Arthur D. Kahn
With the near disappearance of the study of the Classics, students of literature as well as general readers lack the background to share the pleasure of Byron’s contemporaries, steeped like him in the Classical literatures, in the constant interplay in his prose and poetry with the literatures of Greece and Rome.
Byron underwent an intense drilling in Latin and Greek and in works of literature in both languages. Throughout his life he continued to study the Classical authors. In this book the author demonstrates how Byron repeatedly looked to Classical authors as models for his own compositions, conning as a twenty-year-old Quintilian’s Institutes in preparing his frame-breakers oration in the House of Lords, studying the plays of Seneca while composing his dramatic works, turning to Theocritus and Virgil as models in pastoral poetry\ and to Horace and Juvenal for verse satire; and, finally, setting Homer and Virgil as foils for his mock epic masterpiece, Don Juan.
The author reveals a level of artistry in Byron’s works rarely explored and appreciated.
In this book the author seeks to demonstrate an entire level of artistry in Byron’s poetry and prose rarely recognized by students and readers in the twenty-first century.
Arthur D. Kahn is a retired, distinguished professor of Classics and the author of numerous scholarly articles as well as twelve books, including The Education of Julius Caesar, Writer and Critic, a translation of essays by the Hungarian literary critic and philosopher Gyorgy Lukacs, On First Looking into Homer’s Iliad: Exploring the Bard’s Dramatic Artistry, and a play, The Life and Death of Lord Byron.
PREFACE
“The learning of Latin and Greek, I am told, is going into disuse in Europe,” declared Thomas Jefferson in 1782, then serving as ambassador to France. “I know not what their manners and occupations may call for,” he remarked, “but it would be ill-judged in us to follow their example. Jefferson boasted, with some hyperbole, that every American farmer could read Homer in the original. Indeed, Professor Meyer Reinhold, author of The Classick Pages, declares that “it is...probable that never since antiquity were the Classics...read by a greater proportion of a population” than in the United States during the latter half of the eighteenth century.
As early as 1702, defining the entrance requirements for Harvard College, Cotton Mather announced: “When scholars had so far profited at the grammar schools, that they could read any classical author into English, and readily make and speak true Latin and write it in verse, as well as prose; and perfectly decline the paradigms of nouns and verbs in the Greek tongue, they were judged capable of admission to Harvard-Collidge.” Classical learning in the United States during the 18th and 19th centuries was more than adornment for an educated elite, but, as Reinhold notes:
their reading in and meditation upon the Classics was eminently practical and purposeful; and it contributed substantially to the development and motivation of an unparalleled concentration of political giants in world history.
Indeed, the Founding Fathers exemplified in their lives and writings an assimilation of the ideals of Classical humanism: the Greek emphasis on the examined life, on the fullest exploitation of an individual’s capacities and on the application of reason to the achievement of happiness; along with the Roman affirmation of gravitas and civic responsibility. The remarks of Professor H. Rackham of Cambridge University in the introduction to his translation of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics could be applied to the many other works of Classical literature that shaped the character and thinking of cultivated Americans as well as cultivated Englishman into the first half of the twentieth century:
It is true that a moral system which so exalts the life of the intellect is in many ways alien to modern thought and practice; but in so far as Aristotle’s End can be...taken to include complete self-development and self-expression, the full realization in healthy activity of all the potentialities of human nature, his teaching has not lost its appeal. His review of the virtues and graces of character that the Greeks admired stands in such striking contrast with Christian Ethics that this section of the work is a document of primary importance for the student of the Pagan world. But it has more than a historic value. Both in its likeness and in its difference it is a touchstone for that modern idea of a gentleman, which supplies or used to supply an important part of the English race with its working religion.
Until World War I the Classics provided the core of secondary-school and higher-education curricula in this country, and prestigious American institutions of higher learning followed the Ivy League schools in setting at least two years of Latin as an entrance requirement. Although social and civic goals in the teaching of the Classics had by then been abandoned, Latin teachers continued to instill in their students Classical respect for precision in language. (The eloquence of Churchill, Roosevelt and de Gaulle reflected their Classical educations.) The anti-intellectualism of the McCarthy era and of the youth rebellion of the sixties accelerated the decline of Classical studies in the United States. Subsequently, in the seventies and eighties, the Christian Right proclaimed that the Judaeo-Christian tradition was the sole valid stream of the American heritage and denounced humanism as an alien evil promoting such heresies as Darwinism and scientific theories regarding the origin of the universe. The equation of economic self-aggrandizement to patriotism during the Reagan-Bush era provided a further blow to Classical humanism. In its anti-humanist crusade the Christian Right paradoxically found allies among the “politically correct” multiculturalists. Neither group allows ignorance of the contributions of the Greeks (and of the Romans as well) to all aspects of modern civilization to curb their passionate denunciations of Classical humanism. The multiculturalists, for example, take no note of the fact that the English language, fast becoming a lingua franca throughout the world, embodies the history and cultures of Europe since Homer with 69 per cent of its vocabulary of Latin and nine per cent of Greek roots. To Greece and Rome, too, the entire world owes its terminology for discussing the very issues emphasized by the “politically correct,” e.g. “politics,” “democracy,” “justice,” “equity,” “civil liberties,” “imperialism,” “colonialism,” etc.
The decline of the Classics has had a deleterious impact on philological studies. Students and professors unfamiliar with the Classical heritage are handicapped in their analysis and appreciation of European and American writers of past centuries. To expose this deficiency I explore in this book the complex Classical influences on the works of Lord Byron, describing in the first chapter Byron’s early exposure to Classical literature and continuing in subsequent chapters with an investigation of the continuous dialectical interplay Byron conducted with the works of Greek and Latin authors, displaying a reverence for their literary conventions and assimilating their formal devices and techniques. The study treats works of various genres: drama, pastoral, satire and epic, proceeding chronologically from the twenty-four-year-old Byron’s oration in the House of Lords on the frame-breakers bill and concluding with his final great work, Don Juan.
