Standing in the tradition of recent studies examining the relationship between Classics and national cultures, particularly in postcolonial contexts, this interesting and substantial volume, rooted in a 2016 Dublin conference, examines a century of Irish engagements with Greece and Rome. The 21 chapters (including an introduction by the editors and an epilogue) cover a pleasingly wide range of receptions: in addition to familiar literary and theatrical figures such as Joyce and Yeats, Frank McGuinness and Marina Carr, we meet, for example, sculptor Percy Metcalfe, designer of the famous ‘barnyard set’ of Irish coins in use from 1928 to 2002, and academics unlikely to be well known outside Ireland, such as the formidable Margaret Heavey, translator into Irish of, among many other things, the Latin prose composition textbook known as ‘Bradley’s Arnold’.
The ‘politics’ of the title is to be understood broadly, with the politics of language (particularly Irish) and other aspects of culture prominent. But the volume naturally homes in on the two phases of great political conflict in the 20th century and the political-cultural negotiations that followed them: the revolutionary period and the first years of the Irish Free State, and the decades of the Troubles in the north of Ireland up to and beyond the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. A persistent theme, shared with many studies of classical reception in countries with complex imperial/colonial histories, but here given a specifically Irish inflection, is that of the tensions associated with an inheritance that might be regarded as universal or as problematically loaded: rejection, discomfort, repurposing and recuperation all find a place in the story.
Some selected highlights. Brian McGing considers ‘Greece, Rome, and the Revolutionaries of 1916’ (Chapter 3), with particular emphasis on republican leader Patrick Pearse (who pops up frequently in the volume). Analysing Pearse’s funeral speech for Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa in 1915, McGing demonstrates how profoundly, for all Pearse’s romantic assertions of the superiority of Irish literature, classical rhetoric influenced his oratory, with suggestive speculations too about the more specific influence of the Gettysburg Address and the Athenian epitaphios logos (‘funeral oration’). An incidental detail unmentioned by McGing is that O’Donovan Rossa named his 18th child Alexander Aeneas, with imperial connotations unexpected in a Fenian. Issues of cultural nationalism in relation to the Irish language are to the fore in chapters 5 (Síle Ní Mhurchú) and 6 (Pádraic Moran). Ní Mhurchú explores the practice and politics of translating Greek and Latin texts and English-language textbooks into Irish in the 1920s and 1930s, while Moran examines the teaching of Classics through Irish at Galway until its cessation in 1978. A central figure in both chapters is the remarkable George Thomson, whose struggles with conservative Catholicism and government bureaucracy over the publication of classical materials in Irish illustrate how Ireland could hamper itself in its attempts to develop Irish-language education as the country moved towards independence. In Chapter 8, Cillian O’Hogan dissects the ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ newspaper columns of Myles na gCopaleen (Brian O’Nolan, best known under his other pseudonym Flann O’Brien), published between 1940 and 1966. This essay brilliantly exposes the various ways in which Myles engages medieval literature and culture in ‘opening the door towards an alternative classical tradition’ (170) in post-independence, post-Joycean Ireland. Another study might emphasize more overtly the column’s relation to Roman satire; in this connection, one might reflect that Myles’ Latinization of his name in a piece from 1947 as ‘Melius Equuleus’ (165; equuleus, ‘young horse’, renders ‘na gCopaleen’) possesses also connotations of the rack (equuleus), suggesting an alignment with Lucilian satirical violence.
Chapter 11, by Chris Morash, presents an absorbing account of the two phases of Yeats’ fascination with Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, both embodying acts of resistance to censorship, before and after the creation of the Free State: the poet emerges as a canny operator in, for example, the careful toning-down of his own version of the play (evidenced by the deletions in his copy of Jebb), which aimed to thwart the Catholic-inspired ‘Committee on Evil Literature’ in the mid-1920s. Maureen Alden (Chapter 16) discusses Michael Longley’s 1994 poem ‘Ceasefire’, his 14-line crystallization of the Achilles/Priam scene in Iliad 24, alongside its model, and with full regard to its context of production in the Troubles (the pain of which is starkly evoked in a single page, 309); the essay enables an enriched reading of both texts. Finally, Suzanne O’Neill’s study (Chapter 19) of the Dublin GPO and the Parliament Buildings at Stormont unpicks the powerful political symbolisms of these two neoclassical structures, with regard to architectural style, fabric, iconography and other features; there is much of interest here, most of all in the way in which the GPO was transformed from a statement of British imperialism (though perhaps more quietly worded than O’Neill suggests) to a proud assertion of Irish independence following the Easter Rising of 1916, a striking example of the fluidity of meaning to which, as we have become increasingly aware, the classical inheritance lies open.
