and/or editions” of Classical texts or textbooks into Irish, “down to 1978” (125): the impressive list includes not only major authors and genres from Homer to St Augustine, but also pedagogical mainstays such as J.B. Bury’s History of Greece, Bradley’s “Arnold,” North and Hillard’s Greek Prose Composition, as well as Thomson’s own textbook on Greek philosophy.
Though well-known as a “gargantuan figure in the Irish language revival” (138), Fr Patrick Dinneen also had considerable classical erudition. About half of his Irish-language Aistí ar litridheacht Ghréigise is Laidne (Essays on Greek and Latin Literature, 1929) concern Virgil, whom Dinneen appreciated as both the teacher of Europe (cf. T.S. Eliott) and as a northern Italian “Celt” whose personal dispossession, love of the land and poetry, broad-minded patriotism, and pietas can be better understood by contemporary Irish speakers than (say) imperial or “west” Britons. Mac Góráin’s superb chapter explores all this, while placing Dinneen’s “native ownership” of Virgil in counterpoint to Friel’s Translations, which dramatizes the loss of Gaelic heritage before classically-tutored British surveyors.
O’Hogan also breaks new ground with his chapter on Myles na gCopaleen’s Irish Times columns from 1940-1966. The columns are comically scholarly, as “Myles” (i.e. Brian O’Nolan, aka Flann O’Brien) often reels off classical lore in his persona as son of a decorated major—a classical education being “shorthand for a sort of pose taken by the educated (frequently Anglo-Irish) elite” (161). On the other hand, Myles can write columns entirely in Latin, or in a mix of Irish and Latin. This macaronic language (so reminiscent of medieval Irish clerics), along with the “marginalia”-style commentary on events, other Times columnists, and himself allows O’Hogan to name Myles’ “marginal approach” as part of an “alternative classical tradition” (170), that borders at once on Irish medieval classicism and on the self-reflexive postmodern.
The “political” in Sections III to V rises primarily out of literary works—the circumstances of their composition, and vagaries of their reception. Currie surveys writing about the Aran Islands and the mythical Fir Bolgs, their associations with Greece and Homer, and how the Islands’ rocky “abjectness” (in Bataille’s conceptualization) was exploited for colonializing and revolutionary ends alike. Hall compares two contemporary responses to the Sinn Féin party—Joyce’s Cyclops episode in Ulysses (1922) and the Tacitean history, Evolution of Sinn Féin (1920) by Robert Mitchell Henry, Professor of Latin at Queens University, Belfast. Hall links the two figures as seeming opposites (northern Protestant scholar and nationalist campaigner vs southern, Catholic-raised, cosmopolitan exile) via the medieval Irish Merugud Uilix Maicc Leirtis (Wanderings of Ulysses Son of Laertes), itself influentially edited by the Celticist Kuno Meyer (brother of Eduard) during the “birth pangs of the Irish Republic” (211). Hall’s confident mapping of this constellation of factors is one highlight of the book. Morash’s study of Yeats’ Oedipus translations moves from the poet’s campaign against censorship (first British, then Irish), on to his Vision (1925), which drew immensely on Burnet’s Early Greek Philosophy (1892) and Cumont’s Astrology and Religion among the Greeks and Romans (1912) and which would inform the late Yeats’ philosophico-historical vision of Oedipus as transitioning from the “dark” of “Babylonian” mythopoesis to a Classical age of “Platonic tolerance and Doric discipline,” just as Yeats himself sang of an older, “Romantic” Ireland amid the encroaching glare of modernity.
