Introduction
‘Irishness’: The definition of ‘Irish’ accepted here is ‘born and bred in Ireland or of Irish ancestry and parentage’ This clearly leaves room for disagreement … [various] can have their Irishness questioned … [ix]

1: The First Thousand Years
Douglas Hyde stated in his influential history of Irish litrature that ‘the classic tradition, to all appearances dead in Europe, burst out in full flower in the Isle of Saints, and the Renaissance began in Ireland seven hundred years before it was known in Italy.’ (Lit. Hist., p.216; quoted Darmsteter [?] [1] Cf. On the other hand the golden mirage presented by Douglas Hyde, as quoted, has faded beyond recall [by the Viking invasions].

The Metrical Dindshencas (composed before 1166), d. EJ Gwynn, ?3 vol. (Dublin) [3]

Prosper of Aquitaine states in his Chronicle for a.d. 431, written in the following yar, that there were Christians in Ireland before the coming of Palladius. Cf Bede, Ecc. Hist., 1, 13, and 5, 24; Kenney, 164. [4]

Palladius, ‘devotee of Pallas Athene’; Patrick [Patricius], ‘of Patrician ancestry’. [4]

An Irish grammatical treatise based on Donatus, Priscian and other late Latin grammarians, called Auraicept na nEces, includes the following quatrain [trans.]: ‘Learning and philosophy are vain,/Reading, grammar and gloss,/diligent literature and metrics,/Small their avail in heaven above.’ Ed. Calder (Edinburgh 1917, p.6). [6]

If the Adamnán who wrote a commentary on Virgil’s eclogues and Georgics was Adamnán abbot of Iona, as many believe, we can be confident that texts of Virgil and some early commentators on his works ere available in this ‘little Ireland’. But we can hardly go as far as Gibbon, in his Decline and Fall &c (Chp. 37, n.24), who believed that Iona had ‘a classical librry which offered some hopes of an entire Livy’. [7] Note in Stanford implies that Kenney (Sources, 1929), citing a classical colophon in Adamnán, is one of the believers.

Also: the first statement about the existence of Greek writings in an Irish monastery (but not in Ireland) is in the book by Adamnán of Iona On the Hol Places, written shortly after 680. He was able to consult ‘books of Greek’ (libri Graecitatis), but what they were … we cannot now determine. [8]

The late-seventh century Antiphonary of Bangor, the monastery where Columbanus was educated, contains several [eccles. Gk. words]. [8]

Aldhelm’s denunciation of the Irish monks devotion to ‘ancient fables’ [10]

Patrick, second Bishop of Dublin, from 1074to 1084, could compose competent and highly rhetorical verses in Latin hexameters, alcaics, and adonics, ued elaborately contrived phrases reminiscent of Columbanus ‘hisperic’ Latinity. See A. Gwynn, The Writings of Bishop Patrick of Dublin 1074-1084 (Dublin 1955).

Not venturing into complex authorship of The Hisperica Famina: note 49, see MW Herren, the Hisperica Famina (Toronto 1974). [17]

Cormac, King-Bishop of Cashel, d. 908, included many Greek words in his extensive glossary [12]

Michael Scotus, trns. Averroes probably not Irish since he refused the archbishopric of Cashel as not knowing Irish, and by that time Scotus normally meant Scottish [12-13]

Godfroi or Joffroi of Waterford, whose Fr. trans. of the pseudo-Aristotelian Secret of Secrets was widely popular in France … was a good enough scholar to doubt its authenticity … also produced French trans. of Eutropius and Dares Phrygius. [13] Note: see Seymour, 1929, p.31-34. [18]

Thomas Hibernicus, a fellow of the Sorbonne, ed. anthol. A Handful of Flowers (Manipulus Florum), still considered worth reading in 1483 when it was printed in Piacenza, the first printing of a book by an Irishman.

Bibl: for Sedulius, see S Hellmann, Sedulius Scottus (Munich 1906, and J Carne, Old Ireland, ed. R McNally (Dublin 1967), 228-50; for his influence on goliardic poetry, BI Varcho, ‘Die Vorlaufer des Golias’, Speculum 3 (928) 523-79).

Monachism: H. Graham, The Early Monastic Schools (Dublin 1923); Ryan, Irish Monaasticism; gougaud, Christianity; C Mooney, The Church in Gaelic Ireland (Dublin 1969).

HL Jones, ed. Strabo’s Geography (London 1932) [index in vol. viii; for Ptolemy, see JJ Tierney, JHS lxxxiv (1959), 132-48. Also TF O’rahilly, Erly Irish History and Mythology (Dublin 1946)

Patrick: L. Bieler ‘The Place of St Patrick in Latin Language and Literature’, in Vigilia Christiania, vi (1952), 6-98; C Mohrmann, The Latin of St Patrick (Dublin 1961) with Bieler’s review in Eigse x (196), 149-4.

Palladius: L. Bieler, ‘The Mission of Palladius’, in Traditio vi (1948).

Also L. Bieler, bibl. survey of Hiberno-Latin scholarship, in Historische Zeitschrift, Sonderheft 2. (1965), and Bieler, ‘The Classics in Ancient Ireland’, in Bolgar, Classical Influences &c (1971); also Meyer, Learning in Ireland (1913). FURTHER: FJA Raby, A History of secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages (Cambridge 1934), praising Donatus, Colman, Eriigena, and Sedulius; also E Knott, Irish Classical Poetry (Dublin 1957); Bieler, ‘Island of Scholars’ in Revue du Moyen Age Latin, viii (1952). [16]

Columbanus: see Bieler, ‘The Humanism of St Columbanus’, in Mélanges Colunbaniens (1950), 95-102; GS Walker, Sancti Columbani Opera (Dublin 1957) and the review by M Esposito in Classica et Mediaevalia 21 (1960), 184-203.

Commentaries on Martinus Caella’s De Nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae (between 410 and 439) by Irishmen Dunchad, Eriugena, and Martin of Laon. [16]

C Plummer, Lives of Irish Saints ?2 vols (London 1968)

J Coleman, A Medieval Irish Monastic Library Catalogue, BSI, ii (1925), 6.

Recent surveys of early medieval poetry: Michael Herren, ‘Classical and secular Learning in Irland Before the Carolingian Renaissance’ in Florilegium i (1981), 118-57; Herren, ‘Hibrno-Latin Philology: the State of the Question’, in Insular Latin Studies, Papers in Medieval studies (Toronto 1981), 1-22, with bibls.; also John J. O’Meara and Bernd [sic] Naumann, eds., Bieler Festschrift, Latin Script and Lettering AD 400-900 (Leiden 1976). ALSO: Fergal McGrath, Education in Ancient and Medieval Ireland (Dublin 1979).

2: The Schools
Peter White, appointed to Kilkenny grammar school by sir Piers Butler, 1538; native of Waterford, fellow of Oriel Coll., Exon; his pupil richard Stanihurst, who praised him highly in his Description of Irland, to which we owe much of our information about Irish scholars in the 16th c. The passage quoted by Stanford describes a carrot-and-stick method of ‘this lucky schoolmaster of Munster’ in classical education, to the effect that ‘in the realm of Ireland was no grammar school so good, in England, I am well assured, none better.’ See J Browne, Transactions of the Kilkenny Arch. Soc., i. (1849-51), 221-29; Stanihurst, Description, Chp. 7. Other students were Luke Wadding and Peter Lombard; see Millet (Rome 1964)

Alexander Lynch, Galway schoolmaster, taught John Lynch and Roderick O’Flaherty. [20] AND See DNB, and also J. Hardiman’s ed. of O’Flaherty’s Chorographical Description of West of h-Iar Connaught (Dublin 1846); also Millet. [notes, p.41]

British Museum Add. ms 481 f. 157v-8r is Robert Ware’s trans. of his father Sir James Ware’s Latin account of the teaching of a ‘newe grammar’ by Richard Owde at St patrick’s Grammar School in Dublin in 1587, and the ensuing controversy, arbitrated in favour of the older grammar of Lily (1540) by Archbishop Loftus since ‘diversities of grammars woud be destructive of learning’. [21]

It was at Salamanca that the Dublin-born Jesuit William Bathe published his celebrated Janua Linguarum (1611) [Door to Languages], designed to provide a quick and easy method of learning Latin … very popular and translated into eleven languages including Greek, Czech, and Hungarian, similar to modern ‘dirct method … and used for a long period. [22] NOTE adds: James Hamilton, author of the celebrated teaching method, was taught at Jesuit school in Dublin (DNB).[42]

William King, Archbishop of Dublin, left account of his studies at Dungannon Royal School in the 1660s [23] See notes: King, Quaedam Meae Vite Insignoria, ed. JW stubbs, EHR xiii (1898), 309-23; cf. CS King, A Great Archbishop of Dublin (London 1906), pp.5-6. [42]

King also mentioned that he read a work by Mathurin Cordier, probably his Scholastic Colloquies (1568), of which 100 eds. are listed. [23]. A pupil of Alexander Lynch called Butler popularised a new textbook in Ireland by translating the Book of Phrases by Maturinius Corderius from Latin to English, Corder being a Hugenot [20]

Patrick Cusack, ed. Oxon., teaching in Dublin in 166: ‘who with the learning that God did impart to him grav great light to his country’ but ‘employed his studies in the instructing of scholars rather than in penning of books’ (Stanihurst). NOTE: his epigrams for students are recorded in Harris’s Ware, [?vol 1.], p.95. [20, + n.]

J Jones, General Catalogue of Books … Printed in Ireland and Published in Dublin 1700-1791 (1891), lists about 5,000 eds. of classical authors. [24]

Sir John Carr astonished that a poor boy ‘under an appearance of the most abject poverty … was well acquainted with the best Latin poets, had read most of the historians, and was then studying the orations of Cicero’. See The Stranger, 2 vols (1806) p.380. [25]

TC Croker: ‘a tattered Ovid and Virgil may be found even in the hands of common labourers’ (Researches in the South of Ireland, 1824, p.326). [25]

Edmund Campion, recorded after a visit to Ireland his surprise that the ‘meer Irish’ spoke Latin ‘like a vulgar tongue’ but ‘without any precepts or observations of congruity’. (Historie, Dublin 1633, p.18.)

His friend Stanihurst on native [Brehon] lawyers: ‘They do not draw their knowledge of Latin from sources belonging to the grammarians. they despise all that, regarding it as a sordid business and childish trifling. Whatever ‘coms uppermost’, as is said, they blab out. They do not regulate their words by the grammatical art, nor do they consider the quantities of syllables. they dtermine the length of every period by the capacity of their breadth not by any artistic standard.’ Translated from the Latin of Stanihurst, De Rebus (1584, p.37) by DH Madden (Some Passages in the Early History of Classical Learning in Ireland, Dublin 1906 pp.85-86. [26]

Already in the early med. period a highly artistic Hiberno-Latin had evolved, with many differences from standard classical Latin. Now in th 16th c. Hiberno-Latin had become a second colloquial language for the native Irish. [26]

In the Molyneux papers, a note of censure on Ireland’s rural Latinity: ‘The inhabitants of the county of Kerry—I mean those of them that are downright Irish—are remarkable beyond the inhabitants of the other parts of Ireland for their Gaming, Speaking of Latin, and Inclination to Philosophy and dispute therein … When they can get no one to Game with them, you shall often find them with a Book of Aristotles or some of the Commentators Logic which they read very diligently till they be able to pour out Nonsensical Words a whole day about universale a parte rei, ens rationis and suchlike all the while their Latin is Bald and Barbarous and very often not Grammatical for in the heat of a dispute they stick not at breaking Priscians head very frequently.’ (Molyneux Paprs, TCD, ms. 1, 4, 19, f. 92 v). [26-27]

Sir Richard Cox, ‘very few of the Irish aim at any more than a little Latin, which every cowboy pretends to’ (Researches in the South of Ireland, c. 1689, cited in DH Madden, op. cit. 1906; cf. Brookiana, i. 33. [27]

Thomas Sheridan recorded this notice in an egg-heckler’s window in Co. Waterford: ‘Si sumas ovum/Mol sit atque novum’ (Brookiana, 1, 5). [27]

Canon Sheehan: ‘God be with the good old times, when the headge-school masters were as plentiful as blackberries in Ireland when the scholars took their sods of turf undr their arms for school seats; but every boy knew his Virgil and Horace and Homer as well as the last ballad about some rebel that was hanged … when the Kerry peasants talked to each other in Latin; and when they came up to the Palatines in Limerick, as harvestmen in the autumn, they could make uncomplimentary remarks and say cuss-words ad libitum before their master’s face, and he couldn’t understand them for they spoke the tongue of Cicero and Livy—the language of the educated world. (The Literary Life and Other Essays, Dublin 1921, p.52.) [27-28]

George Borrow, in Lavengro, chp. x, xii, xiv, recalls attending school in Clonmel in 1815, and other memories of Irish classical culture. [28-29]

Carleton: ‘Love of learning is a conspicuous principle in an Irish peasant … How his eye will dance in his head with pride, when th young priest thunders out a line of Virgil or Homer, a sentence of Cicero, or a rule from Syntax! And with what complacency and affection would the father and relations of such a person, when sitting during winter evening about the hearth, demand from him a translation of what he repeats, or a grammatical analyssis, in which he must show the dependencies and relations of word upon words—the concord, the verb, the mood, the gender and the case; in very one and all of which the learned youth enters with an air of oracular importance, and a polysyllablicism of language that fails not in confounding them with astonishment and edification.’ (Denis O’Shaughnessy Going to Maynooth) [30] In his essay on The Hedge School, Carleton lists an egregious prospectus of classical instruction which includes besides the normal pabulum in a list ending with ‘.. Livy, Thomas Aquinas, Cornelius Agrippa, and Cholera Morbus.’ [30]

Henry Fitzcotton, a burlesque called A New and Accurate Translation of the First Book of Homer’s Iliad (Dublin 1748), attacking ‘the dreadful state of slavery under stupid trants who … make their pupils spend many of their valuable years wholly in getting by heart a parcel of amo’s and tupto’s … ‘ [31]

As headmaster of the Cavan Royal School from 1720 to 1726, Thomas Sheridan trained seniors to perform classical plays in the original Greek; the first performances of their kind in Ireland or Britain; Archbishop King refers to one in a letter of Dec. 1720: ‘I was invited to see Hippolytus acted in Greek by Dr Sheridan’s pupils. They did very well—spoke an English preface. The master had made one for them, but a parcel of wgs got the boy and made another prologue for him.’ Quoted Ball, Correspondence of Swift 6 vols. (1910-14), iii, 124, n.3. The dedication of Sheridan’s Philoctetes (Dublin 1725) shows that the performance was attended by the Lord Lieutenant; [Note: cf. A Lefanu, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs Frances Sheridan (London 1824), p.12.] Swift wrote a commendation to Lord Dorset, Viceroy in 1735: ‘Yur Grace must please to remember that I carried you to see a comedy of Terence acted by the scholars of Dr Sheridan with wich performance you were well pleased. The doctor is the most learned person I know in this kingdom and the best schoolmaster here in the memory of man having an excellent taste in all parts of literature.’ (Ball, v. p.150). Stanford characterises this as the ‘exaggerated praise by a friend’, and notes a translation of Sophocles’s Philoctetes, and of Persius’ Satires as well as a Latin grammar and miscellaneous writings. [33]

J. Jamieson, History of the Royal Belfast Academical Institution (Belfast 1959); also JR Fisher and JH Robb, royal Belfast Academical Institution Centenary Volume 1810-1910 (Belfast 1913). [notes, 43]

Richard and Maria Edgeworth, in ssay on Practical Education (1798, 2nd ed. 1815), reflects increasing criticism of classical monopoly, which they characterise as ‘toil and misery’ which deploring ‘barbarous translations’; ‘As long as gentlemen feel a deficienty in their own education, when they have not a competent knowledge of the learned languages, so long must a parent be anxious that his son should not be exposed to the mortification of feeling inferior to others of his own rank … It is not the ambition of a gentleman to read Greek like an ancint Grecian, but to undertsnad it as well as the generality of his contemporaries; to know whence the terms of most sciences are derived, and to be able, in some degree, to trace the progress of mankind in knowledge and refinemnt, by examing [sic] the exent and combination of their different vocabularies’; ‘A public speaker, who rises in the House of Commons, with pedantry propense to quote Latin or Greek, is coughed or laughed down but the beautiful, unpremeditatd, classical allusions of Burke or Sheridan, somtimes conveyed in a single word, seize the imagination irresistibly’ (Essay on Practical Education new ed. London 1815, chp. xiii; chp. ii, 255-6. Stanford comments: they write of classics almost like lace on their coats, and one almost feels that if thy had enough courage they would have found little or no place for them in their ‘practical education’. [34] NOTE: for classical influence on Richard Lovell Edgeworth, see Memoirs, i (London 1820), 23, 32-33, 64-65.

Ellis Walker, headmaster of Free school Derry and later Drogheda Grammar School (1694-1701), published rhyming version of Enchiridon (Handbook) of Epictetus in 1692, then ‘a Latin play out of Terence’, performed in 1698. [24, 36].

William Neilson, of Dundalk Grammar School, and later the Royal Belfast Academical Inst., published Greek Exercises (1804; 8th ed. 1846); Greek Idioms (1810); supplemented ed. of James Moor’s Elementa Lingua Graecae (1821); he also taught Irish—Introduction to the Irish Language (1808)—and Hebrew; elected Professor of Greek at Glasgow but died before taking up the post. [37]

Rural polymath, Patrick Lynch from Co. Clare, learned Hebrew as well as Greek and Latin; published in The Pentaglot Preceptor: or Elementary Institutes of the English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Irish Languages, vol. 1, containing a Grammar of the English Tongue (1796); went to Dublin as a schoolmaster and in 1815 became secretary of the Gaelic Society; no further vols. of Pentaglot appeared; The Classical Students’ Metrical Mnemonics, Containing in Familiar Verse All the Necessary Definitions and Rules of the English, Latin, Greek and Hebrew Languages (1817), 104pp; also produced versions of Alvary’s Latin and Wetenhall’s Greek grammar as well as works on Irish and on Irish saints. Stanford comments: exemplifies the traditional omnivorousness and boldness of the native Irish scholars, a trait to be seen in writers like James Joyce. [37]

schoolmasters and the classics, bibl., inter al., The Grecian Drama: a Treatise on the Dramatic Literature of the Greeks, by JR Darley of the Royal Dungannon School (1840).

