Book contents
16 - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2009
Summary
In speaking of the ‘three provincial centuries’ marked by British neglect of Plato, W. B Yeats lumped together the period from 1600 to 1900. But the start is too early and the end too late, for Plato's sojourn in the shadows cannot plausibly be dated prior to the death of the Cambridge Platonists, nor construed as surviving undiminished through the Victorian age. Yeats really had in mind the high noon of empiricism, Newtonianism and Enlightenment. He meant, to be blunt, the eighteenth century.
Abundant evidence exists to show that Plato, direct or mediated,counted for less in this age than in previous or succeeding phases of British culture. Three levels of neglect can be discerned. In the first place, there is the comparatively low level of concern in the eighteenth century with matters Greek. One striking index of the general situation lies in the fact that the great historian of the ancient world, Edward Gibbon, learnt no Greek at Westminster or Oxford: he had to teach himself the language as a mature private student. In the major public schools which set out the national curriculum for educated males, hardly any attention was paid to Greek prose of any description; the philosophers and historians were still ‘untrodden ground’ at Westminster as late as the 1820s. Until a major shift of interest from Latin to Greek in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, which was initiated by Butler of Shrewsbury and Thomas Arnold of Rugby (who daringly introduced Plato into sixth-form studies), the bulk of school-work was devoted to Latin. (Before 1800 Greek was learnt from textbooks written in Latin, not English.)
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- Platonism and the English Imagination , pp. 181 - 185Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994
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