Some Previously Unrecognized References to Classical Historians in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's The Last Man

Abstract

‘WE are all Greeks,’ writes Percy Bysshe Shelley (PBS) in the preface to ‘Hellas’.1 Given the systematic attempts by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (MWS) to exorcise the post-mortem influence of her husband,2 we should not be surprised to find that this claim, too, is interrogated in her fiction. Throughout The Last Man, MWS subtly aligns the fate of plague stricken modernity with the collapse of progressive political institutions in the classical world. Although largely unrecognized, this usually occurs by way of implicit reference to the works of classical historians like Herodotus, Livy, Julius Obsequens, and Dio Cassius. My goal here is to trace where these allusions occur and comment on the polemical ends to which they are subordinated. Inevitably, however, this project must also form part of a broader critical enterprise that seeks to delineate the influence of antiquity on the second generation Romantics.3 The first classical historian referenced in the novel is Herodotus, whose Histories4 were read by PBS in 1815 and again by PBS and MWS together in the second half of 1821.5 Most notably, Herodotus’ account of the Peloponnesian war in books seven and eight provides MWS with two figures that are central to the rhetorical infrastructure of the novel. The first comes with Lionel Verney’s description of how, ‘on the twenty-first of June,6 it was said that an hour before noon, a black sun rose: an orb, the size of that luminary, but dark, defined, whose beams were shadows, ascended from the west; in about an hour it had reached the meridian, and eclipsed the bright parent of day’.7 Given the later use of Herodotus (below), the key reference here is likely to be the solar eclipse that occurs before Xerxes launches his invasion of Greece. In this connection, Herodotus records that the Persian magi gave Xerxes to understand ‘that God meant to foretell to the Greeks the eclipse of their cities—for it was the sun that gave warning of the future to Greece, just as the moon did to Persia’.8 If so, the black sun image anticipates the destruction of the conventionally Hellenic values of democracy and freedom by the plague. The importance of this latter point, in particular, cannot be overstated. As an eventuality of eastern origin—it first emerged ‘on the shores of the Nile [and in] parts of Asia’9—the plague is identifiable with what Anne K. Mellor calls the ‘Judaeo-Christian demonic other’10—and thus the invocation of the Persian invasion of Greece creates a complex semiotic assemblage that symbolically equates the biology of infection with an externally mediated collapse of progressive political institutions.