Shelley's Cosmopolitan "Discourse": Ancient Greek Manners and Modern Liberty

Abstract

When he headed for Italy in spring, 1818, Percy Shelley left behind at Marlow life-sized plaster casts of Belvedere Apollo and Medici Venus which had presided over his reading of Plato and his writing of Laon and Cythna (MWS Letters 1: 38, 38n and White 1.505). Reading A. W. Von Schlegel's Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature on way to Italy, a work that describes Greek classical drama as fundamentally analogous to sculpture, he anticipated a less bookish, more direct encounter with sculpture and architecture of classical civilizations (MWS J 16-21, march 1818). Like his modern Greek protagonists in Laon and Cythna, he sought to regenerate from Mediterranean culture material ruins of a classical Greek of civic liberty. Halting for summer in cool retreat of Bagni di Lucca, however, Shelley continued to analyze Greek culture through its texts--first working on a translation of Plato's Symposium and then, in late July, drafting his second try at an introduction to dialogue (Weinberg 21; Jones, xiii). This essay, which he titled on Manners of Antient Greeks, opens a cosmopolitan defense of classical Athenian manners in love--that is, of their practice of homoeroticism. Homophobia had blocked modern British readers from accepting Plato's portrayal of love between men as a desire for ideal beauty & equal to that in Phidias' and Praxiteles' sculpture. In this essay, then, Shelley attempts a sympathetic explanation of that difference in sexual orientation; and he mediates that explanation through an appeal to beautiful forms of sculpted human figure. Yet, as he works through drafts of essay in two different notebooks, his argument becomes a different sort of cosmopolitanism, one that would in his view be more inclusive and egalitarian. For Greek homoeroticism, he argues, mars otherwise perfect society of ancient Greece because it excludes a heterosexuality based upon intellectual and civic liberty of women. (1) The mediating, persuasive form of his argument is loveliness--the desirable beauty--of human form. Shelley begins drafting this preface in a small notebook (Bod. MS. Shelley adds. e. 11) just after fragment On Love. In that essay, which Donald Reiman and Steven Jones suggest was his first try at writing an introduction to Symposium translation (Jones xiv, xx n. 8; Reiman, SC VI, 638-47), he analyzes idea of epipsyche or mental projection of an version of self as an object of desire. Having explored consequences of pursuing such an ambiguous in Alasto, his reading of Phaedrus on August 4-5 would have grounded this concept more firmly in Athenian culture (MWS Journal 217-18; Halperin, Diotima 269, citing Phaedrus 255c-e). Following On Love in notebook, Discourse also associates loveliness with an idealizing image-making by lover. Though pages of these drafts include scarcely any of his characteristic visual sketches, his verbal text immediately evokes this visuality, first, with graphically expressive title, written with a flourish, and then with content. Shelley opens his Discourse by asking, What was combination of moral & political circumstances which produced [unc] unparallelled a progress ... in literature & and why it so soon recieved a check are problems left to ... posterity to wonder over, as the ruins of a fine statue obscurely suggest to us grandeur & perfection of whole (17-18). This powerful simile of sculpture as bridging time even in its ruined state leads into a consideration of original and interdependent grandeur of all arts practiced in classical Greece. Though little evidence of their painting remains except for verbal description, Their sculptures are such as we in our presumption assume to be models of truth & beauty & ^to which with all no artist of modern times can produce anything com forms in any degree comparable (18). …