Samuel Johnson at War With the Classics

Abstract

lTWO CENTURIES before Johnson's lifetime, Justus Lipsius, great Belgian scholar and critic, like many another from northern Europe traveled to Rome and contemplated ruins of classical past. Deeply moved, he wrote in Latin an account of most famous and monumental one of all-the Colosseum. In this little book, called de Amphitheatro liber (Leyden: C. Plantin, 1584), he allowed his imagination to play upon great ruin, describing it as the shadow and cadaver [umbra & cadaver] of famous edifice, every part of it either pillaged by hand of man or crumbling from passage of time, without joints or limbs of its former body [corporis]. And so he sighs to his companion and asks, who can unearth from such ruins a true likeness? (p. 13). de Amphitheatro is accompanied by a sensitive engraving of Colosseum as it appeared in sixteenth century: crumbling, weedy, and almost as if sinking into earth. The rest of book is author's patient effort to reveal monument's true likeness: he uses ancient writers to illuminate ruin, and facts about ruin to illuminate his texts. Such loving attention to symbols of and from classical past is characteristic of Renaissance; it leads through mythographers, antiquarians, editors, collectors, and many others to classicism so widespread in literature and arts at end of seventeenth century. It led most certainly to Pope's famous declaration in Essay on Criticism ( 171 1 ):