C. A. Hagerman. Britain's Imperial Muse: The Classics, Imperialism, and the Indian Empire, 1784–1914.

Abstract

Perhaps the most compelling image in this book appears in its conclusion. In 1803, a Roman mosaic of Bacchus/Dionysus riding a tiger was uncovered while construction work was being done on the East India Company's premises on Leadenhall Street in London. The discovery was fitting, for the mosaic referenced the Dionysian conquest of the East. Its surviving pieces were restored to a high polish and transferred many years later to the British Museum. C. A. Hagerman's study of the imperial affection for the classics similarly takes on the appearance of this restored mosaic. He treats classical discourse as an assemblage that shaped imperial perceptions, conduct, virtue, and vision. In turn, British imperial interpretations shaped classical discourse in light of the present. Like the Roman mosaic, classical discourse appears as a medium and open to multiple readings. While other scholars have critiqued the notion of the Indian sublime in European intellectual traditions, the history of ideas that Hagerman presents is different. This book contributes to the burgeoning literature at the intersection of classical reception studies and British imperial history by analyzing how a divinely sanctioned Roman dominium animated British imperial visions. It mines poems, private libraries, scholarly tomes, popular literature, examination questions, personal correspondence, and memorandums written in English in both India and Britain. Nine full chapters deal with the various ways in which imperial discourse drew on the classics for ideas about the civilizing mission, imperial virtue, subject peoples, and imperial decline. Far from an irrelevant subject of rote learning, the classics appear in each chapter as crucial to imperial subjectivity. Britain's elites, as Hagerman notes, learned to love the classics as schoolboys, gleaning from them a shared code of conduct that would prove indispensable for public life. Even if a muscular Christianity permeated the upper classes in the nineteenth century, elite models of rule held that public men ought to orate like Cicero and rule with a firm hand like Roman heroes—and a steady diet of classical histories of conquest fed the imperial appetite. As the chapter on Roman imperial perfection suggests, republican ideals of martial and civic virtues may well have been pushed aside by Victorian Hellenism, but the fascination with Rome's martial history remained. Even that most modern idea of Victorian progress was not left untouched by the classics.