The Ends of Empire: Romantic Interpretations of Greek Decline

Abstract

How did historical actors in Romantic Britain understand the decline of the Greek city states and their potential relevance for Britain? One traditional assumption is that the Greek example aided the rise of democratic national self-determination and a related philhellenism, while Rome, in contrast, was equated with empire and a potential model for both expansion and decline. But as this article and others collected with it make clear, democracy was not the only political inheritance of ancient Greece. A closer look at British Romantic understandings of Greece and Greek history reveals that even in this period associated with philhellenism and other movements for democratic self-determination, Greece too could be a sign of empire and decline. As this article argues, in the work of William Mitford, John Gillies, William Young, and others, later eighteenth-century histories of Greece present a powerful model of anti-democratic thought, one that sets the terms for the later, more positive recovery of Greece and democracy. Moreover, these histories show us how — as in the companion essays by Rachel Foxley and Ben Early — a particular mix of ancient and contemporary sources are used to fit the events, concepts, and problems associated with the history of ancient Greece into a narrative with immediate contemporary resonance. Ultimately, then, the article contributes to the larger themes of the volume by expanding our understanding of the Greek political legacy beyond Plato and Aristotle and beyond the association of Greece with democracy. It shows further how, in a manner consistent with the self-reflexivity that has come to characterize reception studies, the classical past is made and not given as the appeal to antiquity contributes to the understanding of present events. The meaning of ancient Greece changes as it is interpellated into the present, and these past engagements, in turn, frame our own current understanding of ancient Greece and its multiple legacies.