In Walshe’s chapter on the politics of sexuality, Oscar Wilde’s court-room appeal to the “higher” culture of Hellenic male homosexuality becomes a model (in different ways) for Joyce, Behan, Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys, Cathal O’Searcaigh, David Norris, and possibly Patrick Pearse: Irishness becomes bound up with homosexuality and Hellenism. Torrance also traces receptions of a “classic” over the century: staged in Dublin in 1920 (using Gilbert Murray’s translation), re-imagined in Brendan Kennelly’s version (1993), and again in Marina Carr’s Hecuba (2015), Euripides’ Trojan Women has through its many Irish afterlives prompted a full range of responses to issues surrounding gender equality and female sexuality, from “demonization” to celebration. Perhaps least predictable is the material informing McElduff’s contextualization of McGuinness’s Carthaginians (1988): the protagonist of that play, “Dido,” is “an openly gay nationalist male” (268), a characterization that McElduff explores in relation to the malleable “Dido” of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Irish ballads.
Section V focusses on literary responses to Northern politics—but with Michael Longley (rather than, say, Seamus Heaney) in centre stage. For O’Rourke, Longley’s adaptations of Propertius and Tibullus respond to the originals directly but also to the “heavily politicized” entrée of Propertian elegy into Ireland, via Yeats and Pound: “For both Yeats and Longley… Latin elegy has provided a suitable medium through which to approach the present, perhaps because the genre’s brief flowering at Rome itself coincided with and reflects, in its collision of love and war, the trauma of civil conflict and the pain of reconciliation” (307). The reconciliation of enemies is at the centre of Longley’s “Ceasefire” (1994), which collapses Iliad 24 into a single, intense sonnet. Alden studies both poems in close detail and in intense relation to the Northern “Troubles.” Heaney’s Burial at Thebes makes an appearance in Torrance’s chapter, along with other Irish versions of Antigone, by Paulin, Gregg, and McCafferty: building on studies by Macintosh and others, Torrance sheds new light on how Sophocles’ play has had such resonance for Northern Ireland, where prominent funerals have blended the public and private, political and religious, in ways paralleling and even illuminating the play’s own tragic dynamic.
Section VI turns to the politics of the visual and tactile. In her tour of two classicizing monuments from post-independence Dublin—the Irish National War Memorial for casualties of WWI, and the obelisk Cenotaph on Leinster Lawn—Hill shows how both works helped to bridge sectarian and political divides. O’Neill’s contribution suggests more intractable differences embodied in two classicizing “temples”: the General Post Office (GPO) in Dublin has become a symbol of and even shrine to Irish independence, while Stormont (the Northern Ireland Parliament Building) was designed expressly to trumpet unionist determination for “perpetual partition” (392). Morris’ informative “biography” of Ireland’s pre-Euro coins shifts the focus from the monumental to the miniature, and from the more Roman to the Greek: West Greek coins and Yeats’ visit to Sicily in 1925 directly inspired the design of what came to be “globally admired as among the most beautiful examples of modern coinage” (393).
In all, the volume’s 21 contributions corroborate the contention that there was “no standard response to ‘classics’ across the work of individuals” (Moloney, 63). In an early twentieth-century Ireland divided by history, religious denomination, rebellion, and civil war, a plurality of ancient phenomena (e.g. Greek and Roman, democratic and imperial, polytheistic and Christian) were bound to fall upon different minds in a complex variety of ways, as different figures adapt things classical for their own purposes, whether universalizing, sectarian, conciliatory, or satirical. Modern Irish politics were given new layers of complexity through encounters with Greek and Roman classics, as this book explores so well, even if one hesitates to agree with Martin that Irish responses were “more intricate and with greater consequence, wielding more social and political heft, than the way the classical tradition captivated other nations” (407).
