A Conflict of Memory: Greece, Byzantium, and British Identity in the Nineteenth Century By Tristan Craig Between the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, Greece and Rome were in Europe hailed as the pinnacle of human achievement – culturally, artistically, and politically. Neoclassicism permeated art and literature, with interest in Ancient Greece eventually moving to the fore in Britain through the Romantic Hellenism which arose in the context of the Napoleonic Wars. Whilst Classical Athens would be adopted into the collective memory of nineteenthcentury Britain, manifesting conspicuously in Enlightenment treatises, revivalist architectural form, and the Philhellenic movement, its consolidation in modern society rested on ideological, rather than chronological, continuity. In response to this movement, contemporaneous scholars sought to trace the link between the two divided worlds through the predominantly neglected Byzantine Period, spanning over one thousand years of Greek history. This article will examine the extent to which ancient Greece and the eastern Roman Empire were appreciated and appropriated in Britain during the nineteenth century and how this manifested in the emerging independent Greek state, British identity, and wider European interests. Whilst discourse on Periclean democracy pervaded the works of Scottish Enlightenment scholars such as David Hume, John Gillies, and William Mitford during the eighteenth century, it was within the context of the Napoleonic Wars that Philhellenism would fully take root in Britain. Enmity toward Napoleon, who declared in 1812, ‘I am a true Roman Emperor; I am of the best race of Caesars – those who are founders’, had profound implications for the distinctly Roman model of liberalism that proliferated in eighteenth-century Britain. Polemical works against French imperialism ultimately gave rise to revisionist historiography which sought to trace the link between the ancient Greek polity and British liberalism. However, it was the publication of James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s The Antiquities of Athens in 1762 which would introduce the British public to the grandeur of Athenian architecture and provoke a burgeoning interest in Classical Greece. This was realised nowhere else other than in the attempts to reconstruct the Athenian Parthenon, a temple dedicated to the goddess Athena, and from which ornamentations had been largely stripped by Lord Elgin in the formative years of the nineteenth century.
Three notable projects in Cambridge, Edinburgh and London sought to emulate the Parthenon, the latter two serving as monuments to the Napoleonic Wars, telling of the stance against the previously dominant Roman classicism which Napoleon styled himself upon. Whilst the Cambridge and London projects did not progress beyond the initial plans, public fundraising began for Edinburgh’s National Monument. The city was styled as the cultural and intellectual successor of Athens, ‘whose genius has already procured for it the name of the Modern Athens’ and its topography, namely Calton Hill, was thought to mirror the Athenian Acropolis, lending itself well to attempts to rebuild the Parthenon upon it. For all the enthusiasm of those most committed to the Hellenization of the city, a lack of money proved to be the undoing of the project and on 30 June 1829, one of the principal architects, William Henry Playfair, announced that construction would cease indefinitely. The acquisition of the Parthenon marbles by the British Museum in 1816 heralded a profound interest in the antiquities of Classical Greece. Richard Lawrence, in his 1818 monograph highlighting key exhibits of the Museum, commended the purchase of ‘this admirable collection of Grecian sculpture, being for the improvement and exaltation of the British school of art’. His aim was both to celebrate the artistic achievement of the sculptures and denounce those who, ignorant of their inherent beauty, who might question their worth. An admiration for the splendour of Classical Greece was gaining traction, even amongst those whose political persuasion was at odds with “Greek liberalism”. Lord Byron, who would come to join the Greeks in their fight for independence, was a staunch supporter of Napoleon Bonaparte (referring to himself by the initials ‘N.B.’) and remarked melancholically on the Athens which confronted him on his travels, far removed from the Classical world he admired. In the second canto of his 1812 poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, he writes:
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‘Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth! Immortal, though no more; though fallen, great! Who now shall lead thy scattered children forth, And long accustomed bondage uncreate?’