Thomas Sheridan, in View of the State of Education in Ireland (1769): ‘thu after the drudgery of so many years, goaded on by the dread of punishment, in a constant course of disagreeable labour without any degree of pleasure to soften it, or hope of seeing an end to it, all that the oung scholars have attained is, a poor smattering in two dead languages.’

bibl. W. MacDonald, Reminiscences of a Maynooth Professor (London 1925). This writer found Pinnock’s edition of Goldsmith’s histories of Greece and Rome and oasis in his own arid education in the classics at Maynooth. ‘Epaminondas was like an Irish hero.’ (see p.2-7)

A Lyall, The Life of the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava, 2 vols (London 1905); includes account by Dufferin of his childhood indifference to Greek, and his learning it as any other modern language, and its becoming his chief delight, in adult life. Letter to his son’s tutor, Lyall, 1, p.27; also his rectorial address to Univ. of St. Andrews.[41] The Marquis of Dufferin coolected inscriptions in Teos and Iasos during a cruise of the Mediterranean in 1842-43 for his house in Co Down [140] For an amusing Anglo-Latin speech at a banquet in Iceland, see Lylall, i, 151; cf Stanford, PRIA, 46.

CV Stanford, Pages of an Unwritten Dairy (London 1914). Remarks on an enthusiastic classical school-teacher cited.

3: The Universities and Learned Societies
Erasmus, Ciceronian Dialogues (1530) imagined himself touring civilised countries incl. Scotland and Denmark, but not Ireland. In preface to his edition of the New Testament of 1516 he remarked, ‘I would hav these words translated into all languages, so that not only the Scots and Irish, but also the Turks and Saracens, might read them.’ [45]

James Ussher, [Luke] Chaloner;s younger contemporary [as Fellow at TCD] and a richer man, had a much largeer classical collection, though his own chief intrests were in ecclesiastical history. Note: TCD has MS catalogues of Chaloner’s and Ussher’s books, both part of the collection.

Narcissus Marsh est. a public librar near St Patrick’s Cathedral in 1706. Besides two fifteen-century and many good sixteen-century editions of classical authors, it contained one series of particular interest—the classical volumes from the library of the notable English collector, Bishop Stillingfleet, with autograph annotations by one of the best Greek scholars of the seventeenth century, Isaac Casaubon.

An MS translation of Odyssey, The Battle of the Frogs and Mic, and Homeric Hymns and epigrams by one James Hingston, grad. 1734, is in the possession of the author [Stanford].

Edmund Burke wrote a description of his experience as a candidate for matriculation in 1744, adding a message to one of the teachers who had prepared him in Ballitore: ‘Tell Mastr Pearce, for his Comfort, that I was examined in Ars in Praes’ (being a mnemonic for the parts of the Latin verb). He won a prize and took a Foundation scholarship in classics. [50]

Oliver Goldsmith, entered College in 1745, in his Present State of Polite Learning (1759), approvd educational methods of Dublin Universit, in distinguishing between three types of university in Europe: ‘those upon the old scholastic establishment, where the pupils are immured, talk nothing but Latin, and support everyday syllogistical disputations in school-philosophy’, such as Prague, Louvain and Padua, others ‘where pupils are under few restrictions, where all scholastic jargon is banished’, and pupils took their degrees when they chose, like Leyden, Gottingden and Geneva, and a third being a mixture of the two. Goldsmith thought the third type best for rich, and the second type the best for poorer students. In the Life of Parnell, Goldsmith says the TCD entrance exam was harder than at Oxbridge. [50]

Samuel Madden, a rich clergyman of Co. Fermanagh, instituted premiums at TCD for best candidates in term exams. [51]

Berkeley presented a 120 guineas and a die for two gold medals to encourage Bachelors to study Greek, in 1752. Senior Lecturer in Greek up to 1724, whn he resigned. [51]

Dublin printing of textbooks nearly restricted to a handsome production of Sheridan’s Philotectes (1729) printed by Hyde and Dobson in 1725; also eds. of Terence (1729) and Tacitus (1730) from Grierson. [54]

In an effort to improve the standard of scholarship the Board of the College placed two Junior Fellows, Thomas Leland and John Stokes, in charge of the press in 1747 to publish a series of classical authors which would reflect credit on the university. Their two volume edition of Demosthenes’ speeches against Philip of Macedon (1754) and the first vol. of Leland’s translation of Demosthenes (1756) were respectable works of scholarship. But for some reason Leland pubishd his other classical works in London, and the standard of the press relapsed into mediocrity … [54]

William Molyneux founded Dublin Philosophical Society in 1683, lasted only six years; in 1702 a former member, thomas Molyneux, produced a maper on ancient Greek and Roman lyres published in Transactions of Royal Society in London. Royal Irish Academy founded in 1785, largely through efforts of James Caulfeild, 1st earl of Charlemont; Charlemont himself read at a meeting of 1789 a paper entitled An account of a Singular Custom at Metelin with some Conjecturs on the Antiquity of its Origin, having been in Lesbos during his Greek touring, and there observed the apparent matriarchy of the island, where the women seemed ‘to have arrogated to themselves the deportment and priveliges of men’.

J. Barrett edited a palimpsest of St Matthew’s Gospel [55]; note: a full ed. of the MS was handsomely produced by the Dublin Univ. Press, 1801; for Barrett’s work on it, see SP Tregelles, The Dublin Codex Rescriptus (london 1863). [70]

Richard Kirwan read two classical papers in 1808-09: An Essay on Happiness, in which he reached the conclusion that ‘the condition of every class of inhabitants of Attica, was upon the whole miserable; and that the Athenian commonwealth [55] can at most be demed only semi-civilized’. The second paper, On the Origin of Polytheism, Idolatryy, and Grecian Mytholog, displayed wide classical and biblical erudition but no tolerance for ‘the immoral tendency and gross indecency’ of Greek myths. [56]

In 1795 St Patrick’s College was founded at Mayooth, offering a three-year course in classics; in 1827 the years included: Caesar, Sallust, Virgil, Horace, Cicero, St. John’s Gospel, Lucian and Xenophon; cicero, Livy, Virgil, Juvnal, Epictetus,Xenophon, and Homer; Tacitus, Livy, cicero, Virgil, Horace, Quintilian, Homer, Demosthenes and Longinus; also Greek and Roman history.

The introduction of a new system of marking which gave classical men a better chance in fellowship examinations resulted in a spectacular series of notable scholars beginning with Mahaffy, Fllow in 1864.

Thomas Davis, grad. 1836, famously addressed College Historical Society in 1840; affirmed that ‘the classics, even as languages, are shafts into the richest mines of thought which time has deposited’ and praised them extensively; but he deplored the time spent on the languages when good translations would suffice, while time spent learning the languages detracted from the allowance for modern literature: ‘Numerous works, English, French, and German, are intrinsically superior to the corresponding Greek, and still more above the parallel Roman works.’ He conceded: ‘If the student knew the politics and philosophy, and felt the poetry, or even appreciated the facts to be found in the Greek and Roman writrs, I might forgive the error of selecting such studies in preference to native and modern … seriously, what does the student learn besides the words of the classics? ..’ Stanford remarks that here Davis works himself up to a fine Demosthenic flow: ‘I ask you, again, how can the student profit by study of the difficult literature of any foreigners, ancient or modern, till he learns to think and fel; and these he learns easiest from world or home life, refined and invigorated by his native literature; and even if by chance the young studnt, fresh from a bad school, has got some ideas of the picturesque, the generous, the true, into his head, he is neither encouraged nor expected to apply them to the classics. Classics! good sooth, he had better read with the hedge-school boys the History of the Rogues, Tories and Rapparees or Moll Flanders, than study Homer or Horace in Trinity College. I therefore protest, and ask you to struggle against the cultivation of Greek or Latin or Hebrew while French or German are excluded; and still more strongly should we oppose th cultivation of any, or all of these, to the neglect of English and, perhaps I may add, Irish literature.’ Davis mainly critical of unfair monopoly held by classical studies, and the dull pedantry of the teaching. [60]

Stanford’s bibliographical note on Davis as follows: ~above quotations from Davis, Address &c. (Dublin 1840), p.14-19; previous members of the College Historical Society had discussed the classical studies in published addresses to the Society, e.g., Isaac Butt in 1833 (notable for its emphasis on the influence of Demosthenes) and TJ Ball in 1837. Butt published translations of the Georgics and Faste. [70]

Owing to Catholic dissatisfaction with the constitution of the Queen’s Colleges, the Catholic University had been established under papal chartr in 1854, with John Henry Newman, afterwards Cardinal, as its Rector. Formerly a Fellow of one of the liveliest Oxford colleges of that time, Oriel, Newman was a valiant advocate of a liberal education in the traditional sense and a vigorous opponent of what he called ‘low utilitarianism’. Both in his discourses to Dublin Catholics in 1852 and in his lectures to members of the Catholic University 1854-58 [published together as The Idea of a University, London 1902), he reiterated his belief in the supreme value of the classics in education … :’to advance the useful arts is one thing, and to cultivate the mind is another. The simple question to be considered is, how best to strengthen, refine, and enrich the intellectual powers; the perusal of the poets, historians and philosophers of Greece and Rome, will accomplish this purpose, as long experience has shown; but that the study of experimental sciences will do the like, is proved to us by no experience whatever.’ (First lecture.) [62]

Newman in his Discourses (incl. in The Idea of a University, 366ff) described the kind of examination that a young candidate for matriculation might expect to encounter. [The examination, quoted fully by Stanford, revolves on the student’s grammatical analysis of the title Anabasis.] [63] in subsequent pages Newman with a characteristic sens of justice—and som sense of humour—went on to express the point of view of the candidate himself and of his father, who argues that ‘the substance of knowledge is far more valuable than its technicalities’. Stanford notes that Newman’s brief ascendancy greatly strengthened the liberal classical tradition in Dublin. He firmly opposed the view held by his friend ‘Ideal’ Ward that in Catholic education only ecclesiastical writers should be studied in Greek and Latin, not the pagan authors. He dfended the classical writers as ‘prophets of the human race in its natural condition’ and championed Horace as ‘the complement of St Paul and St John who ‘arms us against the fallacious promise of the world’, condemning the harmful results which came from the French revolutionaries’ use of Plutarch’s Lives as if they were ‘a sort of Lives of the Saints’. His beautifully cadenced [64] tribute to the lasting value of passages from the classics … is perhaps the finest in the English language (An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, 1881, pp.78-79; quoted by Tristram, [in Tierney, ed. 1945), pp.277-8). [65; notes, 71]

Hopkins’ letters during his time in Dublin (1884-89) suggest many promising lines of research, especially in Greek metrics; he published nothing of note in classics, and his predilection for Plato and Duns Scotus made for intellectual incompatibility with the Aristotelians in the College. A legend persists that on one occasion the members of his class persuaded him to let them drag him by the heels round the classroom to demonstrate Achilles’ treatment of Hector’s corpse at Troy, a rather drastic exercise in what Aristotle in his Poetics terms ‘joining physically in the action of one’s subject’. [65]

Sir Bertram Windle, President of Cork College, eleced Professor of Archaeology in 1906 and author of a useful book on Romans in Britain (DNB; and see M Taylor, Sir Bertram Windle: a Memoir (London 1933).

In 1893 James Joyce, then [at] Belevedere, had to study an ed. of Lamb’s Adventures of Ulysses by a former student of comparative philology in TCD, John Cooke. Cooke rather gratuitously inserted a good deal of elementary philological material into his notes. From these, by a long and circuitous route, may have evolved the cosmopolitan super-language of Finnegans Wake. [Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition, 1984 ed., p.68] See WB Stanford, ‘Joyce’s first Meeting with Ulysses’, in The Listener, 19 July 1951, and ‘The Mysticism that Pleased Him’, in Envoy 5 (1951), pp.62-69.

In 1889 Flinders Petrie discovered multitudinous papyrus fragmets of ancient Greek literature embedded in mummy-cases in the Fayyum district [Egypt] … JP Mahaffy of TCD was given a large amount of this material to edit, which he did with speed and energy. At the same time he used his influence and persuasive powers to inform the public about the literary importance of the discoveries. … papyrology was found too specialised for more than a few of the larger English universities, and no lectureship was founded in Ireland, though a good many papyri are in Dublin libraries. [68]]

SH Butcher, Prof. of Greek at Edinburgh (Irish by birth and parentage) fnd. the Classical Association of Ireland, and became its first president, in 1908. [69]

Notes and Bibl. : Berkeley endowed a fund at Yale in 17[1]3 to maintain 3 students to study Latin and Greek. [70]

James Ussher’s Epistle concerning the Religion of the Ancient Irish (1622), among the first uses of Greek type by Dublin printers.
TK Abbott, Catalogue of Fifteen Century Books in the Library of TCD and in March’s Library (Dublin 1907)
P Grosjean and D O’Connell, A Catalogue of Incunabula in the Library at Milltown Park, Dublin (Dublin 1932)
TPC Kirkpatrick, ‘The Worth Library: Stevens Hospital Dublin, Bibl. Soc. Irel., i., 3 (1919), 1-12.
HG Wheeler, Libraries in Ireland before 1855 (unpublished thesis, TCD 1957)

On Dublin Printing House, see P White, in The Irish Printer, 3 (1908), and 7 (1912); I MacPahil, ‘The dublin Univ. Press in the 18th century’, in Annual Bulletin of the Friends of the Library of TCD, 1956, pp.10-14; W. O’Sullivan, ‘The Univrsity Press’, in Quarterly Bulletin of the Irish Georgian Society, i (1958), pp.18-52’ and Report of the Govt. Commission on the University of Dublin (1853), 187-91. [70]

TW Moody and JC Beckett, Queen’s, Belfast, 1845-1949, the History of a University (London 1959).
The Belfast Literary Society 1801-1901, [no ed.] (Belfast 1901); biogs. of the Bruces, Neilson, and Hincks, pp.29-34, 48-50, 55-9, 69-70. [71]
On Newman: see CS Dessain, Letters and Diaries, &c., London 1965) [his view of low classical standards at Dublin, xvi, 321-22. Also F McGrath, Newman’s University: Idea and Reality (1951).

JK Ingram, in Hermathena i (1874), p. 409, a brief appreciation of Ferrar’s work by his successor as comparative philologist in TCD, mention the influence of a local German scholar, Prof. R. Siegfried. Ingram argus for ‘comparative grammar’ as a kind of mastr subject in advanc of classical instruction. For Ingrams’s own work see the obit. in TCD: A College Miscellany for 8 May 1907, and Classical Review (1887), p.116.

bibl. on Papyrology, in Mahaffy (1971), pp.183-7, 200-4.; also Stanford, PRIA 72-3.

4: Literature in Irish
Stanford’s general remarks on ancintIrish authors’ relation to the classics: Here we shall se how the native Irish who stayed at home and cherished their own rich and elaborate literary traditions invaded and plundered the classical authors with fruitful and sometimes curious results. They showed no sign of deferential awe towards classical antiquity. [Stanford makes an analogy with Irish raiders and traders overseas in the same period, ‘confident in their own prowess’.] They welcomed new ideas … but they were not overwhelmed by the classical tide as the Celts of the continent and of Britain … had been. They had their own illustrious kings and heroes to match those of Greece and rome. Besides, they had their own sophisticated methods of story-telling and poetry-making. they were as convinced [74] that they could improve on the techniques of their ancient Greek and Roman predecessors as a modern technologist is convinced that he can better the machines of an earlier age. [74].

Further, The main impression that the native Irish handling of classical material leaves is one of an extraordinary readiness to alter the canonical versions of the Greek and Roman writers. This Gaelic nonchalance may seem irresponsible, even outrageous, to modern classical readers taught to venerate the ancient authors … But what should be recognised in these Irish versions is that here we have a new literary fusion which is both scholarly and creative, derivative and inventive, classical and Celtic, which cannot be fitted into any of the orthodox genres. [Comparison with Joyce and Beckett ensues.]

The texts discussed in this chapter are:

Togail Troí—5th c., and the earliest foreign-language version of the original in existence, Roman de Troie by Benoit de Saint Maure being 1160. [Stanford 74]

Merugud Uilix Maic Leirtis—i.e., the Odyssey, 3,000 words. [Stanford, 75-78]

Details in Tain Bo Cuailgne and The Book of Invasions show possible classical sources. [78]

Stanford distinguishes the English and Irish associations of ‘Greek’, the OED giving ‘cheat, sharper, merry fellow, person of loose habits, … Irishman’; Dineen giving ‘bright, grand, splendid, cheerful, gaudy’, as well as serving as an epithet for the Fitzgeralds. And where English genealogists trace to the Trojans, Irish genealogies commonly attach to the Greek lineage. [~79]

Irish translations of Statius’ Thebaid, as Togail na Tébe (MS of 1379), Virgil’s Aeneid (c.1400); Lucan’s Civil War, as In Cath Catharda (15th c.); The Story of Hercules and his Death, as Stair Ercuil ocus a Bás (15th c.), based on Caxton’s Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye.

The story of the Sons of Tuireann includes an imaginary visit by Irishmen to ‘the blue streams of the coast of Greece’; the Irishmen trick the king and kill him after a contest involving enigmatic poetry. [~880]

Classical allusions and genealogies occur plentiously in The Sword of Oscar, in Duanaire Finn; Th Triumphs of Turlough (14 thc.), closely modelled on Lucan’s Pharsalia; the poem by Eochaid Ó hEoghusa on the accession of James I (a reference to Ovid’s Metamorphosis).

Charles Vallancey produced a literary curiosity when he included an Irish translation of the Punic speech from Plautus’ Poenulus in his Essay on the Antiquity of the Irish Language (1772).

