Roman History in Hewitt, McGuinness, Friel, Heaney

Abstract

Roman History in Hewitt, McGuinness, Friel, Heaney Brian Arkins Reception Studies is a major growth area in Classics.1 The past has an impact on the present in an active rather than a passive way. T S Eliot explains: ‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different’.2 Marina Carr cites the example of Shakespeare: ‘he took from everywhere but look what he did with his plunder’.3 But this is not a one-way street. Eliot asserted that it is not preposterous ‘that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past’.4 Accordingly, Louis MacNiece states about his poem ‘Autumn Journal’ (1939): ‘Far from being objective about the Ancient Greeks I sent them here in the light of the mood induced in me by Munich’.5 Shakespeare crops up in this regard in David Lodge’s novel Changing Places. An academic says to a young man: ‘You could precisely quantify the influence of Shakespeare on T.S. Eliot’. The young man replies: ‘But my thesis isn’t about that … It’s about the influence of T.S. Eliot on Shakespeare’.6 For our purposes, what counts are the links, real and imagined, between the Roman and the British empires with Ireland subject to Britain.7 Whole books were written in the nineteenth century about the similarities between the two empires;8 this paper covers a later version of that. Francis Haverfield (Camden Professor of Ancient History at Oxford) stated in 1911 that ‘Roman history seems to me at the present day the most instructive of all histories … it offers stimulating contrasts and comparisons. Its imperial system, alike in its differences and similarities, lights up our own Empire, for example in India, at every turn’.9 The Roman Empire and the British Empire were, at their peak, very large. That of Rome covered 1.5 million square miles, with a population of about 60 million people. It stretched from the Atlantic to the Euphrates, and included all territory bordering the Mediterranean, mare nostrum, ‘our sea’. Studies • volume 110 • number 439 315 The British Empire, the world’s sole superpower, covered over 13 million square miles, with a population of 500 million people. These two empires relied on military power to subdue other countries. Rome had a massive army, Britain a major navy. Both countries gained economic advantage from empire. From Macedonia and Syria, unheard of wealth flowed into the city of Rome. Britain’s empire played a very significant role in establishing global capitalism. Both empires furthered the interests of local elites. They presided over a diverse range of cultures, religions, languages, some of which they might seek to suppress. And so to Ireland. Ireland was not conquered by the Romans (as Britain was), but was conquered by Britain. But political writing about Ireland can invoke Britain and Rome. As Horace Walpole said, the British ‘had become the heir apparents of the Romans’. Not least in disingenuous accounts of how this happened. Livy held that the Romans conquered the world in ‘selfdefence ’. J R Seely claimed that the British Empire came about in ‘a fit of absence of mind’.10 In a variety of different ways, Irish writers explore the matter of the two empires: John Hewitt sees Northern Ireland as a Roman colony. Frank McGuinness and Brian Friel trope Ireland as the city of Carthage, conquered by Rome. Seamus Heaney invokes Tacitus on empire.11 The poets John Hewitt and John Montague toured Northern Ireland twice (in 1970 and 1971) to read poetry.12 Under the rubric, ‘The Planter and the Gael’, they aimed to promote community relations between the binary opposition of native versus settler. Hewitt as settler can be ambivalent both about the natives and the local elite: ‘My trouble is I stand between the opposites with only 400 years of Irish earth on my bones, and I am a disaffected person to Stormont bullies’.13 But for Louis MacNeice, Dublin is ‘Augustan capital of a Gaelic nation’.14 Hewitt’s poem called ‘The Colony’ does not name the colony...