Masculinity And Ancient Rome In The Victorian Cultural Imagination

Masculinity and Ancient Rome in the Victorian Cultural Imagination examines Victorian receptions of ancient Rome, with a specific focus on how those receptions were deployed to create useable models of masculinity. Romans in Victorian literature are at once pagan persecutors, pious statesmen, pleasure-seeking decadents, and heroes of empire, and these manifold and often contradictory representations are used as vehicles equally to capture the martial virtue of Wellington and to condemn the deviance and degeneracy of Oscar Wilde. In the works of Thomas Macaulay, Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, H. Rider Haggard, and Rudyard Kipling, among others, Rome emerges as a contested space with an array of possible scripts and signifiers which can be used to frame masculine ideals, or to vilify perceived deviance from those ideals, though with a value and significance often very different to ancient Greek models. Sitting at the intersection of reception studies, gender studies, and interdisciplinary literary and cultural studies across discourses ranging from education and politics, this volume offers the first comprehensive examination of the importance of ancient Rome as a cultural touchstone for nineteenth-century manliness and Victorian codifications of masculinity.

A People’s History of Classics explores the influence of the classical past on the lives of working-class people, whose voices have been almost completely excluded from previous histories of classical scholarship and pedagogy, in Britain and Ireland from the late 17th to the early 20th century. This volume challenges the prevailing scholarly and public assumption that the intimate link between the exclusive intellectual culture of British elites and the study of the ancient Greeks and Romans and their languages meant that working-class culture was a ‘Classics-Free Zone’. Making use of diverse sources of information, both published and unpublished, in archives, museums and libraries across the United Kingdom and Ireland, Hall and Stead examine the working-class experience of classical culture from the Bill of Rights in 1689 to the outbreak of World War II. They analyse a huge volume of data, from individuals, groups, regions and activities, in a huge range of sources including memoirs, autobiographies, Trade Union collections, poetry, factory archives, artefacts and documents in regional museums. This allows a deeper understanding not only of the many examples of interaction with the Classics, but also what these cultural interactions signified to the working poor: from the promise of social advancement, to propaganda exploited by the elites, to covert and overt class war. A People’s History of Classics offers a fascinating and insightful exploration of the many and varied engagements with Greece and Rome among the working classes in Britain and Ireland, and is a must-read not only for classicists, but also for students of British and Irish social, intellectual and political history in this period. Further, it brings new historical depth and perspectives to public debates around the future of classical education, and should be read by anyone with an interest in educational policy in Britain today.

Since the middle of the eighteenth century, the classical world has been seen as foundational and exemplary to Western civilization. However, the Greeks never invaded and colonised western and northern Europe the way the Romans did, and, conversely, Greece was a difficult place to reach for modern travellers well into the nineteenth century. Inevitably, therefore, the links with ancient Greece were a product of the imagination: an exemplary civilization, in its politics, arts, and culture. There was one problem, however: the Greeks, it seemed, enjoyed pederastic relations. And not only this: one of Athens' most famous teachers, Socrates, was attracted to boys. Daniel Orrells offers a fresh, original examination of how modern thinkers in Germany and Britain, who were so invested in a model of history that directly traced the European present back to an ancient Greek past, negotiated the tricky issue of ancient Greek pederasty.

In Masculinity and Dress in Roman Antiquity, Olson argues that clothing functioned as part of the process of communication by which elite male influence, masculinity, and sexuality were made known and acknowledged, and furthermore that these concepts interconnected in socially significant ways. This volume also sets out the details of masculine dress from literary and artistic evidence and the connection of clothing to rank, status, and ritual. This is the first monograph in English to draw together the myriad evidence for male dress in the Roman world, and examine it as evidence for men’s self-presentation, status, and social convention.

This volume explores the role that republican political participation played in forging elite Roman masculinity. It situates familiarly "manly" traits like militarism, aggressive sexuality, and the pursuit of power within a political system based on power sharing and cooperation. In deliberations in the Senate, at social gatherings, and on military campaign, displays of consensus with other men greased the wheels of social discourse and built elite comradery. Through literary sources and inscriptions that offer censorious or affirmative appraisal of male behavior from the Middle and Late Republic (ca. 300–31 BCE) to the Principate or Early Empire (ca. 100 CE), this book shows how the vir bonus, or "good man," the Roman persona of male aristocratic excellence, modulated imperatives for personal distinction and military and sexual violence with political cooperation and moral exemplarity. While the advent of one-man rule in the Empire transformed political power relations, ideals forged in the Republic adapted to the new climate and provided a coherent model of masculinity for emperor and senator alike. Scholars often paint a picture of Republic and Principate as distinct landscapes, but enduring ideals of male self-fashioning constitute an important continuity. Roman Masculinity and Politics from Republic to Empire provides a fascinating insight into the intertwined nature of masculinity and political power for anyone interested in Roman political and social history, and those working on gender in the ancient world more broadly.

When Men Were Men questions the deep-set assumption that men's history speaks and has always spoken for all of us, by exploring the history of classical antiquity as an explicitly masculine story. With a preface by Sarah Pomeroy, this study employs different methodologies and focuses on a broad range of source materials, periods and places.

Fascinated and often baffled by China, Anglophone writers turned to classics for answers. In poetry, essays, and travel narratives, ancient Greece and Rome lent interpretative paradigms and narrative shape to Britain's information on the Middle Kingdom. While memoirists of the diplomatic missions in 1793 and 1816 used classical ideas to introduce Chinese concepts, Roman history held ominous precedents for Sino-British relations according to Edward Gibbon and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. John Keats illuminated how peculiar such contemporary processes of Orientalist knowledge-formation were. In Britain, popular opinion on Chinese culture wavered during the nineteenth century, as Charles Lamb and Joanna Baillie demonstrated in ekphrastic responses to chinoiserie. A former reverence for China yielded gradually to hostility, and the classical inheritance informed a national identity-crisis over whether Britain's treatment of China was civilized or barbaric. Amidst this uncertainty, the melancholy conclusion to Virgil's Aeneid became the master-text for discussion of British conduct at the Summer Palace in 1860. Yet if Rome was to be the model for the British Empire, Tennyson, Sara Coleridge, and Thomas de Quincey found closer analogues for the Opium Wars in Greek tragedy and Homeric epic. Meanwhile, Sinology advanced considerably during the Victorian age. Britain broadened its horizons by interrogating the cultural past anew as it turned to Asia; Anglophone readers were cosmopolitans in time as well as space, aggregating knowledge of Periclean Athens, imperial Rome, and many other polities in their encounters with Qing Dynasty China.

Recent studies of ancient Roman masculinities have concentrated on the private aspects of the subject, particularly sexuality, and have drawn conclusions from a narrow field of reference, usually rhetorical practice. In contrast, this book examines the public and the most important aspect of Roman masculinity: Manliness as represented by the concept of "virtus". Using traditional historical, philological, and archaeological analysis, combined with socio-linguistics and gender studies, it presents a comprehensive picture of how Roman manliness developed from the middle to the late Republic period.