Modern translations include Archbishop John Mchale’s version of the Iliad (completed 1874); translations by Monsignor Padraig de Brún and Prof. George Thomson; Stephen MacKenna, Plotinus—he projected an Irish version Pindar in view of the Gaelic quality he detected in it.

General Bibl: J Carney, Studies in Irish Literature and History (Dublin 1955); EG Cox, ‘Classical Traditions in Medieval Ireland, Classical Quarterly iii (1924), 267-84; M Dillon, Early Irish Literature (Chicago 1948); G. Dottin, ‘Les Légendes grecques dans l’ancienne Irlande’, Rvue des Etudes Grecques, xxxv (1922), 191-407; Robin Flower, The Irish Tradition; G. Murphy, saga and Myth in Ancient Ireland (Dublin 1955); TF O’Rahilly, Early Irish History and Mythology (Dublin 1946); Rudolf Thurneysen, Die Irische Helden- und Koenigsage bis zum Siebzehnten Jahrundert (Halle 1921).

Texts of Togail Troí: oldest, incomplete in the Book of Leinster, c.1150, Whitely Stokes, Togail Troi (Calcutta 1881); a later MS bringing the narrative to the sack of Troy, Stokes, in Irische Texte 2nd ser. 1 (1884), 1-141; other versions: Stokes, Togail vi, and cf. G. Dottin, ‘La Légende de Troie en Irlande’, Revue Celtique, xli (1924), p.149-141.

K. Meyer, trans. Merugud Uilix Maicc Leirtis, The Irish Odyssey (London 1886); also RT Meyer, Merugud Uilix Maic Leirtis (Dublin 1958), and ‘The Middle Irish Odysse: Folktale, Fiction or Saga’, in Modern Philology, 1 (1952), 73-78.

Eriugena referred to Ulysses’s recognition by his dog [Argus] in De Divisione Natura, 3, 738C (Migne). [Stanford, 88]

Synge attened the lectures of de Jubainville on the affinities of classical and Celtic Homeric myths. Kenney, Sources (1929), gives a bibliography of de Jubainville. [Stanford 88]

Greek-Irish literary parallels: Brian O’Nolan, ‘Homer and Irish Narrative’, Celtic Quarterly; n.s., xix (1199), 1-19; ‘Homer and the Irish Hero Tale’, in Studia Hibrnica, 8 (1968, 7-20, and ‘The Use of Formula of Storytelling’, in Béaloideas 39-41 (1973), 233-50; GL Huxley, Greek Epic Potry (London 1969), 1991-6; JV Luce, ‘Homerica Qualities in the Life and Literature of the Great Blasket Island’, in Greece and Romae, 17 (1969), 151-168. HD Ranking develops comparisons between Archilochus and Gaelic satirists in Eos 62 (1974), 5-21.

RAS Macalister, Lebor Gabála Erenn, 2 vols (Dublin 1938, 1956).
MC MacErlean, ed., The Poems of David Ó Bruadair 2 vols (London 1910, 1917).

The Story of the Sons of Tuireann is translated by Lady Gregory in Gods and Fighting Men (London 1926), 25-51.
S Ó Duilearga, Irish Folktales (Dublin 1914); S. Ó Súilleabháin, A Handbook of Irish Folklore (Dublin 1942);
Ó Súilleabháin and RT Christiansen, The Types of Irish Folktale (Helsinki 1963)
S O’Sullivan, The Folklore of Ireland (London 1974)

G. Calder, ed., Togail na Tebe: the Thebaid of Statius (Cambridge 1922).
G. Calder, ed., Imtheachta Aeniasa: the Irish Aeneid (London 1907)
W. Stokes, In Cath Catharda: the Civil War of the Romans, An Irish Version of Lucan’s Pharsalia (Leipzig 1909).
E[oin] MacNeill, Duanaire Finn, i (London 1908) [‘The Sword of Oscar’, pp.153-62.
SH O’Grady, ed., The Triumph of Turlough [modelled on Pharsalia] (Dublin 1924-29).
PS Dinneen and T O’Donoghue, The Poem of EganO’Rahilly (London 1911).
D Ó hAodha, edited the Irish version of Statius Achilleid [c.1100] in PRIA 79 C4 (1979), 83-137.

5: Anglo-Irish Literature
Shirley, St Patrick for Ireland (1640) rather ludicrously by modern standards, presents the Druids as worshipping Jupiter and Mars, whose statues in the classical style appeared on the scene. [90-91]

Katherine Philips … encouraged in her work [Pompey, 1663] and lent £100 to buy Roman and Egyptian costumes by the first Anglo-Irish dramatist to use a tragic theme—Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill, afterwards Earl of Orrery … His Tryphon (1668) enacted the story of the pretender to the throne of Syria in the 2nd c. b.c. as relatd by Josephus in History of the Jews and in the First Book of Maccabees; the production a failure; later, his play on Herod not staged. [91]

Nahum Tate’s libretto for Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (1689) [91]

Thomas Southerne … won some success with his Fate of Capua (1700) describing events in Rome after Hannibals victory at Cannae; his Spartan Dame (1719) based on Plutarch’s life of Agis.

Arthur Murphy’s Grecian Daughter (1773), regarded as best play of that once popular dramatist and a good classical scholar; bathetically lachrymose second act; based on Valerius Maximus’s story of a woman of filial piet breast-feeding her starving father as prisoner. [91]

Audbrey de vere’s Alexander the Great (1874), John Todhunter’s Alcestis (1879) and Helena in Troas (1886) hardly more than academic exercises.

Edmund Burke describes the education basis of the pervasive classicism of the Anglo-Irish world, in a letter to Samuel Parr in 1787 (Copeland et al. eds., Correspondence, 1958-70, vol. v., 337. [Stanford 91]

Models—Burke: Aristotle and Cicero; Grattan, Flood, Curran: Demosthenes; Swift: Juvenal and Martial; Berkeley: Plato (in dialogue style); Goldsmith: Horace (narrative poems) [Stanford 93]

Mary Tighe, long and pallid poem Psyche (1805), based on Apuleius; reprinted 8 times; statue on her Co. Kilkenny grave by Flaxman. [92]

Lady Morgan set Woman, or Ida of athens (1809) in modern Greece; she resisted the temptation to learn Greek and Latin ‘lest I should not be very woman’. See Lady Morgan: L. Stevenson, The Wild Irish Girl (London 1936), 108ff, 116ff.

Ecstatic Hellenism exuberantly expressed in Darley’s Nepenthe (1839), a rhapsodic description of a journey through classical and oriental langs in the compnay of excited bacchanals and nymphs.. it made a curious sequel to his Errors of Ecstasie (1822) a poetic dialogue between the moon and a mystic. See AJ Leventhal, George Darley, 1795-1846 (Dublin 1956).

Aubrey de Vere’s classical poems praised extravagantly by WS Landor: ‘nothing in our days will bear a moment’s comparison with them, nor do I find anything more classical among the best of the ancients’; on Search for Prosperine (1843): ‘it is the first time I have felt hellenized by a modern hand’. Search &c., contains choruses of fauns, naiads, and nerieds; also, his Greek Idyls, his sonnets on Greek themes, his verses on Sophocles and Delphi, show a well-digestd knowledge of classical and modern Greece, as do his Picturesque Studies of Greece and Turkey, 2 vols. (1850), and a deep admiration for the higher Greek ideals. The essay on Landor’s poetry in the first volume of his Essays Chiefly on Poetry (1887) presents a good critical survey of previous neo-classical poets [in English] and perceptive things about Greek landscape and religious feelings. [93]

Gogarty’s criticism of the fashionable style of Landoresque, cool classicism: ‘This modern admiration for the cold and classic only exists because it is modern and the ‘classics’ are old. Landor is ‘Greek’ and ‘classic’ but he is more classic than Aeschylus and Euripides. Surely every word in Aeschylus must have been as full of myster and romance as ‘alien corn’ or ‘ancestral voices’—romance native to the Greeks? Forgetting this, or being out of touch with it, we call the white marble classic. It was coloured once.’ Quoted in O’Connor, Oliver St. John Gogarty (1964), pp.99-100. [93]

Gogarty’s classic subjects in finely chiselled poems and epigrams include Virgil, Nymphis et Fontibus, The Isles of Greece, Troy, Choric Song of the Ladies of Lemnos, Europa and the Bull, Leda and the Swan, Centaurs, To Petronius Arbiter, and With a Coin from Syracuse.

Stanford submits an essay on Yeats’s relation to the classical authors and themes that were ‘the builders of my soul’, Ireland and the classical Tradition (1984), pp.94-102. His remarks on Joyce are also condensed in pages 102-09.

Yeats on Latin: ‘Teach nothing but Greek, Gaelic, mathematics, and perhaps one modern language. I reject Latin because it was a language of the Greco-Roman decadence, all imitation and manner and othr feminine tricks … Roman potry is founded upon documents, not upon belief.’ Greek had much in common with Irish, and could also provide what the Irish tradition lacked, ‘co-ordination or intensity’. (On the Boiler.) Stanford also cites a lengthy letter of 1930 on his son’s education to the same effect; printed in Pages from a Diary (Dublin 1944), p.36: ending, ‘If he wants to read Irish after he is well found in Greek, let him—it will clear his eyes of the Latin miasma.’ [Stanford, 94]

NOTE: His father read him Macauley’s Lays of Ancient Rome, which Yeats called ‘the first poetry to move me after the stable-boy’s Orange rhymes’. Autobiographies, p.56. [Stanford, 95]

Stanford notes Russell’s failed attempt to persuade Yeats of the superiority of intellectual to sensual beauty. [97]

In an account of the writing of King Oedipus (Abbey 1926) and Oedipus at Colonus (1927), printed in an article for The New York Times in January 1933, Years refers to help from ‘a young Greek scholar who, unlike myself, had not forgotten his Greek’ who supplied suitably ‘bald translation’ to present the ‘precise thoughts’ of the original. Stanford notes that Yeats of course knew no Greek at any time, and that the scholar was Gogarty, who obliged with a literal translation after Gilbert Murray had refused. The collaboration began in 1904; was left off till 1909, and was held back until 1926 when it reached the Abbey stage. [~98] Notes refer to AN Jeffares and AS Knowland, Commentary on the Collected Plays of WB Yeats (London 1975), and Ulick O’Connor, Oliver St John Gogarty (1964).

Yeats claimed that he wanted the language of the play to be ‘intelligible on the Blasket Island’. (Wade, p.730). ‘When I say intelligible on the Blasket Island, I mean that, being an ignorant man, I may not have gone to Greece through a Latin mist. Grek literature, like old Irish literature, was founded upon belief, not like Latin literature upon documents. No man has evr prayed to or dreaded one of Vergil’s [sic] nymphs, but when Oedipus at Colonus went into the Wood of the Furies he felt soe of the creeping of the flesh that an Irish countryman feels in certain haunted woods in Galway and Sligo.’ [Stanford, 99].

Pearse: ‘When Peare summoned Cuchulain to his side,/What stalked in the Post Office? What intellect,/What calculation, number, measurement, replied?/We Irish, born into that ancient sect/But thrown upon this filthy modern tide/And by its formless spawning fury wrecked,/Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace/The lineaments of a plummt-measured face.’ (The Statues (1938).

Notes and Bibl.

Further classical plays: Hecuba, attrib. R. West (1762); S. Madden, Themistocles (1729); W Howard, Regulus (1744); I Bickerstaff, Leucothea (1756), Daphne and amintor (1766), and The Ephesian Matron (1769); Henry Brooke, Anthony and Cleopatra (1778); F Gentleman, Orpheus and Eurydice (1783); I Jackman, Hero and Leander (1787); J O’Keeffe, The Siege of Troy (1795); WC Oulton, Pyramus and Thisbe (1798); JJ Proby, The Fall of Carthge (Greek style and chorus), Caius Gracchus, and Polyxena (all published 1810); JS Knowles, Caius Gracchus (1815) and Virginius (1820); J Banim, Damon and Pytheas (1821). Others cited in Kavanagh, 94, 347, 421, and Clark’s list of plays in Irish Stage in Country Towns; also Stanford, PRIA, 82, n.270. [110]

RH Murray, Edmund Burke (Oxford 131) [discusses his classical interests]; e Barker, The Politics of Aristotle (Oxford 1948), pp.lxi-lxii considers the sources of his political theory; JAK Thomson, Classical Influences on English Prose (London 1956) [considers Burke, Swift and Goldsmith in the light of this title].

CA Beaumont, Swift’s Classical Rhetoric (Georgia 961); H Williams, Dean Swift’s Library (Cambridge 1932).

Among the numerous publications of minor writers a typical example is Robert Jephson’s Roman Portraits (1794), a fine quarto volume of effete poems with 20 engravings from antique sources. Cf. Jephson’s lively letter to Malone in J Prior’s Life of Edmund Malone (London 1860), p.190-91, claiming that ‘the book will at least have the outside of a gentleman.’ [Stanford, 110]

On Mary Tighe, see Victoria Glendinning, ‘Mary Mary Quite Contrary, in Irish Times, 7 Mar. 1974.

Yeatsian bibliography in Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (1984), Notes: R. Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (London 1954), and Yeats: The Man and the Masks (London 1949); AN Jeffares, WB Yeats: Man and Poet (London 1949); TR Henn, The Lonely Tower (London 1965); classical influences: AG stock, WB Yeats: His Poetry and Thought (Cambridge 1961); DT Torchiana, Yeats and Georgian Ireland (Evanston 1966); TR Whitaker, Swan and Shadow (Chapel Hill 1964); and FAC Wilson, WB Yeats and Tradition (London 1958); elucidation indebted to AN Jeffares, A Commentary on the Collected Poems of WB Yeats (London 1968). Also Yeats, Pages from a Diary (Dublin 1944); also AN Jeffares and AS Knowland, Commentar on the Collected Plays of WB Yeats (London 1975).

AN Jeffares, ‘Pallas Athene Gonne’, in Tributes … to Shotaro Oshima (Tokyo 1970), pp.4-7.

for Catullan influence, see JJ O’Meara, University Review, iii (1966), pp.15-16: quotes, ‘nor shall I ever know how much my practice and my theory owe to … Catullus ..’. [Stanford, 110]

J Eglinton, in Irish Literary Portraits (London 1935) says he helped Yeats in translating Demosthenes. [111]

Stephen Spender, World within World (London 1964), recalls Yeats saying that a gargoyle spoke to him.

WB Stanford, ‘Ulyssean Qualities in Joyce’s Bloom’, Comparative Literature, 5 (1953), pp.125-36.

W B[edell] Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (IAP 1976; this ed. 1984), 261pp, index. [COPY PT. II] [COPIED TO RX JAN 93]

6: Architecture and Art
Boyle monument, St Patrick’s Cathedral (1631)

Duke of Ormonde, inspired by continental fashions, returns 1660; Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, completed 1884; Castletown, 1772.

Edward Lovett Pearce, prob. b. 1699, Co. Meath; mixed Anglo-Irish and Gaelic ancestry; travelled in Italy; stately Ionic colonnade, domed Commons Chamber, aspidal, barrel-vaulted Lords Chamber; corridor lit by smaller domes on three sides of Commons; also Drumcondra House, Cashel Palace, and Bellamont Forest; shared in Castletown; knighted 1732, d. 1733.

Berkeley eulogized the sterner Doric order, seen in Sicily in 1718, in Alciphron (1752): ‘Those who have considered a theory of architecture [cites Barbaro’s ed. of Vitruvius in ftn.] tell us the proportion of the three Grcian orders were taken from the human body, as the most beautiful and perfect production of nature. Hence was derived those graceful ideas of column, which has character of srength without clumsiness, or of delicacy without weakness. Those beautiful proportions were, I say, taken originally from nature, which, in her creatures, as hath already been observed, referreth them to some end, ue, or design. [He here speaks of the parts and details of a Greek temple: entablature, etc.] … Beauty [as] originally founded on nature [being] the grand distinction between Grecian and Gothic architexture, the latter being fantastical, and for the most part founded neither in nature nor in reason, in necessity nor use, the appearance of which account for all the beauty, grace, and ornament of the other.’ [Stanford, 114]

Stanford notes: Berkeley’s journal of the four-month visit in Sicily is lost, but we know that he saw the temple at Selinus: see J Stock’s Life (London 1776), 10 and 55; and cf AA Luce, Life (London 1949). In a Latin letter of 25 Feb 1718 he says he traversed the whole island. [His Italian journals and letters are extant.] [128]

[James Caulfeild], Earl of Charlemont: visited Greece in 1749, headed committee looking after publication of Chandler’s and Revett’s Ionian Antiquities in 1756; encouraged Piranesi in his Antichità Romana; financed artist Richard Dalton who accompanied him to the Levant, producing drawings of Greek and Roman buildings before Wood’s draughtsman Borra, and ‘Athenian’ Stuart. [115] FURTHER: Simon Vierpyl commissioned by Lord Charlemont and his tutor Edmund Murphy to reproduce antique statuary in 1750. Besides copying 22 statues, he modelled 78 heads for Murphy, mostly Roman emperors, in the Capitoline Museum. They decorated Charlemont House till presented to the RIA in 1868. London-born Vierpyl settled in Ireland in 1756. [121]

Robert Wood’s Ruins of Palmyra (1753) and Ruins of Balbec (1757) were widely influential … in 1761 a monument at Kew Gardens was designed by William Chambers from the illustrations of the smaller temple in Balbec. [116]

Monument to Duke of Wellington, proposed as a Corinthian column by the 1814 committee, but an obelisk was settled on.

Nelson’s column is Doric.

Irish classical survey: Cassels’ Rotunda Hospital; Cooley’s Exchange; Gandon’s custom House, Four Courts, and King’s Inns; Francis Johnston, GPO (1818), The Royal Hibernian; Darley, King’s Inns Library; Byrne, Ionic portico of St Paul’s, modelled on Erechteum, (Rathmines); J Mulvany, Broadstone and other stations, the two yacht clubs, and banks. [Note that the discussion of other eminent works is dispersed through the chapter.]

