Greek Myth and Classical Reception (2023 Victorian Reading Project)

This was the fourth theme on my Great Nineteenth-Century Reading Project list, but I started it early because I was thinking about some new teaching (on The Victorian Homer) and fiction projects that were related. As with the other themes, there was a mix of poetry, fiction and non-fiction in this list.

Reading plan (chronological)

1. Aurora Leigh, EBB (1856)
2. The Queen of the Air, John Ruskin (1869)
3. Portraits, Augusta Webster (1870)
4. Agamemnon, Robert Browning (1877)
5. A Minor Poet and Other Verse, Amy Levy (1884) 
6. Greek Studies: A Series of Essays, Walter Pater (essays published variously)
7. Hypolympia, Edmund Gosse (1901)

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Many of this theme’s readings are re-readings, but I found this really useful, as I was reading now from a much more informed position, having spent a lot more time thinking about adaptation, recursion, and translation than when I first encountered Pater, Ruskin, and the Brownings as an undergraduate! (I’ve actually been learning Attic Greek, as part and parcel of this work.) I was also reminded of the overlap with some of the very first things that I read for this project in January 2023: Henry Louis Vivian Derozio’s poems, such as his ‘Thermopylae’. (The Scalar edition has a tag for Ancient Greek that captures these!)

Aurora Leigh is much admired as an epic poem, including by John Ruskin and others on this list. I have always found it a little difficult to find anything much to say about Aurora Leigh: it simply is, as a thing complete. (It did send me to my writing notebook to jot down various quotes, especially from the first few books, though.) But it was useful to re-read it again in thinking about EBB’s experience with, and attitude towards, the Classics.

In teaching this long poem, I juxtaposed it with some excerpts from both The Queen of the Air and Greek Studies; on their own, Ruskin and Pater are not always easy to teach. Ruskin’s series of essays about Athena and Greek mythology provides excuses to talk about political economy, the ethics of war, and more besides. Pater’s collection also focuses on mythology, with a particular interest in Dionysus, and is a useful route in to thinking about Nietzsche’s dichotomy of the Dionysian versus the Apollonian. But all in all, quite tricky to teach comprehensively in five short days of a summer school!

The challenge of the non-fiction readings is part of why the bulk of the rest of the texts here are readily accessible poems. Not all of the poems of Augusta Webster and Amy Levy from these collections were relevant to my Victorian Homer class, but the ones that were were a joy to teach. In class we focused on their different presentations of Medea, who although not strictly Homeric was one of the favourite figures from Greek mythology that students had picked at the start of the week. Levy’s “Medea” is a fragment of a drama, “after Euripides” (whose Medea Webster translated in 1868). It captures the key components of that drama—Jason’s betrayal, Medea’s fraught experience as an outsider, and her desire for revenge—with a lightness of touch and keen understanding of… well, drama, that spotlights Medea as a femme fatale.

Meanwhile, Webster’s dramatic monologue of Medea on the death of Jason (“Medea in Athens”) is captivating and evokes a real sympathy with the figure who is often one of the ‘Big Bads’ of Greek mythology. (Although my personal favourite of Webster’s is “Circe”, because I do love an angry woman and a good storm, and Andrea Selleri wrote a fascinating analysis of “A Castaway” for the Victorian Poetry edition that I guest-edited.)

I included Robert Browning’s Agamemnon because it struck me as interesting to read something from both Brownings, although his translation of Aeschylus’ play is not necessarily a good one. Translation from Greek was a key theme of the Victorian Homer class: who gets to learn enough of the Classical languages to translate, and what does it mean to be a good translation, were the key questions here. (We also had a fun exercise of building our own mini-translation of The Odyssey by choosing the best translations of a set of lines, drawing on a quick compilation of five options, which you can see here: Five Odysseys.)

Telling the story of Clytemnestra’s betrayal and murder of her returning husband should be interesting, particularly in the hands of a man who wrote several tense dramatic monologues about the murder of lovers. Unfortunately, Browning’s Agamemnon is a “literal” translation (or he said “transcription”) that endeavours to preserve as much as possible of the original Greek in English. Translating literally is often a failure because this word-for-word or point-for-point translation fails to capture the music, meaning, or emotion of the original. In particular trying to transport Greek poetry into English is a very challenging endeavour because the prosody is so different; thus, Browning’s Aeschylus feels mostly like dull prose, with some very odd orthographical choices (Klutaimnestra, anyone…?). But the endeavour itself is interesting! When I teach the 2025 Victorian Homer class, I think a portion of Agamemnon, compared to the characters as we experience or understand them from and in The Iliad.

Finally, then, Gosse’s Hypolympia, which brings some levity as an “ironic fantasy” (per the subtitle). In the Gods in Exile vein (from Heine’s 1853 essay of that name), Gosse’s Hypolympia joins stories like Vernon Lee’s “Dionea”, placing the Classical Greek deities into tension with the nineteenth-century Christians of his own time, here on a remote island inhabited by Lutherans. This is my favourite theme of them all, and the subject of the book I’m currently writing, so I won’t say much more on it, except that if you read only one thing from this theme’s list, I’d recommend this (yes, even over Aurora Leigh!).

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Other possible readings

There are innumerable of other pieces of writing from the period that touch on similar themes. Other suggestions are very welcome in comments, but these are a few:

• A great deal of Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, etc.
• Long Ago, Michael Field (1889)
• John Addington Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics (1873) and Studies of the Greek Poets (1873)
• William Morris’ The Earthly Paradise (1868)
• Many of Vernon Lee’s fiction and non-fiction writings