No volume can cover every figure in equal detail (Louis MacNeice, for instance, is basically passed over), but more explicit attention might have been given to the political importance of Christianity, and specifically Roman Catholicism, for twentieth-century Irish classicism. It hovers in the background: Hall on Joyce, Mac Góráin on Dinneen, O’Hogan on Nolan’s “Medievalism,” McElduff on early modern ballads touch on recurrent aspects of that ancient heritage, while Martin recalls St Patrick, that Romanized Briton (407), and “the earliest surviving piece of Irish literature,” in which St Columba learns Greek grammar from an angel (408-9). In their introduction, the editors stress that “Ireland is a unique case as the only postcolonial culture with native precolonial expertise in classical languages and literature dating back to the sixth century” (1). But only one (albeit replete) paragraph points to the “significant role” played by modern clergy (22) in maintaining and advancing that expertise throughout the twentieth century. For the sake of historical fidelity, more should have been said: if, for example, the “temples” of the GPO or Stormont have contributed to political “religions” of their own, then the numerous basilica-style churches like Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral were, along with the celebration of the Latin mass, not without wide socio-political influence. More broadly, this oversight points to how the volume might have done more to define the “political” vis-à-vis the “literary” or “religious” or “cultural” or even a Yeatsian philosophy of history—or, alternatively, to explain why such a definition may be somewhat arbitrary, not least in the case of the “poets’ revolution” of Easter, 1916.
Let this reservation not detract from the undeniable achievement of the book. Immensely informative and thought-provoking, it tackles much material (archival and otherwise) that is new, difficult to access, and highly engaging. The editors and contributors have succeeded admirably in giving the classics their due place in Irish political life across a fraught century and more.
Table of Contents
1. Classics and Irish Politics: Introduction. Isabelle Torrance and Donncha O’Rourke
I: RECEPTION AND REJECTION OF THE CLASSICS IN IRELAND
2. The Use and Abuse of Classics: Thoughts on Empire, Epic, and Language. Declan Kiberd
3. Greece, Rome, and the Revolutionaries of 1916. Brian McGing
4. Classics in the Van of the Irish revolt: Thomas MacDonough, ‘alien to Athens and
Rome’? Eoghan Moloney
II: LANGUAGE POLITICS
5. Translating into Irish from Greek and Latin in the Early Years of the Irish State. Síle ní Mhurchú
6. Classics through Irish at University College, Galway, 1931-78. Pádraic Moran
7. Dinneen’s Irish Virgil. Fiachra Mac Góráin
8. Classics, Medievalism, and Cultural Politics in Myles na gCopaleen’s Cruiskeen
Lawn Columns. Cillian O’Hogan
III: BETWEEN SCHOLARSHIP AND LITERATURE
9. Abjection and the Irish-Greek Fir Bolg in Aran Island Writing. Arabella Currie
10. Sinn Féin and Ulysses: Between Professor Robert Mitchell Henry and James
Joyce. Edith Hall
11. Yeats and Oedipus: The Dark Road. Chris Morash
IV: GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND CLASS
12. Wilde, Classicism, and Homosexuality in Modern Ireland. Eibhear Walsh
13. Trojan Women and Irish Sexual Politics, 1920-2015. Isabelle Torrance
14. Irish Didos: Empire, and Class in the Irish Popular Tradition to Frank
McGuinness’ Carthaginians. Siobhán McElduff
V. CLASSICAL POETRY AND NORTHERN IRELAND
15. Elegies for Ireland: W.B. Yeats, Michael Longley, and the Roman Elegists. Donncha O’Rourke
16. Michael Longley’s ‘Ceasefire’ and the Iliad. Maureen Alden
17. Post-Ceasefire Antigones and Northern Ireland. Isabelle Torrance
VI. MATERIAL CULTURE AND (DE) COLONIALISM
18. Classicism and the Making of Commemorative Monuments in Newly Independent Ireland. Judith Hall
19. The Politics of Neoclassicism in Belfast and Dublin: A Tale of Two Buildings. Suzanne O’Neill
20. The Classical Themes of Irish Coinage, 1928-2002: Images from a Usable Past.
Christine Morris
21. Epilogue. Richard Martin
Bibliography
Index
Notes
[1] Compare recent titles in Oxford’s Classical Presences series: The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece (Hamilakis, 2007); Placing Modern Greece: The Dynamics of Romantic Hellenism, 1770-1840 (Guthenke, 2008); Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire (Bradley, 2010); Classics and National Cultures (Stephens, Vasunia, 2010).