William Vitruvius Morrison, Ionic-fronted courthouse in Carlow [117]: bibl., DNB and J Morrison, Life of the Late William Vitruvius Morrison, in Weale’s quarterly Papers on Architecture, i (1844); his father Richard Morrison is said to have designed the arch erected for the entry of George IV into Dublin in 1821, modelled on Hadrian’s arch in Athens (see The Royal Visit, O’Kelly Pamphlet, UCD, 6165). [notes, 129]

Ormonde led the way in garden design with 20 Renaissance statues ‘which shall be in full proportion of posture, dimensions, and full as large as those figures … now standing and being in his Majesties privie garden.’ (Historical MS Commission, 7th report, 1879, p.752.) They include Diana, Hercules, Commodus, Antoninus, and the Sabine Women. [119] Inventories of the Duke of Ormonde’s possessions show that in France in 152 he acquird 35 tapestries on biblical and classical themes; later, after his return to Kilkenny, we hear of others depicting Achilles, Vulcan, Neptune, Diana and Cyrus, and a fine st of 6 pices portraying th life of Publius Decius Mus who devoted himself to the infernal deities to save the Roman army. [120] Note: Ormonde Papers for 1682/3 also mentions tapestry of Octavius (Hist. MSS Comm., n.s., vi, 1911, p.538).

Richard Milliken, Groves of Blarney, no-classical jokes: ‘There are statues gracing/This noble place in/All heathen gods,/and nymphs so fair;/Bold Neptune, Caesar,/And Necbuchadnezzar,/All standing naked/In the open air!’ Stanford calls him ‘versifier’. [119]

Van Nost carved Mars and Justice on Dublin Castle Gates.

Edward Smyth (1749-1812) used pure classical and Renaissance-classical styles; allegorical statues on Houses of Parliament, Four Courts, and King’s Inns; discovered by Gandon, who had already accepted statues of Neptune and Mercury from Carline in 1783-84; Smyth carved ornamental trophies and notably the heads of the Atlantic Ocean and the chief Irish rivers to adorn the main keystones of the Custom House, later on Irish banknotes [121]

JH Foley, b. Dublin 181, ed. Art school of RDS, and RA London, his tutor being Westmacott, RA Prof. of Sculture. Influenced by Canova and Flaxman; the O’Connell monument one of his most elaborate designs. His early work resembles late classical art. [121]

John Hogan, b. Cork, 1800; studied plaster casts of antique statuary recently presented to the Cork Arts Society; early classical work includes a drunken faun (praised by Thorwaldsen), a Roman soldier, and a Minerva (1822). Studied at Rome after 1823, visiting Vatican and Capitoline museums; became first Irish or English member of Virtuosi del Pantheon in 1837; his Drunken Faun only survives in plaster casts in Dublinn and Cork; his Shepherd Boy in Iveagh House; portrait statue of Bishop James Doyle (JKL) in Carlow Cathedral combines classicism and naturalism. [122]

JE Carew, sculpt., (c.1785-1868), Arethus, Death of Adonis, Rape of Prospeerine, Theseus and the Minotaur, Prometheus, and Vulcan with Venus. [122]

James Barry, b. Cork 1741; went to sea with his father; studied painting in Dublin in 1766; befriended by Burke; emigrated to Londond, met Reynolds, Athenian Stuart, and others; enthusiastic student of classical models; studied Paris and Rome; paintings include Philoctetes in the Isle of Lemnos (inspired by a Greek epigram on Parrhasius’ treatment of the same theme and influence by the Farnese Hercules and the Belvedere torso), Venus Rising from the Sea, Medea Making Her Incantations, Aeneas Escaping with His Family from the Sack of Troy; The education of Achilles, Narcissus, Jupiter and Juno, Mercury Inventing the Lyre, The Death of Adonis, Horatio Presenting his son to the People, and The Creation of Pandora. Stanford holds that he had a special sympathy with the story of the origins of Man’s ills and weaknesses in that story, in view of his own. His Ulysses and a Companion Escaping from the Cave of Polyphemus (now in Crawford Art Gallery, Cork) has Burke’s head on Ulysses and Barry’s on the companion; Barry appears as the Greek painter Timanthes among the figures in his Victors at Olympia; he also appears in his The Cyclops and the Satrys (NGI). His most elaborate work was a series of mural paintings in 1777-83 for the Royal societ of Arts in London, entitled The Porgress of Human Culture, it included Orpheus, Ceres & Bacchus in a Greek harvest-home, crowing of Olympic victors in the presence of Hiero of Syracuse, Diagorus of Rhodes, Cimon, Pericles, Herodotus, Socrates (and himself as Timanthes). The final scene represents ancient and modern benefactors of mankind at Elysium, among them William Molyneux, near to Marcus Brutus. [123]

Barry: His admiration for classical antiquity was enormous; visiting Herculaneum, he wrote: ‘The moderns, with all their vapouring, have invented nothing, have imporved nothing, not even in the most trifling articles of convenient household utensils.’ (Works, i, p.110.) Similarly in his essay on the Pandora myth, he wrote: ‘.. it must be allowed that at least the Greek artists selected with great sagacity and gnius all that specific configuration of parts which, in their complete perfect union, were best adapted to impress on the mind of the spectator an idea of that particular attribute, the perfection of which they had appropriated to each of those partitions or gods into which they had mistaknly divided the Divine Essence. to this procedure of the Grecian artists, however erroneous as to theology, we ar notwithstanding indebted for such a reform, such amelioration of all the arts that had been handed down to this ingenious people from their gyptian and Asiatic predecessors, as can never be overrated.’ (Works, i. 148-49.) An intrpretation of the Royal Arts murals is given in Works, ii, 305-415. BIBL: DNB; The Works of Jams Barry, Esq., Historical Painter, 2 vols (London 1809); D. Irwin, English Neo-Classical Art (London 1966), pp.38-43; J White, ‘Irish Romantic Painting’, Apollo, 84 (1966), pp.276-79; on influence by Burke, se RR Wark, Journal of the Warburg Inst., xvii (1954), pp.382-84.

Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756), derived in conception from the pseudo-Longinus, influenced Lessing in composing Laokoon (1766). [124]

Thomas Hickey, painter, produced in Calcutta the first vol. of a History of Painting and Sculture from the Earliest Accounts (1788), which surveyed Greek art from the shield of Achilles as described in the Iliad down to Pliny, Pausanias, et. al.

Sir William Hamilton, Collection of Engravings from Ancient Vases, continud by Adam Buck (1811), found useful by Sir John Beazley in his standard work on Attic red-figure pottery. See Thomas Bodkin, ‘Adam Buck’s Drawings of Greek Vases’, Proceedings of the Classical Association of Ireland for 1919-20, pp.33-40. [124 + n.]

Robert Fagan, b. Cork, c.1745, archaeologist and collector as well as painter.

Daniel Maclise (1806-1870), profited by presentation of 117 plaster casts of Roman models, prepared under supervision of Canova, to the Cork Society for Promoting the Fine Arts, made by the Prince Regent in 1818.

WH Brooke illustrated popular book on Greek and Roman mythology by T Keightley. [125]

Hugh Douglas Hamilton (c.1739-1808)

Francis Danby (1793-1861), ed. RDS, emigrated to Bristol; classical themes include Venus Arising from the Sea, Three Sisters of Phaeton, the Embarkation of Cleopatra, and three scenes from the Odyssey.

coinage: Mossops, Woodhouses, and Parkes.

WB Yeats, as chairman of the committee on Irish coinage, gave an account of the proceedings; ‘As the most famous and beautiful coins are the coins of the Greek Colonies, especially those in Sicily, we decided to send photographs of some of these and one coin of Carthage to our selected artists, and to ask them, as far as possible, to take them as a model. But the Greek coins had two advantages that ours could not have, one side need not balance the other, and either could be stamped in high relief, whereas ours must pitch and spin to please the gambler, and pack into roll to pleas the banker.’ He resisted religious and patriotic emblems: ‘.. to find a deliberately religious coin one must go back to pagan times so much abhorred by those critics themselves, when Zeus and aphrodite, and other disreputable characters, adorned the money of the Greeks.’ ‘The most beautiful Greek coins are those that represent some god or goddess, as a boy or girl, or those that represent animals or some simple objct like a wheat-ear. Those beautiful forms, when they are renamed Hibernia or Liberty, would grow enmpty and academic, and the wheat-ear had been adopted by several modern nations. If we decided upon birds and beasts, the artist, the experience of centuries has shown, might achieve a masterpiece, and might, or so it seemed to us, please those that would look longer at each coin than anybody els, artists or children. Besides, what better symbols could we find for this horse-riding, cattle-raising country?’ (WB Yeats, ‘What We Tried to Do’, in The Coinage of Saorstat Eireann, Dublin 1928.) The models used were a ball on a coin of Messana, a hare on a Thurian minting, and a horse from a coin of Larissa, and another from Carthage. Stanford addes that the Department of Agriculture called for alterations in the original designs, which—as Yeats said—‘considered as an ideal’ might have upset ‘the eugenics of the farm’: ‘I admit that the state of the market for pig’s cheeks made the old design impossible.’ (Yeats, ibid.) [Stanford, 126-127].

Notes and Bibl:

F. Henry, Irish Art in the Early Christian Period (London 1965); Irish Art During the Viking Invasions (London 1967), and Irish Art in the Romanesque Priod (London 1970).

Architecture: TU Sadleir and PL Dickinson, Georgian Mansions in Irland (Dublin 1915); AE Richardson, Monumental Classical Architecture in Great Britain and Ireland during the 18th and 19th Centuris (London 1914); Records of the Georgian Society, 5 vols. (1909-13); MJ Craig, Dublin 1660-1860 (London 1952); D Guinness, Irish Houses and Castles (London 1971); R Loeber, ‘Irish Country Houses of the late Caroline Period’, Quarterly Bulletin of the Irish Georgian Society, xvi (1973), pp.1-69; review by Sir Samuel Ferguson of J Mulvany’s Life of James Gandon, DUM, clxxiv (1847), pp.693-708.

H Colvin and MJ Craig, Architectural Drawings in the Librry of Elton Hall by Sir John Vanbrugh and Sir Edward Lovett Parc (Oxford, 1964); refers to Craig’s notice on Pearse, in Bulletin of the Irish Georgian Society, xvii (1974), pp.10-14.

MJ Craig, The Volunteer Earl (London 1948); GB tubbs, ‘Piranesi and Lord Charlemont’, in Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architexts, xxxvii (1926), pp.54-6.

G Holmes, Sketches of Some of the Southern Counties of Ireland (London 1801).
CEB Barrett [recte Brett], Court House and Market Houses in the Province of Ulster (Belfast 1973)
AC Champneys, Irish Ecclesiastical Architecture (London 1910)
Edward McParland, Thomas Ivory, Architect (Ballycotton 1973).
J Mulvany’s Life of James Gandon [1847], contains Gandon’s essay on the progress of architecture, 243ff.
E Hyams, Irish Gardens (London 1967)
J Barr, Hillsborough (Belfast 1862).
Van der Hagen painted scenry for a performance of Cephalus and Procris in Smock alley Theatre Dublin in 1733. [129]
CP Curran, Dublin decorative Plaster Work of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century (London 1967); also Curran, in Journal of Royal Soc. of Antiquarians of Ireland, lxx (1940), pp.1-56; D. Guinness, ‘Decorative Plasterwork in Ireland’, in Apollo, 84 (1966), pp.260-67’.
A Coleridge and D Fitz-Gerald, ‘Eighteenth Century Irish Furniture’, in Apollo 84 (1966), pp.276-89.
C. Maxwell, in Irish Times, 23, 24, 26 June 1936 [on Wedgewood company in Dublin]
WG Strickland, A Dictionary of Irish Artists, 2 vols (Dublin 1913); Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin, Irish Portraits 1600-1860 (London 1969); Crookshank, ‘Irish Sculpture from 1750 to 1860’, in Apollo, 84 (1966), pp.306-13.
CP Curran, ‘Edward Smth, Sculptor, in Architectural Review, ci (1947), pp.67-69; HG Laks, ‘Dublin Custom House: the Riverine Sculptures’, Journal of Royal Soc. of Antiquarians of Ireland, lxxv (1945), pp.187-94.
WC Monkhouse, The work of John Henry Foley (London 1975)); J Turpin, John Henry Foley 1818-1874’, in Irish Times, 2 April 1974; DNB; and Anne Crookshank, ‘Irish Sculpture’, in Apollo 84 (1966); also H Potterton, the O’Connell Monument (Ballycotton 1973).
R Trevelyan, ‘Robert Fagan: an Irish Bohemian in Italy’, Apollo (Oct. 1972), pp.298-31.

Thomas Davis mentions with approbation the busts contributed to the Cork Arts Society by the Prince Regent in 1818, in his second Essay on National Art (1843), and mentions a second collection then recently acquired for the teaching of art in Dublin.

E Adams, Francis Danby (London 1973) and DNB.

Medallists: see W Frazer, Journal of Royal Soc. of Antiquarians of Ireland, 17 (188), pp.443-66, 608-61; 18 (1887), 189-208, 313-6; 23 (1893), 7-26; also L. Forrer, Biographical Dictionary of Medallists, 8 vols (1904-23); Crookshank, Irish Portraits (1969), pp.95-100; AEJ Went, The Medals of the Royal Dublin Society (Dublin 1973).

A wooden triumphal arch was erected to welcome Wentworth at Limerick in 1637 with cupids, Apollo, ‘ancient genii’, and ‘laureate poets’ (Calendar of State Papers, Ireland 1633-47, p.168; cited by R Loeber.

GN Wright, Historical Guide to Ancient and Modern Dublin (London 1821) [p.269 describes classical elements in decoration of old Theatre royal Dublin.]

7: Travellers, Antiquarians and Archaeologists
IN 1706 Sir John Perceval on a visit to Rome ordered a large collection of antiquities to be shipped to his house in Co Cork … intercepted by a French warship … a second collection shipwrecked … Berkeley wrote to console him: ‘The finest collection is not worth a groat where there is none to admire and set a value on it, and our country seems the place in the world which is least furnished with virtuosi.’ (Rand, Berkeley and Perceval, Cambridge 1914, p.57) [131]

Richard Pococke, b. 1704, ed. England, precentor of Lismore Cathedral in 1725, d. as Bishop of Meath in 1765; voyaged in Levant 1738-40; thorough survey of the coast of the Troad on horseback in 1740, making a good guess at the location of Troy (Hissarlik); Description of the East and Some Other Countries I174-45), praised by Gibbon in Decline and Fall for ‘superior learning and dignity’ though ‘the author often confounds what he has seen with what he has read’ (Chp. 51, n.69); translated into French, German, and Dutch; a collection of coins and two Hellenistic rliefs in TCD; volume of Greek and Latin inscriptions, with Jeremiah Miller (1752). See Pococke, DNB.

Charlemont: educated by Philip Skelton and Edmund Murphy, and called the best ‘general scholar’ in the Irish House of Lords (Public Characters of Dublin 1798 (Dublin 1798). Travelled to Italy with Murphy, Francis Burton, and Richard Dalton, arch. draughtsman trained in Dublin, London, and Rome.

Dalton, possibly Irish, issued Musaeum Graecum et Aegyptiacum (1751) and later Antiwuities and Views of Greece and Egypt (1791), including drawings of Halicarnassian antiquities. Charlemont delivered his paper on Lesbos to the RIA; a diary, A Traveller’s Essays, Containing an Account of Manners rather than Things … Written for My Own Amusement and for that my My Friends Only, ed. WB Stanford and EJ Finopoulis (1984). [136; 143] See Hardy, Life of Charlemont

Robert Wood, b. 1717, Riverstown Castle, Co Meath; prompted by Pococke’s visit, trvelled in 1750 with James Dawkins and John Bouverie, and a draughtsman called Borra (or poss. Dorra in a note by Charlemont); visited Palmyra, Baalbec, and Athens; issued Comparative View of the Antient and Present State of the Troade with an Essay on the Original Genius of Homer (1767). From observations on his travels, he showed that Homer could be identified with the Levant: ‘A review of Homer’s scene of action leads to the consideration of the times, when he lived; and the nearer we aprrpach his country and age, the more we find him accurate in his pictures of nature, and that every species of his extensive Imitation furnishes the greatest treasur of original truth to be found in any poet ancient or modern.’ Praised by Sir John L Myers, Homer and His Critics, ed. Dorothea Gray (London 1958) as approaching modern anthropologists in his appreciation of the comparison between Homer as poet and the customs of the Bedouin arabs. His contention that the location of Troy was not now discoverable since ‘the face of the country has been considerably changes’ and ‘not a stone is left to certify where it stood’ regarded as disappointing by stay-at-home classicists such as Prof. Andrew Dalzell of Edinburgh (see T Spencer, Fair Greece Sad Relic, London 1958, p.202). Lively style and lack of pedantry made his work memorable; translated into French, German, Italian, and Spanish; it helped Schlieman to maintain and prove that Troy lay under the hillock of Hissarlik. [137]

Irish collectors of sculpture and other remains of antiquity include Lord Cloncurry (whom Byron coldly assisted as Moore records in his Life of Byron, p.113). His collection sank in Killiney bay near his house in Blackrock, Co Dublin. The half columns removed by the 2nd Marquis of Sligo in 1811-12 were identified as those from Mycenae and surrendered to the British Museum by his descendents in 1904. [138-39]

Francis Beaufort, inventor of the Beaufort scale, Captain and later Admiral, surveyed the coast of Asia Minor in 1811-12, publishing his Karamania, or a Brief Description of the South coast of Asia Minor and of the Remains of Antiquity with Plans, Views, &c. (1817); visited many important ancient towns. [139]

6th viscount Strangford when British Ambassador in constantinople, 1820-24, acquired works including the Kouros-type statue known as the Stangford Apollo and three Cycladic figures now in the British Museum [139]

His successor Stratford Canning, in 1824, afterwards Lord Stratford de Redclifee, subsidised Newton’s expedition to Halicarnassus and secured the main fragments of the frieze of the Mausoleum for the British Museum. [139]

Robert Fagan, painter, participated in excavations with Sir Corbet Corbert and Thomas Jenkins nr. Laurentum in the 1790s, entailing the discovery of the Venus at the Capitoline presented to the BM by William the IV. He shard in the discovery of a Mithraeum with statuary at Ostia Fagan in 1797. In 1807 he went to Sicily with his family, digginf at Tyndaris in 1808 and Selinus in 1809-10. His MS, The Island of Sicily Reflecting Its Antiquities, is in the British Museum. Fagan’s name sometimes appears as Faghan in Italian archives. [140; 143]

8: Historians and Controversialists
Nicholas French, Bleeding Iphigenia

James Ussher, produced a treatise on history and geography of Asia in 1643; not primarily interested in what he called ‘heathen story’; only minor works in his large corpus of mainly ecclesiastical history. [144] Stanford’s notes refer exclusively to R Buick Knox, James Ussher, Archb. of Armagh (Cardiff 1967).

