Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments and editorial notes
- INTRODUCTION: An overview of scope and method
- PART I CONTEXTS: INTELLECTUAL, PSYCHOLOGICAL, AND NATIONAL
- Prologue to Part I
- 1 MODERNS, ANCIENTS, AND THE SECULAR: THE LIMITS OF SOUTHERN HEGEMONY
- 2 THE SPIRITUAL: TRUTH WAS NOT THE INCLINATION OF THE FIRST AGES
- 3 AN AMBITION TO EXCEL
- 4 THE MAKING OF A MODERN CANON
- PART II TEXTS WITHIN CONTEXTS. ESSAYING ENGLAND: OUR GENIUS, OUR CLIME
- PART III GROWING ONE'S OWN. THE BRITISH ODE FROM COWLEY TO GRAY
- PART IV EXPANDING THE BORDERS. JEWS AND JESUS: THIS ISRAEL, THIS ENGLAND
- PART V CELTS, GERMANS, AND SCOTS: TOWARDS A UNITED KINGDOM
- APPENDIX: The text of Handel's “Israel in Egypt”
- Index
1 - MODERNS, ANCIENTS, AND THE SECULAR: THE LIMITS OF SOUTHERN HEGEMONY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments and editorial notes
- INTRODUCTION: An overview of scope and method
- PART I CONTEXTS: INTELLECTUAL, PSYCHOLOGICAL, AND NATIONAL
- Prologue to Part I
- 1 MODERNS, ANCIENTS, AND THE SECULAR: THE LIMITS OF SOUTHERN HEGEMONY
- 2 THE SPIRITUAL: TRUTH WAS NOT THE INCLINATION OF THE FIRST AGES
- 3 AN AMBITION TO EXCEL
- 4 THE MAKING OF A MODERN CANON
- PART II TEXTS WITHIN CONTEXTS. ESSAYING ENGLAND: OUR GENIUS, OUR CLIME
- PART III GROWING ONE'S OWN. THE BRITISH ODE FROM COWLEY TO GRAY
- PART IV EXPANDING THE BORDERS. JEWS AND JESUS: THIS ISRAEL, THIS ENGLAND
- PART V CELTS, GERMANS, AND SCOTS: TOWARDS A UNITED KINGDOM
- APPENDIX: The text of Handel's “Israel in Egypt”
- Index
Summary
READING THE CLASSICS
The case for the Ancients, especially for Rome, was based in part on the demonstrable achievements of the parents of European culture, achievements, one theory held, no longer possible for the Moderns. The Ancients' world and its people were in their youth and vigor, and so strength of mind and body were superior to those in the subsequent world of decline. Little wonder that no more Homers or even Virgils could arise, since they were typical of unrepeatable greatness and reflected lost heroic ages. Dryden's Preface to his Plutarch (1685) exploits this theory of decline, bemoans the loss of varied strengths from the noble past, and laments the diminution of his own age. “How vast a difference is there betwixt the productions of those Souls, and those of ours!”
The world in its prime of course included the arts of war, in which republican Rome seemed peerless in both expansion and in alleviating the triumph of arms with the polish of civilization. In 1664 Abraham Cowley thus remarks that “the Roman victory / Taught our rude Land, Arts, and Civility.” Like the poetry of Katherine Philips, which he celebrates, Cowley says that Rome “overcomes, enslaves, and betters Men.”; Addison's Cato (1713) shows Juba, a Numidian Prince, telling his general Syphax that even martial virtues are a fraction of Rome's more important role.
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- Information
- Britannia's IssueThe Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian, pp. 25 - 47Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993