William Hill, fellow of Merton, and headmaster of St. Patrick’s Cathedral School, Dublin, published his The Guide (Periegesis) of Dionysius the geographer in 1658. [144]

Henry Dodwell, b. Dublin 1641; ed. TCD, Fellow in 1662; resigned in 1666 as being unwilling to take divine orders; became Cambden Professor of History at Oxford from 1688; deprived of chair as refusing oath of allegiance to William and Mary; besides ecclesiastical writings, De Veteris Cyclis (1701 and 1702), and Account of the Lesser Geographers, 3 vols. (1698-1712); also involved in acrimonious dispute with between Boyle and Bentley about the letters of Phalaris. An Invitationn to Gentlemen to Acquaint Themselves with Ancient Hisotry (1694) was influenctial, arguing that—as opposed to ancient literature—ancient history was ‘much more fitted for the use of an active than a studious life, and therefore much more useful for Gentlemen than Scholars’. Wrote with ‘a graceful urbanity that must have pleased his readers very persuasively’, says Stanford, rather oddly. [145-45] …

Perhaps as a result of reading Dodwell, Swift … produced an ambitious essay on an aspect of classical history—his Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome (1701), quoting ancient historians such as Herodotus, Xenophon, Polybius, Plutarch, Caesar, Livy, and others.’ May have used a Latin translation, but Swift won a bene in Greek at TCD; attempted over-ambitiously to have himself appointed Historiographer Royal in 1714. … ~Although presenting historical events, he altered facts to suit his argument, intending intended to show contemporary politicians under the form of a powerful analogy the danger of civil faction and the desirability of maintaining a balance power between the Three Estates. … Much of it was allegorical: Miltiades (Edward Russell, 1st Lord of the Admiralty); Aristids (Lord Somers, Swift’s early friend); Pericles (Charles Montague); Phocion (William Bentinck); Tarquinius Priscus (Charles I); Polyperphon (perhaps John Churchill), and so on for many others. Cromwell, as Servius Tullius (who ‘wholly applied himself to gratify the Commons’) is portrayed in defiance of historical comments in Dionysius. [146-47]. NOTE, further remarks at 206, infra.

Stanford characterises this and the following text as examples of ‘parallel history’: Macariae Excidium, or the Destruction of Cyprus, Containing the Last Warr and Conquest of that Kingdom. Written Originally in Syriac by Philotas Philocypres. Translated into Latin by Gratianus Ragallus [sic] P.R., and now made English by Charles O’Kelly. Actually the English version was written first and then translated into Latin by an Irish priest named John O’Reilly. Correspondences are James II (Amasis), William III (Theodore), the Pope (‘Delphic High Priest’), Louis XIV (Antiochus), England (Cilicia), France (Syria), etc. Macaria, an ancient name of Cyprus meaning blessed probably chosen because of Avienus’ description of Ireland as ‘The Holy Island’ (insula sacra) while the word Excidium links it with Gaelic writings entitled Togail (Destruction). A rather tedious work at best—writes Stanford—it ends with a series of lamentations on the fate of ‘the most warlick of Nations’. The events described never happened in Cyprus, and could not have happened under such variegated names. [147]

~Berkeley’s Alciphron takes the form of a dialogue about the relative merits of ancient and modern polities. The defender of the modern world finally concedes something to the ancient: ‘If I were to declare my opinion, what gave the chief advantage to Greeks and Romans and other nations which have made the greatest figure in the world, I should be apt to think it was a peculiar reverence for their respective laws and institutions, which inspired them with steadiness and courage, and that hearty generous love of their country, by which [i.e., the term country] they did not merely understand a certain language or tribe of men, much less a particular spot of earth, but includd a certain system of manners, customs, notions, rites, and laws civil and religious.

John Gast, Archdeacon of Glendalough, produced a history of Greece for schoolboys, Rudiments of Greek History (1753), a dialogue punctuated with moralism and schoolboy exclamations. He followed this with History of Greece from the Accession of Alexander of Macedon to its Final Subjection to the Roman Power (1782), also printed in Basle and Leipzig. His Rudiments was rewritten by John Stock in 1793 and used widely until supplanted by Goldsmith’s history. [149]

Goldsmith received instruction in Classics under Leland at TCD, 1745-50, and afterward made use of Leland’s Philip in his Grecian History. … Hi own Roman History from the Foundation of the City of Rome to the Destruction of the Roman Empire, 2 vols (1769), he describes as ‘a compilation for schools’. Much criticised, it ran to 14 editions up to 1800, as well as many translations. His Grecian History from the Earliest Date to the Death of Alexander (1744) was completed at his death by another author who condensed the ensuing sixteen hundred years down to the Fall of Constantinople in a chapter of ten pages. The work went into 20 editions in fifty years [~150]

NOTE: It was in connection with his praise of Goldsmith as a historian to Boswell that Johnson cited the ‘old tutor’s’ advice: ‘Read your composition, and whenever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.’ Of Goldsmith, he said: ‘it is the excllence of a writer to put into his book as much as his book will hold. Goldsmith has done this in his history … Goldsmith tell you shortly all you want to know … he has the art of compiling, and of saying everything he has to say in a pleasing manner.’ Johnson opens the dialogue with this remark: ‘What Goldsmith comically says of himself is very true—he always gets the better when he argues alone; meaning, that he is master of a subject in his study, and can write well upon it; but when he comes into company, grows confused, and unable to talk … as a comic writer, or as an historian, he stand in the first class.’ (Life of Johnson, chp. xxvii.) [150-51]

The State of Society in the Age of Homer (1827), by William Bruce, a Dublin-born Presbyterian minister and a leading member of the Belfast Literary Society who had previously published an essay on the advantages of a classical education. Bruce considers that previous historians have dealt with ‘civil and military affairs … without … tracing the progress of manners and civilization from one period to another, and undertakes to introduce the reader ‘to the interior of a family that existed three thousand years before we were born.’ He ends with a plea for tolerance based on the understanding that each country and each age find the ‘usages’ of another shocking or revolting. Stanford considers that the book helped turn scholars’ minds to the sociological aspects of ancient history. [151-52]

Lady Morgan’s Woman and Her Master (1840) contains a chapter on the status of women in ancient Greece and Italy hardly more than partisan journalism. Dublin University Magazine—unfairly, thinks Stanford—described it as ‘a work without one claim to notice except the antiquity of its author.’ [12]

Mahaffy; last clergyman to hold professorship of Classics; strongly influenced by Grote, he did not treat Greeks and Romans as Christians manqué; with considerable courage and frankness presented their good and bad qualities in their true colours and judged thm in terms of their own standards; on the other hand, he insisted that ancient history should provide ‘guiding posts for the perplexities of modern life’. His Twelve Lectures on Primitive Civilizations (1869) and Prolegomena to Ancient History (1871) were concerned with early periods. His Social Life in Greece from Homer to Menander (1874) and History of Classical Greek Literature, 4 vols (1880) deal with better known periods; he defened the historicity of Herodotus against Jowett; purer historians censurd digressions and modern parallels. His Social Life had wide impact, presenting Greeks as ‘men with passions like ourselves’, being prone to lying and dishonesty, but also to a ‘strange and to us revolting perversion, the Asiatic custom of attachments among men’, not before discussed in any English publication; later omitted. His candid and popular Rambles and Studies in Greece (1876) became a favourite travel book. His Greek Life and Thought from the Death of Alexander to the Roman Conquest (1887) suited him as being the study of a period in which democracy gave way to monarchy and a ‘stately ceremonial put a tight bridle on the rudeness of free speech, and taught men the importance of studied politeness’; zesty and insightful. He felt himself a pioneer in the territory, enjoying ‘the intene interest of penetrating a country either unexplored or imperfectly described by former travellers’. A series of studies of post-classical times followed: the Greek World Under Roman Sway (1890); The Empire of the Ptolemies (1895); A History of Egypt under the Ptolemaic Dynasty (1899); The Progress of Hellenism in Alexander’s empire (1905); and The Silver Age of the Greek World (1906). [153-54] Stanford’s note indicates that the remarks in this section are taken from his life of Mahaffy, with RB McDowell (1971).

JB Bury, an infant prodigy; b. Foyle College, Derry, and TCD; edited Hyppolytus of Euripides with Mahaffy at 21 in 1881; Fellow in 1885; History of the Later Roman Empire from Arcadius to Irene (1889); editions of Pindar’s Nimean and Isthmian odes in 1890 and 1892, severely criticised for over-insistence on a special stylistic feature; earlier period treated in his History of Greece (1900), The Ancient Greek Historians (1909), and his chapters of the Cambridge Ancient History, which he edited. Resigned his double tenure of chairs of Greek and Modern History in Dublin to take Regius Professorship of Modern History at Cambridge; in his inaugural lecture, he proposed that ‘history is a science, no less and no more’, challenging the moral and literary approaches. ‘To clothe the story in a literary dress is no more the part of a historian than it is the part of an astronomer to present in an artistic shape the story of the stars.’ He advocated for historians ‘a systematic and minute method of analysing their source’ and ‘microscopic criticism’ [155]. His own Life of St Patrick has a preface containing a partial retraction; ‘In vindicating the claims of history to be regarded as a science or Wissenschaft, I never meant to suggest a proposition so indefensible as that the presentation of historical research is not an art, requiring the tact and skill in selection and arrangement which belong to the literary faculty.’ In a Quarterly Review article of 1900 he put the Greeks above the Romans: ‘The Romans of the Empire originated nothing. It is not too much to say that, form Augustus to Augustulus, poverty of ideas, incapacity for hard thinking and excessive deference to authority, characterizes the Roman world … ‘ Stanford considers that his diction about history as science has to be taken in a Pickwickian sense. Nevertheless his inaugural address was also epochal for historians. [~154-57]

Stanford’s bibliographical notes: NH Baynes, Bibliography of the Works of JB Bury (Cambridge 1929), with biographical introduction; PBAcad. xiii (368-78; H Temperley, Selected Essays of JB Bury (Cambridge 1930); JP Whitney, Cambridge Historical Journal 2 (1927), 1991-7; also DNB. And see Arnold Toynee, Experiences (London 1969), 109-10 on influence of and disagreement with Bury’s view of history as science.

Thomas Keightley rivalled Goldsmith for a while with his popular histories of ancient Greece (1835) and the Roman Empire (1840); Mythology of Greece and Rome (1831) reached four eds.; he also edited parts of Virgil, Horace, and Sallust, and produced a post-haste history of the Greek war of independence of 1830. [157]

E[dward Berwick’s pioneer English translation of Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana (1809); CR Elrington’s ed. of Plutarch’s Lycurgus and his Numa (1815); R Traill’s translation of Josephus’ Jewish War, 2 vols (1892, 1896); JG O’Neill’s Ancient Corinth (1930); WH Porter’s ed. of Plutarch’s Aratus (1937) and Dion (1952); TA Sinclair’s History of Classical Greek Literature (1931) and History of Greek Political Thought (1962).

Sir William Ridgeway, ed. TCD, Fellow of Caius College Cambridge, profesor of Greek in Cork, 1883-92; Disney Professor of Archaeology in Cambridge, 1892; The Origins of Metallic Currency and Weight-Standards (1892) and Origin and Influence of the Thoroughbred Horse(1905). In The Early Age of Greece (1901), Ridgeway introduced the controversial theory that Homeric Achaeans were Celts who invaded Greece about two generations before the Trojan War and learned Greek from the Aegean peoples, and that the civilisation described by Homer belonged to the Early Iron Age. Discouraged by criticism, especially bearing on his insubstantial definition of Celts for purposes of the theory, he did not publish the second volume, which finally appeared in the form of separate essays edited by AJB Wace in 1926.

Sir Samuel Dill, son of Presbyterian minister in Hillsborough, Co Down; ed. Queen’s College, Belfast in 1864, went to Oxford and became Fellow of Corpus Christi; Professor of Greek in Belfast in 1890; Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire (1898, 2nd ed 1899); Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius (1904, 2nd ed. 1905, 3 rep.); and Roman Society in Gaul in the Merovingian Age, ed. and issued by CB Armstrong in 1926. Defined his subject as ‘the inner life and thoughts of the last three generations of the empire of the West’; ‘the inner life of the time’, not ‘external history and the machinery of government. Especially drawn to Marcus Aurelius, he believed that the second century overcame the abominations of the first ‘dignified and elevated by a great reform of conduct … to rise to a higher spiritual life and to win the succour of unseen Powers’. 159-60]

Stanford summarises that Ridgeway is rarely read, Mahaffy occasionally, Dill more frequently, and Bury constantly [161]

WB B[edell] Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (IAP 1976; this ed. 1984), 261pp, index. [COPY PT. III] [COPIED TO RX JAN 1993]

9: Literary Scholars and Classical Humorists
Richard Stanihurst, b. Dublin, 1547; ed. Kilkenny Sch. and New College, Oxford; Latin commentaries on Porphyry’s Introduction, publ. 1570; emigrated to continent after his wife’s death in 1579, and d. there, 1618. Published his trans. of Virgil’s Aeneid, bks. 1-4 (Leyden 1582), in English hexameters, the analysis of prosody and metre in the prefaces being ‘sensible and acute’ (Stanford), and several times reprinted; inc. miscellaneous translations and verses. Stanford gives lines from Aen. 1, 132-37, 2, 52-56. The latter, when Laocoon strikes the Wooden Horse, reads: ‘Then the iade; hit, shivered, thee vauts haulf shrillye rebounded/With clush clash buzing, with dromming clattered humming.’ Stanford remarks: ‘absurdly contorted as much of [his] style is—thomas Nash parodied it and called it ‘clownerie’—the scholarship behind it is serious and sophisticated. His fondness for strong alliteration and assonance is very reminiscent of poetry in Irish (but there is no evidence that Stanihurst was familiar with the native Irish literature). [162-63]

Stanihurst, bibl: DNB; Seymour, chp. 10; DH Madden, Some Passages in the early History of Classical Learning in Ireland (Dublin 1908), 17ff; his translation of Virgil in E Arber, ed., The English Scholar’s Library of Old and Modern Works, 10 vols (1880); also RG Austin, Some Translations of Virgil (Liverpool 1956), pp.8-10. Also Elizabeth Critical Essay (1904); GC Smith, The First English Translations of the Classics (New Haven 1927), 132, 145 [178]

gen. bibl: Fr Benignus Millett, ‘Irish Literature in Latin, 1550-1700’, vol. 3, Chp. 23, New History of Ireland; JJ Silke, ‘Irish Studies and the Renaissance’, Studies in the Renaissance, 20 (1972), pp.169-206.

Musarum Lachrymae, 48 quarto pages of elegies on death of Countess of Cork; see M Pollard, Hermathena, cix (1969), 51-3; other Latin verses addressed to the Butler family, see Ormonde Papers, Historical Manuscript Commission 14 App. vol. xii (London 1895), 106-118. [179]

TCD Latin verse published by Caesar Williamson (1658); John Jones (1661, 1664, and 1665); Francis Synge (1661); Dudley Loftus (1663). An eighteenth century curiosity is Technthyrambeia (1730), a long mock-epic on a porter in TCD by William Dunkin, a fluent versifier in many languages, who was headmaster of Portora, 1746-67.

Staniford notes—following DNB—that the Nicholas Whyte, author of a translation of Valerius Flaccus’s Argonautica (Company of Stationers 1556/7), may be Nicholas White, prominent in Irish politics at that date. [178-79]

Sir William Temple, b. London of Irish parents, afterwards spent some time in Ireland; strongly supported ancients in his essay Of Ancient and Modern Learning (1690), asserting the so-called 6th c. Letters of Phalaris to be genuine; William Wotton, Cambridge replied for the moderns, condemning the Phalaris letters as forgeries in Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694); [163] Charles Boyle, 4th Earl of Orrery published an edition (1695) supporting their authenticity, making slighting remarks about Richard Bentley, who replied trenchantly, occasioning an insolent reply from Boyle, assisted by member of Christ Church, Oxford, remarking Bentley’s ‘publick affront’; this led to Bentley’s magisterial Dissertation on the Letters of Phalaris (1699) which totally overwhelmed Boyle in terms of scholarship; the Irish historian Henry Dodwell supported Bentley in a Discourse Concerning the Time of Phalaris (1704), pleading for less bad temper. [164]

Swift’s Battle of the Books takes the side of Temple and the ancients, without rashly arguing for the authenticity of Phalaris. A mock epic based on Homer and Virgil, it characterises William III as Augustus or Aeneas, and the French as the champions of the moderns, relating the parable of the spider and the bee, respectively the ancients and the moderns—the one hoarding dirt and poison, the other honey and wax, productive of sweetness and light.

bibl: RF Jones, ‘The Background to the Battle of the Books’, Washington University Studies: Humanistic Series vii, 2 (1920), 99-162; AC Gutkelch, The Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift (London 1908).

John Toland joined the battle of the books on the side of the classicists, with Letters on Roman Education, in which he wrote: ‘Nor can I imagine that any men will so far oppose matter of fact, or expose their own judgement, as to deny that all perfections of the Moderns beyond the Schoolmen have been revealed to them by the Ghosts of the Ancients, that is, by following their rules, reading their works, imitating their method and copying their stile, which last holds true in prose and verse.’ [Stanford, 164-65]

Among the earliet in translators of the classics in the 17th c. were Sir John Denham’, Aeneid 2 (1656) and his rendering of Sarpedon’s speech in Iliad 12, praised by Pope in his note on Il., 12.2., Also The Wish, Being the Tenth Satyr of Juvenal Paraphrastically Rendered into Pindarick Verse by a Person, sometimes Fellow of Trin. Col. Dublin (1675), author unknown.

Nahum Tate, hymns and psalms, also shared in versions of Ovid’s Art of Love and Remedy of Love, besides supplementing the latter with a trans. of Fracastoro’s Latin poem on venereal disease, Syphilis, sive Morbus Gallicus (1686). His collaborator in a standard metrical trans. of the Psalms, Nicholas Brady, DD, grad. TCD, produced Proposals for a Translation of Virgil’s Aeneids in Blank Verse in 1713, and followed it with an undistinguished verson of the whole Aeneid (1729).

Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon, polished version of Ars Poetica (1680) in unrhymed iambic pentameters, with useful notes, Latin and English versions on facing pages; his Essa on Translated Verse (1684) widely praised, and rather unnecessarily translated into Latin by Lawrence Eusdem; Pope praised Dillon in his Essay on Criticism: ‘To him the Wit of Greece and Rome were known/And Ev’ry Author’s merit, but his own.’ [165] There are autograph corrections by Dillon in the TCD Library. Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets includes an account of Dillon. [notes, 179]

Thomas Parnell, archdeacon and friend of Pope, helped the latter with preliminary research for his Iliad, and wrote the introductory essay ‘On the Life and Writings and Learning of Homer for Pope’s Iliad, producing a translation of his own for the pseudo-Homeric Battle of Frogs and Mice [165]. On Pope’s debt to Parnell, see M. Mack, et al. eds., The Poems of Alexander Pope (London 1667), vii-x; also HJ Zimmermann, Zur Alexander Popes Noten zu Homer (Heidelberg 1966).

Oliver Goldsmith: A Friedman, ed., Works (Oxford 1966); his translations from Latin, in vol. iv, 363. [notes, 179]

Translations by Arthur Murphy, Tacitus, 4 vols (1793); J Sterling, Musaeus (1718); T Sheridan, Philoctetes (1725), T Dawson, Demosthenes (1732). [179]

Six unpublished autography vols. of translations of the Iliad, and Odyssey (1744), both by Edward Maurice, Bishop of Ossory, in TCD Librar.

Philip Francis’ Horace (1742); John Boyle’s Letters of Pliny (1751) [son of Charles, 4th Earl]; Thomas Leland’s speeches of Demosthenes and Aeschines (1756-1760), reprinted ten times in the following 95 years; Thomas Moore, Anacreon (1800). [165]

Constantia Grierson, the first to produce a full edition of a major classic in Ireland; b. Phillips, 1705 of poor parents in Co. Kilkenny, learned greek, Latin and Hebrew; m. George Grierson, King’s Printer; won favour of Lord Carteret by including an elegant Latin dedication and Greek epigram of her own to his son in Grierson’s text of Terence (1727); supervised Grierson’s printing of a 3 vol. ed. of Tacitus by Theodor Rycke, a Dutch scholar; the ed. being highly praised; her contribution to the scholarship nugatory. [166

Grierson published the edition of Columella’s treatise on agriculture by Bishop Tenison, of Ossory, 1732.

Usher Gahagan, edited Catullus, Horace, Juvenal, Persius, and Virgil, all for ‘Brindley’s Classics’ and also a Latin treatise on Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1747), but was hanged for clipping coins. [166]

Leland’s edition of Demonsthenes’ Philippics and Olynthiacs (1754), with John Stokes, internationally well received. [166] On eighteen-century interest in Demosthenes, see U Schindel, Demosthenes im 18. Jahrundert (Munich 1963). [179]

His nephew John Walker edited 7 vols. edition of Livy (1797-1813); Tyrrell and Purser, Correspondence of Cicero (1879-1901); and Henry’s studies in the Aeneid are among the few full scale projects of Irish classical scholars. [166]

Robert Wood, Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer (1769), though privately circulated in draft form in 1767. He was Under-secretary of State in 1756, restricting his scope for classics. Woods broke ground by considering Homer not in terms of literature and language so much as in the context of the lands he had visited, interpreting it as oral poetry in the manner confirmed by Milman Parry [‘formulaic’], after listening the Eastern reciters; he questioned whether Homer was more literate than many contemporary ballad-makers in Greek lands; he also argued that Odyssey was superior to Iliad. His Essay won high praise on the continent, especially from Goethe and the best Homerist of his time, Heyne. Friedrick August Wolf studied it before his epochmaking Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795). [167] Complete edition of his Essay, with additions and corrections, ed. 1775,four years after his death, by Jacob Bryant; bibl. Sir John L Myres [sic] Homer and his Critics, ed. Dorothea Gray (Lon 1958); A Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse (Oxford 1971), xiii-xiv) [‘Wood’s insight was in many ways the most valid conception until modern times of what sort of poet Homer was and of how the Iliad and Odyssey came into being.’

WJM Starkie’s eds. of Aristophanes’ Acharnians, Wasp, and Clouds, were standard works, though Shakespeareanised. [168]

Michael Tierney, ed. Euripides’ Hecuba (1946).

JF D’Alton, later Cardinal Archbishop of Armagh, produced Horace and His Age (1917), and Roman Literary Theory and Criticism (1931) at Maynooth [169]

William Preston ‘grabbled manfully with the Hellenistic complexities of Apollonius Rhodius in his Argonautica (1811) [170]

Edward Berwick produced the first complete version of Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana (1809). [170]

..eccentric efforts of an Irishman of brilliant but undisciplined talnts, the Homeric Ballds (1838) by William Maginn, influential in their day. b. Cork, 1794, he entered TCD in 1811 and took a doctorate in 1819; an undergraduate poem called Aeneas the Eunuch has not survived; went to London as a result of the good reception of his contributions to Blackwood’s; portrayed as Captain Shandon in Pendennis, calling him ‘one of the wittiest, most amiable, and the most incorrigible of Irishmen’. Quarrelled with Blackwood’s and began to publish his Homeric Ballads in Fraser’s Magazine in 1838; rendered the Homeric poems in popular metres instead of iambic pentameters, in keeping with the current theory of their popular origin, criticised as a perversion by some, but regarded by Gladstone as ‘admirably turned Homeric tone’, and Arnold rated them above Macauley’s Lays of Ancient Rome, calling them ‘genuine poems in their own way’. Stanford cites two ‘egregious examples’ [170-71], and asserts that the best are hardly better than mediocre. Maginn added notes and an introduction which show considerable acumen; other experiments include translations of dialogues by Lucian into blank-verse comedies; he projected eds. of Homer and the Greek dramatists; after imprisonment for debt, he died in1842 and lay in an unmarked grave until 1926, when subscribers had a Celtic cross erected. Lockhart’s epitaph ends, ‘Many worse, few better, than bright broken Maginn.’ [171]

SH Butcher’s trans. of Odyssey, with Andrew Lang, is original in being done in prose, though the Wardour St. diction ultimately brought it to the ridicule of parody in Ulysses. [171]

Louis MacNeice, Agamemnon (1936); see WB Stanford, in T Brown and A Reed, Time Was Away: The World of Louis MacNeice (Dublin 1974), 63-6.

Forrest Reid, Poems from the Greek anthology (1943); Lord Dunsany, Horace (1947), and Stephen MacKenna, The Enneads of Plotinus (1930).

James Henry, b. 1888, a practicing physician, devoted himself to Virgilian studies on receiving a large legacy in 1845. A stilted translation of 2 books of the Aeneid (1851); articles and books, including Notes of a Twelve Years Voyage of Discovery in the First six Books of the Eneis (1853); then a massive volume of his Aeneidea, or Remarks Critical, Exegetical and Aesthetical on the Aeneis (1873). Subsequent vols. edited by JF Davies, Arthur Palmer and LC Purser, containing over 2,000pp., 1876; recently reprinted in Holland.

Henry James: obituary notice by JP Mahaffy, in The Academy, 12 Aug. 1876, p.162-63; also RD Williams, James Henry’s Aeneidea, Hermathena cxvi (1973), 27-43; JS Starkey, ‘James Henry and “the Aeneidea”, Hermathena lxiv (1944), p.19-31, which contains a bibliography of his publications.

Eruigena, asked by Charles the Bald with whom he was sitting at dinner, ‘Quid distat inter sottum et Scottum?’, answered courageously, ‘Tabulum tantum’ [‘the table’]. [174]

Jonathan Swift, incorrigible punster, a Modest Defence of Punning (1716). On Swift’s humour, see ‘Swift’s Games with Language’, in The John Rylands Library Bulletin 36 (1953-54), p.416; also H Williams, The Poems of Jonathan Swift (Oxford 1937), iii, 988-89, on his rhyming mispronunciation of Greek names, e.g., ‘Aristophanes’ with ‘too profane he is’. [181]

Thomas Sheridan … made a vigorous attack on the cheaper kinds of pun in a book with the unashamedly punning title, Ars Pun-ica sive Flos Linguarum, or the Flowers of Languages, by ‘Tom Pun-sibi’ (1719). Answered by The Folly of Puns by ‘Jack Serious’ (1719), and in a bitterly hostile anon. broadsheet, Tom-Pun-Sibi Metamorphosed (1709). [174]

Francis Mahony (‘Father Prout’), b. Cork, 1804; ed. by Jesuits in France, where he learned fluent Latin, French, and Italian and gained a good knowledge of Greek; showed unusual aptitude in composing verses in hexameters, elegiacs, sapphics, and alcaics; refused admission to the Order; returned to Ireland to teach in Clongowes; ord. as a secular priest at Lucca, officiated in France, Italy and England; contributed to journals, esp. Fraser’s under editorship of his friend Maginn. His Songs of Horace, and Days of Erasmus, considered seriously as works of scholarship; other works ‘a rare combination of Teian lyre with Irish bagpipe; of the Ionian dialect blending harmoniously with the Cork brogue; and Irish potato seasoned with Attic salt’ (Oliver Yorke, in Kent, xix). … His most spectacular tour de force was his translation of Milliken’s Groves of Blarney into Greek, Latin, Norman-French, and Irish verse. A favorite device of his was to ‘discover’ fragments of classical verse, which were in fact his own translations of well-known contemporary verses [175]; also macaronic and ‘bog Latin’.

John O’Keeffe: the chief comic figure in The Agreeable Surprise (1792) is an Irish butler called Lingo, described as an incorrigible pedant-ignoramus: ‘It seems he’s been a schoolmaster here in the country, taught al the bumkin fry what he calls Latin; and the damn’d dog patches his own bad English with his bits of bad Latin and jumbles the Gods, Godesses, heroes celestial and infernal together ..’ ‘Scio scribendo … Legere … Tacitorum Latinum … Quid opus mihi usumque scienta? What need have I of so much knowledge?’ [176]

RY Tyrrell, ed. Kottabos [fnd. 1869]. (Kottabos was a sicilian game played by ancient Greeks at banquets and symposia. Contribs. incl. Dowden, AP Graves, Edward Hincks, JK Ingram, JP Mahaffy, Oscar Wilde, Standish O’grady, Arthur Palmer, TW Rolleston, RY Tyrrell and others. Kottabos is described by Stanford in Hermathena, cxv (1975), p.9-10. Tyrrell later edited a collection entitled Echoes from Kottabos (London 1906), adding a few pieces not previously published.

RJ Hayes, Sources for the History of Irish civilisation. Articles in Irish Periodicals, vols. vi and vii (Boston 1970). [186]

An etching by Maclise shows Mahoney with Maginn and other contributors to Fraser’s including Coleridge, Thackeray, Lockhart, and Southey, in a convivial scene. [175]

10: Science and Philosophy
The term ‘scientia’ used in the sense of rhetoric in St. Patrick’s repudiation of the learning of rhetoricians. [182]

Cenn Faelad wrote a grammar of Irish based on classical methods, c.618; see Calder, Auraicept na nEges (Edinburgh 1917), ed.

Malsachan’s Ars Grammatica (c.900).

Glossary of Cormac shows that comparative linguistics was still studied in Ireland after the Norse invasions. [183]

Adamnán’s On the Holy Places (De Locis Sanctis), gives information given directly to him by a Frankish bishop Arculf, who had visited Jerusalem about 680, and shows sound historical method and good Latin. Arculf’s account is supplemented with facts drawn from Jermome and other Christian writers, in turn drawing on classical sources; the book widely copied in medieval times, and cited as an authority as late as the 15th c. [183-84]

Dicuil, author of On the Dimensions of the Earth (De Mensura Orbis Terra), written in 825; a survey of Europe, Asia, and Africa, still in terms of the Roman empire, it mainly compiles classical and post-classical authors such as the elder Pliny, Solinus, Isidore of Seville, Aethicus Ister, and a work commissioned by Theodosius II in 435 incorporating earlier material. Dicuil’s use of Pliny’s figures for latitude and longitude shows a deficiency in Irish education at the period. Also produced a treatise on astronom, with grammatical and metrical digressions, in 816; spoke of ‘the rule of the Greeks and Latins which my people in Ireland always observe’ in connection with the dating of Easter in the Celtic church [184]; also includes speculation on topics such as the distance between the planets and the possibility of a southern polar star. [185]

An abbot of Bangor cad Mo-Sinu Moccu-Min or Sinlán, d.610, was ‘the first of the Irish who learned by rote the computus from certain learned Greek’, according to a note in an 8th c. gospel at Wurzburg. [185]

A scribal note in an Irish MS of 1342: ‘May the merciful God have mercy on us all. I have collected practical notes from several works, for the honour of God, for the benefit of the Irish people, for the instruction of any pupil and for the love of my friends and of my kindred. I have translated from Latin into Gaelic, from the authority of Galen in the last book of his Practical Pantheon and from Hippocrates’ Book of Prognostics.’ [186] Quoted by M Dunley in Doolin & Fitzgerald, eds., (1954), pp.19-20

Dian Cecht, son of Midach (presumably a hibernicisation of medicus) cited in legends about the Tuatha de Danaan as supply King Nuada with a silver hand in place of the one lost in battle. [186]

Charm: ‘Gaspar fert aurum, thus Melchior, Balthasar aurum./Haec tri qui secum portabit nomina regum/Solvitur a morbo Christi pietate caduco.’ [186]

Dermot O’Meara, Pathologia Haereditaria Generalis (1619), the earliest schientific book printed in Ireland, based on Galen and Hippocrates.

Novissima Idea de Febribus, by Jacobus Sylvius [James Wood] (Dublin 1686) [188]

The first book to be printed at the Dublin University Press [TCD] was Hippocrates’ Prognostics (I and III), with a Latin translation and commentary by Henry Cope, Physician to the King in Dublin in 1738.

Dictionaries: English-Latin and Latin-English by Elisha Coles, headmaster of Galway Grammar in 1678; Irish-Latin by Richard Plunkett; Spanish-Latin by Balthazar Fitzhenry.

Roger Boyle, Lord Baron Broghill, 1st Earl of Ossor, a professional Anglo-Irish soldier under Charles I, Cromwell, and Charles II, dramatist, poet of sorts, and elder brother of Robert Boyle, produced a Treatise on the Art of War (1677), involving an ostensibly scientific approach but extensive material from Greek and Roman history. He affirmed: ‘the Ultimate and Onely Legitimate end of war is, or at least ought to be, among Christians, th Obtaining of a Good and Lasting Peace.’ [188]

Edward Tenison, ed. Columella’s De Re Rustica (Dublin:Grierson 1732), with no name on the title page. See DNB. [188]

Edward Barry, b. Cork, Regius Professor of Physic in Dublin University [TCD in 1754, published in Observations, Historical, Critical and Medical, on the Wines of the Ancients and the Analogy between them and Modern Wines (1775), the first scientific study of the subject in English, departing from comparisons with opium, tea, and tobacco [drugs], he describes manufacture in Greece and Italy, with apt quotations from the classical authors (and a correction of an interpretation of Horace in Bentley), ending with a chapter on ‘convivial entertainments’ of the Greeks and Romans. He recommends that some of the ‘several gentlemen of fortune, who make improvement in agriculture their favourite stud and practice’, especially those ‘in the mosst southern parts of the county of Corke’, should plant vineyards and make wine, as giving ‘rational and elegant amusement.’ [189]

George Berkeley: Siris (1744), ingeniously compares tar-water with the resinated wines of Greece. [189]

William Molyneux, scientist, Dioptrica Nova, &c (London 1692), in the introduction condemns ‘the commentators on Aristotle’ for rendering ‘Physics an heap of froathy Disputes’ though Aristotle was ‘certainly himself a most diligent and profound investigator of Nature’. He also explains that he has written in English because he is ‘sure that there are many ingenious Heads, great Geomaters and masters in Mathematics, who ar not so well skill’d in Latin.’ [190]

Eriugena, known as Johannes Scottus. Th Division of Nature (De Divisione Naturae, composed 862-66; neo-Platonist and Christian; based in his study of Chalcidius’ Latin translation and commentary on Plato’s Timaeus and his own translations of ‘Dionysius the Aropagite’ and Maximus Confessor, as well as St. Augustine. De Divisione takes the form of a dialogue between teacher and student; classifies phenomena in four categories: that which creates but is not created; that which is created and creates; that which is created and does not create; that which does not create and is not created.’ Stanford comments on its fluent Latin style, after Bieler. Quot: ‘Sicut ergo lapis ille qui dicitur magnetes, quamuis naturalli sua uirtute ferrum sibimet propinquans d e attrahit nullo modo ut hoc faciat se ipsum mouet aut a ferro aliquid patitur quod ad se attrahit: it rerum omnium causa omnia quae ex se sunt ad se ipsam reducit sin ullo sui motu, sed sola suae pulchritudinis uirtute. [‘.. so the Cause of all things leads back to itself all things that derive from it without any motion of its own but sole by the power of its beauty.’] [192-3]

Besides his obvious veneration for classical Greek thinkers, he apparently admired contemporary scholarship of 9th c. Constantinople; an epigram to the effect that the that city is the new Constantinople has been attributed to him: ‘Constantinopolis florens nova Roma vocatur./Moribus et muris Roma vetusta cadis.’ According to William of Malmesbury, he actually went to Athens. (William, De Gestis Pontificum Anglorum, 5, p.240; cf. CH Slover, ‘William of Malmesbury and the Irish’, in Speculum 2 (1927), 268-83. His admirers include Sylvester II. Archb. Ussher mentions him in Veterum Epistolarum Hibernicarum Sylloge (1632), and probably presented two MSS of writings by him to the Library of TCD; Sir James Ware included him in his account of the writers of Ireland. In the late 19th c., William Larminie made a partial translation of the De Divisione Naturae, still unpublished [in 1984]. [Stanford, 193-94]. Bibl., The Mind of Eriugena, ed. JJ O’Meara and L Bieler (Dublin 1973), papers of the Dublin colloqium of 1970. [notes, 200]

Gerard and Arnold de Boot [latinized as Bootius], Philosophia Naturalis Reformata id est Philosophiae Aristotelicae Accurata Examinato ac Solida Confutatio et Novae Introductio (A Reformed Natural Philosophy, i.e., And Accurate Examination and Substantial Refutation of Aristotelian Philosophy and an Introduction to a New One.] (Dublin 1641), an anti-Catholic propaganda work by two brothers and physicians from the Protestant University at Leyden who arrived in Ireland in 1635. [194]

William O’Kelly [of Aughrim], published an erudite semi-philosophical treatise in Prague, entitled Philosophia Aulica juxta Veterum ac Recentiorum Philosophorum Placita [Court Philosopy &c.], for the use of ‘the studious nobility who either dispised the common philosophy or else could not bear the tediousness of the schools, or at any rate had an appetite for curious things.’ [‘vulgarem … rerum curiosum avidae.’] [194]

Berkeley: b. Co. Kilkenny 1685; ed Kilkenny Grammar School; entered TCD at 15 in 1700; Fellow in 1707, Senior Lect. in Greek, and resigned Fellowship in 1724. His earliest studies were in mathematics; in Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists (1713) he adopted Socratic dialogue-form, but his arguments are not Platonic and his allusions rarely classical. In Alciphron (1732), however, he quotes neo-Platonists Porphyry and Iamblichus, as well as Hesiod, Homer, Plutarch, Empedocles and others. Siris (1744) dealing with—besides tar-water—questions of Greek philosophy such as the nature of fire, ‘the ether’, the soul, and God, and citing a wide array of Greek philosophers, incl. Pythagoreans, Herclitus, Anaximenes, Empedocles, Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Plutarch, Iamblichus, and Dionysius the Areopagite, as well as Plotinus in his opening paragraph. Renaissance Platonists such as Ficino and Pico della Mirandola feature later. Stanford remarks: ‘it seems that now in his conception of reality he held less firmly to the sensory realm and was reaching out towards the Platonic and neo-Platonic view. [195] Berkeley cites Anaxagoras, Aristotle, and Plato in his scientific work, De Motu (1721).

Francis Hutcheson, son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers and himself a minister; ed. locally in Co. Down, and in Glasgow Univ.; accepted invitation to open a Presbyterian academy in Dublin. Published first, An Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725; and 5 eds.); trans. in French and German; influenced Burke—who in contrast took up a position against traditional aesthetics; partly a defence of Lord Shaftesbury’s Hellenic views on aesthetics and morality and partly a refutation of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, it was characterised by the author’s respect for beauty and its enlightened hedonism, in reaction to severe puritanism. Elected Prof. of Moral Theology at Glasgow in 1729, and there co-operated with Alexander Dunlop in promoting a Greek revival; his annotated ed. of Marcus Aurelius Meditations (1742), with Dunlop’s successor James Moor[e], and printed by Robert Foulis whom he supported to the post of University printer [196]

Stephen MacKenna, b. 1872; fought for the Greeks against the Turks in 1897; aged thirty-five, he turned to Plotinus and neo-Platonism; translated the Enneads, a lengthy Greek work containing great difficulties of text, language and thought; after agonising difficulties and delays, complted his work in 1930. Stanford quotes 22 lines of prose translation from Enneads, 6, 9, 9: ‘The soul in its nature loves God and longs to be at one with Him in the noble love of a daughter for a noble father … ‘ [198]

Bibl: MacKenna first published a translation of the sixth treatise of the first Ennead, On the Beautiful, in 1908, then five vols. translation all six enneads (1917-1930), the fifth vol. being shared with BS Page; further eds. appeared after his death in 1956 and 1962.

FW O’Connell and RM Henry, eds., An Irish Corpus Astronomiae, being Manus O’Donnell’s 17th c. Version of the Lunario of G Cortes (London 1914).

Bibl, Medicine: M Dunlevy, ‘Medicine in Ireland in Ancient Times’, in Doolin & Fitzgerald, eds., in What’s past is Prologue: A Retrospect of Irish Medicine, (1954): incl. DA Binchy, ‘The Leech in Ancient Ireland’, pp.5-9, F. Shaw, ‘Medicine in Ireland in Ancient Times’, pp.10-14; also incl. in this collection are an essay by R Hayes, ‘‘Medical Links with the Continent’, and an essay by M Dunlevy. SEE Also, N Moore, ‘Essay on the History of Medicine in Ireland’, St Bartholomew’s Hospital Reports 11 (1875), 145-66; J[ohn] Fleetwood, A History of Medicine in Ireland (Dublin 1951). Note also that SH O’Grady lists many Irish medical MSS in his Catalogue of Irish MSS in the British Museum, i (London 1901). P Walsh, Notes of Two Irish Medical Scribes’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record 20 (1922), 113, and 23 (1923), 238f. ALSO F Shaw, ‘medieval Medico-Philosophical Treatises in the Irish Language’, in Ryan, Essays and Studies Presented to Prof. Eoin MacNeill (Dublin 1940), 144-57. ALSO RG Moorhead, A Short History of Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital (Dublin 1922) [Stanford, 200]

A MSS from the library of Gerald Earl of Kildare, written in 14882, contains an Irish version of Bernard’s Lilium, and includes some classical references: see N[orman] Moore, ‘Essay on the History of Medicine in Ireland’, St Bartholomew’s Hospital Reports 11 (1875), 1467.

TK Hoppen, the Common Scientist in the Seventeenth Century: a Study of the Dublin Philosophical Society 1683-1700 (London 1970).

JJ O’Meara, Eriugena (Cork 1969); IP Sheldon-Williams and L Bieler, eds., Ioannis Scotti Eriugena Periphyseon (De divisione Naturae). Liber Primus (Dublin 1968); Liber Secundus (Dublin 1972), the translation supplied in notes by by Sheldon-Williams; a third vol. to follow. ALSO L. Bieler, ‘Remarks on Eriugena’s Original Latin Prose’, op. cit., n.34.

AA Luce, Life of George Berkeley (London 1949); also RI Aaron in Mind 41 (932), 465-75, for the classical books in Berkeley’s library.

B. Farrington, The Faith of Epictetus (London 1967).

B[edell] Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (IAP 1976; this ed. 1984), 261pp, index. [COPY PT. IV]

11: Patriots and Philhellenes
Stanford remarks that Giraldus—in Topographia (1185)—compares Henry II to Alexander, rather than a Trojan, perhaps because the Irish chose of Greek pedigrees [note at p.79, supra] would seem favourable to an Irish victory at the outcome. [202] See Topographia, ‘De Victoriis’, being the second last sect.

In 1552, Edward Walshe of Waterford addressed his Conjectures on the state of Ireland to the Duke of Northumblerand in the hope of influencing the English colonial policy to favour dense rather than sparse plantation: ‘the waye taken by the polliticke romaynes’ (with reference to agrarian law of Caius Gracchus in 123 bc); see DB Quinn, ‘Edward Walshe’s Conjectures” Concerning Ireland,’ Irish Hist. Studies, 5 (1947), 303-22. [Stanford 203; note 228]

William Herbert, an English ‘undertaker’ with 13,000 acres in Ireland, wrote Croftus, sive de Hibernia Liber (1587)

Sir John Davies, Historical Relations, or a Discovery of the True Causes by Ireland was never Intirely Subdued (1613), investigating the failure of conquest and colony, sadly contrasted with the efficient methods of the Romans. Citing the remark of Agricola that Ireland could be conquered with one legion, he said, ‘I make no doubt, but that if he had attempted the conquest thereof with a far greater arm, he would have found himself deceived in his conjecture’.

Lucius Cary, Viscount of Falkland, ed. TCD; established a neo-classical grove of Academe at his home, Great Tew, in England; d. in the Battle at Newbury, 1643.

Nicholas French, bishop of Ferns, in exile, published The Bleeding Iphigenia (Louvain 1674), a vigorous plea for the Catholic cause; his reasons for the title as follows: ‘the picture of Iphigenia (one of the rarest peeces of antiquity) going to be sacrifised for appeasing the anger of Diane, offended with her Father Agamemnon for killing a stagg consecrated to the Goddess, made Timanthes the Author thereof very famous. He placed in lively cullors, round about this fair Princes [sic], her Kinsmen, Frinds, Allyes, and suite in great Consternation, all drown’d in lamentations and tears; but the gallant Lady (nothing in nature appear’d more comely) smiled, bearing in her countenance a Majesty, and contempt of death: soe charming was the art of this picture, that few could view it without teares. / Courteous reader, the Author of this Preface hath drawne another Iphigenia of the body of a noble, ancient Catholic Nation, cla’d all in redd Robes, not to bee now offered up as a victim; but already sacrific’d, not to a profane Deity, but to the living God for holy Religion: look but on this our bleeding Iphigenia, and I dare say you will lament her Tragedy.’ Thus French appealed not in terms of Christian or Gaelic imagery—Dark Rosaleen or Cathleen Ní Houlian—but in terms of the classical language of polite culture in the continental Renaissance, detached from sectarian loyalties, since all condemned her suffering as unjust, as met with in the accounts by Aeschylus, Euripides, and Ovid. [~205]

In another work, The Unkinde Deserter (1676), French attacked the Duke of Ormonde, citing figures such as Cincinnatus, epaminondas, Phocion, Socrates, and Cato. [20]

John Lynch, ed. by Jesuits in Galway, published Cambrensis Eversus (1662); written in fluent Latin, over 800 quarto pags in the 3 vol. M Kelly ed., 1848-2; aimed to impress the recently restored Charles II b quoting widely from classical sourcs to support his view of the antiquity and respectability of the Irish race, in the course of a massiv refutation of the slanders of Giraldus on Ireland [205]

Roderick O’Flaherty, ed. Galway at the school of Lynch’s father; Ogygia seu Rerum Hibernicarum Chronologia, represents Ireland as Ogygia, the island west of Britain described by Plutarch as being visited by Greeks, including Hercules, where the god Chronos lay imprisoned in a cave; drew extensively on mythology and history and quated many dates in classical history with those of events in Ireland in the manner of the ‘synchronisms’ of Gaelic annalists; dedicated to James II [206].

Stanford also mentions in passing Philip O’Sulivan Beare of Cork, and Stephen White of Clonmel, as producing notable historical works in Latin. [206]

Swift’s Dissension, main thesis: : it will be an eternal Rule in Politicks, among ever free People, that there is a Ballance of Power to be carefully held by every State within it self, as well as among several States with each other.’ (If this is upset, he says, there will be ‘Tyranny: that is to say, the Summa Imperii, or unlimited power solely in the Hands of the One, the Few, or the Many’. (See davis, i, 197). In conversation with Lord Somers, he remarked that ‘having been long conversant with Greek and Latin authors, and therefore a lover of liberty’ he found himself ‘much inclined to be what they called a Whig in politics’.

Stanford continues, in a condensed account of Swift’s political evolution: Soon however he showed an awareness of other lessons in ancient history. at forty-six, still waiting a bishopric, he wrote The Publick Spirit of the Whigs (1714). He denied the ‘current notions of power and obedience’ among the clery according to which ancient history supports a policy of submission to absolute monarch. Swift instances the fact that every schoolboy’s history deals with the first eight hundred years, and ‘the Authors do everywhere instil Republican Principles; and from the Account of nine in twelve of the first Emperors, we learn to have a detestation of Tyranny. [Here he refers with approbation to Hobbes’s view] That the Youth of England was corrupted in their political Principles, by reading the Histories of Rome and Greece, which having been writ under Republicks, taught the Readers to have ill Notions of Monarchy ..’ In the Examiner (1710-11), Swift expressed strongly anti-republican views, which he summarised in his own index (1713) as ‘Republican politics infinitel dishonourable and mischievous to this kingdom; a poorness and narrowness of spirit in them.’ In The Examiner, Issue 31, he observed that though Liberty is the mother of Faction, she is also the daughter of Oppression. In writing Drapier’s Letters (1724-5) he was to come to see that Oppression was pregnant in his own country. [207] In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift lets Gulliver meet the ghosts of famous Greeks and Romans in an incident derived from Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead. Gulliver praises Brutus, the tyrannicide, and deprecates Caesar, the supreme governor. ‘I had the honour to have much conversation with Brutus, and was told that his ancester, Junius, Socrates, Epaminondas, Cato the youngr, Sir Thomas More, and himself, were perpetually togethr—a sextumvirate, to which all the ages of the world cannot add a seventh.’ In Presbyterians Plea of Merit (1733), seven years after Gulliver, while castigating sectarianism, he showed himself more sympathetic to the Commonwealth than formerly: ‘I do not say this in Diminution, or Disgrace to Commonwealths; wherein, I confess, I have much altered many Opinions under which I was educated, having been led by some Observation, long Experience, and a thorough Detestation for the Corruption of Mankind: Insomuch, that I am now justly liable to the Censure of Hobbs, who complains that the youth of England imbibe ill opinions, from reading the Histories of Ancient Greece and Rome, those renowned Scenes of Liberty and every Virtue.’ Stanford remarks on his disappointment of preferment under the monarchy, as well as his experience of tyranny in the matter of Wood’s half-pence, and adds: In his later works Swift was writing as an individualist uninhibited by his Anglican deanship. [209]

Bibl: Davis, HJ, The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift, 1 vols (Oxford 1939-68). On the Latinity of his epitaph, see JV Luce, Hermathena (1967),78-81.

Both Leland and Francis, in editing Demosthenes, emphasised the note of liberty. Francis wrote of the Athenians as believing that ‘Liberty is their sole Good, nd the Preservation of it is the sole Object of their Attention’. In the first sentence of his translation of Demosthenes orations against Philip (1754), Leland established the note of oratory to be found in Grattan and Curran: ‘To animate a people renowned for justice, humanity, and valour, yet in many instances, degenerate and corrupted; to warn them, of the dangers of luxury, treachery and bribery; of the ambition and perfidy of a powerfyl foreign enemy; to recall the glory of their ancestors to their thoughts; and to inspire them with resolution, vigour, and unanimity; to correct abuses, to restore discipline, to revive and enforce the generous sentiments of aptriotism and public spirit:—These wer the great purposes for which the Orations were originally pronounced.’ (Introduction) Leland went on to publish another popular book, his History of the Life and Reign of Philip, King of Macedon (1758), which remained the standard work as being a judicious study of a complex subject. A summary sentence reads: ‘If he was unjust, he was like Caesar, unjust for the sake of Empire.’ [210] Stanford later argues again that Leland and Lawson deserve crdit in the history of Irish politics for their effective eulogies of freedom. [214]

John Lawson, Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Oratory and History from 1750 to 1759, gave a rousing series of lectures on oratory in which he commended the Greek’s as ‘valiant lovers of Liberty’, giving this as the reason why the Arts and Sciences, and especially Oratory, flourished among them. Stanford wonders whether Leland and Lawson, thought themselves upholders of the Anglican ascendancy and King’s men, did not ultimately inflame the young men of the college of a later generation—that of Tone and Emmet—to ‘snatch up arms [and] march against this Philip, this Tyrant, this treacherous invader of our Country’, as Lawson enthusiastically summarised the probable effect of Demosthenes’ philipics. [210-211]

Leland succeeded Lawson as professor of Oratory in 1759, and published his lectures—as Lawson had—in 1765. He was primarily concerned with refuting a recent attack on rhetoric, as shown by the title: A dissertation on the Principles of Human Eloquence, with Particular Regard to the Style and composition of the New Testament, in which the Observations by the Lord Bishop of gloucester, in his Discourses on the Doctrine of Grace, are Distinctly Considered. It includes an eloquent passage on civil liberty: ‘An asiatic is born in a country of despotism. He has from his infancy been taught that the sum of his duty is to pay unlimited obedience to his Master … let him be a witnss to the noble effects of civil liberty; and his sentiments and language shall be totally changed … he shall regard LEONIDAS at the head of his little band of Spartans, as bject more truly admirable, grand and magnificent … ‘ [211]

Stanford lists as students exposes to Lawson and Leland Burke (entered 1714), Flood (1747), Grattan (1763), and Curran (1767).

Burke, in a letter to the Provost when being offered an hon. degree by the University in 1790, mentioned ‘those principles of Liberty and morality … which are infused and have always been infused together into the minds of those who have had the happiness of being instructed in it.’ (TW Copeland, et. al. eds., Correspondence of Edmund Burke, 9 vols, 1958-70, vi, 192. [211-12]

As a speaker in the Historical Club, which he founded, Burke spoke twice as a Roman [‘Brutus on the death of Lucretia’, and as ‘a Roman Senator against Caesar at the time when he took command in Gaul’] and once as a Greek [‘Ulysses on his embassy to Menelaus to recover Helen’]. (See TSC Dagg, College Historical Society: a History 1770-1920 (Cork; priv. publ. 1969). Burke’s Vindication of Natural Society (1756) roundly denounced the political and moral instability of the Athenians, preferring Romans: ‘rome has a more venerable aspect that Athens, and she conducted her affairs, so far as related to the ruin and opporesion of the great part of the world, with greater wisdom and uniformity’. Boswell records that Burke argued against Johnson that Virgil was superior to Homer. (Life of Johnson, chp. xlii, 1777-78; ftn.)

Henry Grattan, more Demosthenic than Burke; Byron wrote of him: ‘With all which Demosthenes wanted endowed,/And his rival, or victor, in all he possessed’ (The Irish Avatar); for him Ireland was Athens and Britain the Macedonians; his Declaration of Irish Rights (1780) expressed the ‘young appetite for freedom; used few classical allusions; his recurrent them liberty as Leland and Lawson understood it. [212]

Henry Flood, able scholar; translated speeches of Demosthenes and Aeschines, as well as a version of the first Pythian ode of Pindar; well-judged speeches in the Irish parliament, but his Westminister maiden was disastrous a classical allusion, comparing the India Commissioners to the Roman Decemviri, enemies of liberty, provoking a scathingly sarcastic response; the parliamentary recorder referred to his manner of speaking thus: ‘variety of remarks, delivered with great correctness of phrase, but in a more deliberate and sententious way that is the custom of our parliamentary speakers’; the ensuing speaker John Courtenay, also Irish, referred with heavy irony his ‘profound and unhackneyed story of the Decemviri’, and mocked its implications; Flood, humiliated, is not known to have quoted the classics in Westminster again; left bequest to TCD for the encouragement of Greek and Irish. [213] For the speech, see Parliamentary Debates, xxiv, 56-7 ( Dec 1783). Bibl., W Flood, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Flood (Dublin 1838).

Curran customarily read Homer every year, and often emphasised a major point with a telling Latin quotation. Stanford tells of a story of his appearing in defence of Robert Johnston before Barr Yelverton, Lord Avonmore; he purposely misquoted, giving Yelverton the opportunity to correct, and larded his speech with allusions such as they both enjoyed; Curran spoke warmly of an ‘old and learned friend’ instructed in liberty by the classics (Yelverton), and then recalled ‘those Attic nights and those those refections of the gods’ which he had shared with Yelverton, whereon the judge burst into tears, but finally gave judgement against Curran’s client. [213-14] See Hale, John Philpot curran (London 195), and Philip, Curran and his Contemporaries (London 1850).

Bibl. D O’Sullivan, The Irish Free State and its Senate (London 1940).

Crofton Croker on hedge-school master: ‘In an evening assembly of village statesmen he holds the most distinguished place, from his historical information, pompous eloquence, and classical erudition. His principles very very closely indeed on the broadest republicanism; he delivers warm descriptions of the Grecian and Roman commonwealths; the ardent spirit of fredom and general equality of rights in former days—and then comes down to his country, which is always the ultimate political subject of discussion.’ (Researches &c., 1824, p.329-9.)

PJ Dowling, The Hedge Schools of Ireland (Cork 1966).

Richard Lovell Edgeworth wrote that certain books on ancient history were ‘certainly improper’, and that to ‘inculcate democracy and a foolish hankering after undefined liberty is not necessar in Irland.’ (Letter to the Board of Education, in reports from the commissioners to the Board of Education of Ireland: Reports on Free Schools of Royal foundation 1813, p.109.)

Tone, Autobiography: ‘[at sixteen] I began to look on classical learning s nonsense; on a fellowship in Dublin College as a pitiful establishment; and, in short, I thought an ensign in a marching regiment was the happiest creature living.’ (Autobiographies, ed. RB O’Brien, London 1893), i, 9ff; quoted by MacDermot, Theobald Wolfe Tone (London 1939), p.7. Tone took a foundation scholarship in 1784. [216]

At his maiden speech to the Historical Society, Emmet discoursed on freedom and ‘proceeded to portray the evil effects of the despotism and tyranny of the governments of antiquity and most eloquently depicted those of Greece and Rome.’ (RR Madden, Life of Robert Emmet, Dublin 1847, p.6; cf Dagg, History of college Historical Society, Cork 1969, p.95.). ‘The poets of antiquity were his companions, its patriots his models, and its republics his admiration.’ (Madden, The United Irishmen, Their Lives and Times, 3rd series, 2nd ed., London 1860, p.287); his mind ‘was so imbued with the finest forms of ancient art and most perfect images of the orator of Greece and rome, that he seems to have made for himself an ideal existence of their excllencies, and to have lived in the past as if he belonged to it, and in the present as if he were in it but not of it.’ (ibid., 478).

Stanford acknowledges Davis’s antipathy to classics-centred university education, but points out his high estimate of the value of classical knowledge (‘no language of mine shall underrate the value of such a possession’), and the frequency of Greece and Rome as touchstones for nationhood and freedom in his ballads: ‘For Greece and Rome who bravely stood,/Three hundred men and three men … (A Nation Once Again), etc. [217]

Quotes celebration of Greek liberty in RD Williams, The Patriot Brave: ‘Great spirits who battled in old time/for the freedom of Athens, descend!’ [217]

William Mulchinoeck [sic], A Patriot’s Haunts, foresaw Erin’ armies advancing ‘With banners flaunting, fair, and free,/Fit for a new Thermopylae/And in the dark and narrow pass/I pace a new Leonidas. [217]

Speranza: ‘The Old Man’s Blessing’: ‘Let thy daring right hand free us/Lik that son of old Aegus,/Who purged his land for evermore/From the blood-stained Minotaur.’

bibl. The Spirit of the Nation, ed. WH Grattan Flood (Dublin 1911); also G.-D Zimmermann, Irish Political Street Ballads and Rebel Songs 1780-1900 (Geneva 1966).

Mitchel was devoted reader of classical, especially Greek literature; at the climax of his trial-speech, he appealed to his audience to remember Scaevola who trust his hand into a brazier to defy the Etruscan invader: ‘The Roman, who saw his hand burning to ashes before the tyrant, promised that three hundred should follow out the enterprise. Can I not promise for one, for two, for three, aye, for hundreds?’ (JG Hodges, report of the trial of John Mitchel, etc., Dublin 1848, 97-98.)

Thomas F. Burke, in the dock, quoted the Spartan mother: ‘return with your shield, or on it.’ (DB Sullivan, Speeches from the Dock, rev. ed., Dublin, 1968)

Pearse’s speech of 1916 on Thomas Davis: ‘Character is the greatest thing in a man: and Davis’s character was such as the Apollo Belevedere is said to be in the physical world—in his presence all men stood more erect. The romans had a noble word which summed up all moral beauty and civic valour: the word virtus. If nglish had as noble a word as that it would be the word to apply to the thing which made Thomas Davis so great a man.’ Pearse was prevented from delivering the speech inside TCD by JP Mahaffy (See Stanford and McDowell, Mahaffy, 1972, pp.114-15.)

Byron, in a letter to Thomas Moore: ‘when a man hath no freedom to fight for at home,/Let him combat for that of his neighbours;/Let him think of the glories of Greece and of Rome/And get knocked on the head for his labours.’

Charlemont found the modern Greeks unfavourable: ‘low cunning and knavery’; the countrymen of Aristides are now perhaps the keenest and most accomplish’d Rogues upon the Face of the Earth.’ [222] Goldsmith Grecian History (1774) expressed an antipathetic view of modern Greeks as degenerate Grecians, in a chapter added after his death [222]

Buck Whaley was especially scathing of the Greeks, while travelling through Greece to win his wager in 1788; sailing through the Peleponnese, he recorded that ‘the noble, generous, arduous and exalted spirit for which the Spartan youths were famed’ was now extinct, and ‘we behold their posterity sunk to the lowest pitch of human degradation, mean, cruel, cowardly, ignorant, dishonest and embracing contentedly the fetters of slavery ..’ (Buck Whaley’s Memoirs, first publ. 1797, ed. Sir Edward Ó Sullivan, London 1906, 66, 264.)

Woman, or Ida of Athens (1809) painted a compassionate picture of the plight of the Greeks under the Turkish rule and strongly asserted their right to freedom, implying that their subjection to Turkey was comparable with that of Ireland to Britain. [223]

Richard Church, b. Cork, generalissimo of Greek forces in 1827; bibl., S Lane-Poole, Sir Richard Church etc (London 1890); EM Church, Chapters in an Adventurous Life: sir Richard Church in Itlay and Greece (Edinburgh and London 1895); Church’s papers are in the British museum. [224; notes, 240]

[??;] Gawin Rowan Hamilton, Killyleagh; Edward Blacquiere, Dublin.

Stratford Canning was composing a paper on the future territorial claims of Greece at his death. [225] See S Lane-Poole, the Life of the Right Honorabl Sir Startford Canning (London 1880)

Sir Thomas Wyse,b. Co. Waterford, ed. Stonyhurst and TCD, British Minister at Athens, 1849; recreated good-will and did much to promote literary and artistic enterprise in Greece; state funeral there in 1862; Excursions in the Peloponnese (1856) and Impressions of Greece, posthum. (1871) reflects warm sympathy and constant interest in the classical past; his son William Bonaparte Wyse recommended as successor to King Otho of Greece after his abdication in 1862, but became in fact High Sheriff of Waterford. [225] Bibl: JJ Auchmuty, Sir Thomas Wyse 1791-1862 (London 1939); also EJ Arnould, ‘William-Charles Bonaparte Wyse’, Publications de l’Institut Méditerranen du Palais de Roure, 3 (1957), pp.141-61.

Lord Strangford’s chaplain, R Walsh, published a lively account of events in Greece and Turkey, A Residence at Constantinople during the Greek and Turkish Revolutions, 2 vols (London 1836), ill.

Memoirs of Miles Byrne, ed. by his widow (1st ed. Paris 1863; rep. Shannon 1972), incls. accounts of meetings in Paris with Tennant and Winter, and other details regarding contemporary philhellenism in the 1820s.

mahaffy’s Rambles and Studies in Greece (1876), rep. 11 times. [226]

Stephen MacKenna, strong Irish nationalist, fought briefly in Thessaly in 1897; prevented from continuing the struggle in Crete after the Greek defeat.

Stanford gives an account of James David Bourchier, b. Bruff, who assisted the Greeks in the insurrection in Crete of 1896. Lady Grogan, Lif of JD Bourchier (London 1926).

Symon Semeonis encouraged a band of resistance fighters led by a man called Kalliergis, in 1322. See Esposito, Itinerarium, 45, n.4. [227]

12: Faith and Morals
Stanford gives a full account of John Toland, 1670-1722, whom he calls a faligitious propagator of religious scepticism, based partly on classical learning. Ed. Glasgow, Leyden, Oxford. He had the intention in 1693 while still at Oxford, of compiling an Irish dictionary and composing a dissertation to prove that the Irish were colonists from Gaul. He never produced these, but his Specimens of the Critical History of the Celtic Religion and Learning, Containing an Account of the Druids drew widely on Greek and Latin writers such as Lucian, Athenaeus, Caesar, Cicero, Pliny, and Virgil to make ingenious comparisons between the Irish and Greeks (connecting for example Ogam with Lucian’s Hercules Ogmios). In 1694 he published an essay arguing that the heroic death of Roman Consul Regulus at the hands of Carthaginins torturers was a fable, so removing ‘all the cruelty from Africa, where it lay so long, into Italy whose title to it I find much better.’ Next, in London, he came under the influence of Locke; in 1699 he published his Christianity Not Mysterious (later burned by the hangman in Dublin), a work with no special classical learning; his Letters to Serena (1704) uses a wide selection of classical quotations ostensibly to criticise the pagan conception of worship but actually presenting a rationalistic approach to all religions; his Adeisidaemon (The Unsuperstitious Man), purporting to exculpate Livy from superstitious beliefs, asserted that the modern state could be harmed equally by superstition or atheism, and was banned by Rome. Hypatia or the History of a Most Beautiful, Most Vertuous, Most Learned, and Every Way Accomplish’d Lady, Who Was Torn to Pieces by the Clergy of Alexandria, to Gratify the Pride, Emulation and Cruelty of their Archbishop, commonly but Undeservdly Stil’s Saint Cyril (1720), self-evidently a riposte. His Latin tract, Pantheisticon sive Foruma Celebrandae Sodalitatis Socraticae (1720), primarly exposition of his pantheistical beliefs, but with the ultimate intnetion of establishing a sodality or cult, it begins with a discussion of the philosophical communities of antiquity such as Epicureans and Socratics, and curiously appends a pantheistical liturgy, possibly a parody of Christian liturgy, possible an index of his need for an equivalent of the ceremonials he had left behind: ‘Mod: Floreat PHILOSOPHIA/Resp: Cum ARTIBUS politioribus/Mod: Favete linguis VERITATI, LIBERTATI, SANITATI, triplici Sapientium voto, Coetus his (omneque inibi cogitandum, loquendum, agendum)sacer esto/Resp: Et nunc et semper.’ Praises are offered to Socrates, Plato, Marcus Cato, Cicero and others, including Solomon and Confucius, with hymns from writers as varied as Pacuvius, Manilius, Virgil and Lactantius interspersed, and a list of appropriate odes from Horace relevant to the themes of wisdom, equanimity, cheerfulness and innocence of life, all of this laided out in the form of a prayerbook, with red and black type. [233-34] Bibl., A collection of Pieces by Mr John Toland (London 1726), and Miscellaneous Works, etc. (London 1747); DNB; JG Simms, ‘John Toland 1670-1722, a Donegal Heretic’, Irish Hist. Studies xvi (1969), 340-50. [notes, 244]

NOTE that in Alciphron, Berkeley’s sceptical speaker in the dialogue is called a ‘witty gentleman of our sect who was a great admirer of the ancient Druids’ [234] Berkeley also found ‘something useful in the old religions of Rome and Greece.’ [234]

Wilde’s tutor and friend Mahaffy and his older colleague RY Tyrrell: ‘I got my love for the Greek ideal and my knowledge of the language at Trinity from Mahaffy and Tyrrell’, he wrote. In Wilde helped Mahaffy with his Social Life in Greece from Homer to Meander (1874) and was thanked in the introduction for ‘having made improvements and corrections all through the book’. Mahaffy corrected his aesthetic divagation towards Catholicism, catching up with Wilde on a journey to Rome, apparently funded by Jesuits, and deflecting him to Greece. Stanford discusses the struggle of Christian and Hellenic sentiment in Wilde’s poetry. His neo-Hellenism is vividly presented in longer poems such as The Garden of Eros, The New Helen [here it is a Trojan dame instead of the Blessed Virgin who is ‘not born as common women are’, in a poem deliberately placed at the end of his Rosa Mystica to emphasize his rejection of Christian mysticism], The Burden of Itys, Carmides, Panthea, and The Sphinx. Others, include Humanitad. In The Decay of the Art of Lying (1891), he paradoxically argues that the reality which underlay the Greek ideal was just as ordinary as contemporaries: ‘Do you believe that the athenian women ere like the stately figurs of the Parthenon frieze, or like the marvellous goddesss who sat in the triangular pediments of the same building: … You will find tht the Athenian ladies laced tightly, wore high-heeled shoes, dyed their hair yellow, painted and rouged their faces, and were exactly like any silly fashionable or fallen crature of their own day.’ Wilde scathingly reviewed Mahaffy’s Greek Life and Thought (1877), charging the author with ‘bias, provincialism, and lack of ‘reasonableness, moderation, style and charm.’ [238-39] Bibl., V holland (London 1954); H Pearson (London 1946), and BBrazol (NY 1938); also A Ojala, ‘Aestheticism and Oscar Wilde’, Annales Academiae scientiae Fennicae (Helsinki), B 90, 2 and 93, 2 (1954 and 1955); B Fehr, Studien zu Oscar Wilde’s Gedichten (Berlin 1918); for classical references, see R Ellman, The Artist as Critic (NY 1968). [notes, 245]

Mahaffy Hellenised the Gospels, and was formally accused of heresy by some TCD colleges in younger years [especially in connection with a sermon in Chapel]. He argued that much of St Paul’s teaching was derived from Stoicism, that St John’s gospel was indebted to Platonism; that Christ spoke Greek at times. ‘St Paul’s ermon at Athens, for example, is nothing but a statement of the Stoical morlity, with the doctrine of Jsus Christ superadded. and it is quite plain that if these were his precise word he was arguing on the Stoical side against the Epicuran, just as he took the Pharisee’s side against the Sadducee on a memorable occasion. anyone who knows what the Stoic theodicy and morals were, cannot possibly deny this’ (Mahaffy’s footnote in unspecified work). Mahaffy a pioneer for the view that sophisiticated Christianity absorbed to its advantage much of the higher ethics of classical antiquity. [241]

Aubrey de vere: in his Essays (1887) he found reasons for praising some aspects of Greek religion; fundamentally, however, he found it deficient in ‘spirituality’ and unsympathetic to ‘religious zeal’ and ‘obedience as a law of life.’ Stanford comments: In genral de Vere gives the impression of a writer in whom temperament and artistry were never fully integrated. As an artist he was drawn to Greece and disliked the Latin tradition, but temperamentally he was drawn to the more realistic Roman tradition. He was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1851. [242]

WB Yeats for a while considered taking the path to Rome. In December 1931 … [243]

Epilogue
Michael Cacoyannis’s production of Yeats’s Oedipus Tyrannus, Abbey 1973.

Other works by W. B. Stanford: Greek Metaphor (Oxford 1936); Ambiguity in Greek Literature (Oxford 1939); Aeschylus in his Style (Oxford 1942); ed. Livy, Book 42 (Dublin 1942); ed. Homer’s Odyssey, 2 vols (London 1947-48; 2nd ed 1961-62); The Ulysses Theme (Oxford 1954; 2nd ed. 1963); ed. Aristophanes’ Frogs (London 1957; 2nd ed. 1963); ed. Sophocles’ Ajax (London 1963); The Sound of Greek (Berkeley 1967); with RBD McDowell, Mahaffy: A Biography of an Anglo-Irishman (London 1971); with JV Luce, The Quest for Ulysses (London 1974); with Robert Fagles, The Oresteia of Aeschylus (1976); Enemies of Poetry (London 1980); Greek Tragedy and the Emotions (London 1983).