Homer's Turk

Jerry Toner

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674076334
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

A seventeenth-century English traveler to the Eastern Mediterranean would have faced a problem in writing about this unfamiliar place: how to describe its inhabitants in a way his countrymen would understand? In an age when a European education meant mastering the Classical literature of Greece and Rome, he would naturally turn to touchstones like the Iliad to explain the exotic customs of Ottoman lands. His Turk would have been Homer's Turk.An account of epic sweep, spanning the Crusades, the Indian Raj, and the postwar decline of the British Empire, Homer's Turk illuminates how English writers of all eras have relied on the Classics to help them understand the world once called "the Orient." Ancient Greek and Roman authors, Jerry Toner shows, served as a conceptual frame of reference over long periods in which trade, religious missions, and imperial interests shaped English encounters with the East. Rivaling the Bible as a widespread, flexible vehicle of Western thought, the Classics provided a ready model for portrayal and understanding of the Oriental Other. Such image-making, Toner argues, persists today in some of the ways the West frames its relationship with the Islamic world and the rising powers of India and China.Discussing examples that range from Jacobean travelogues to Hollywood blockbusters, Homer's Turk proves that there is no permanent version of either the ancient past or the East in English writing—the two have been continually reinvented alongside each other.

PART I

Contexts

1

Classicizing Orientalisms

When the thirty-two-year-old George Sandys set out on his travels to the Eastern Mediterranean in 1610, he was keen to satisfy a growing hunger in the English reading public for knowledge about the distant lands where fortunes could be made in the burgeoning spice and luxury-goods trade. The problem he faced was one that confronts all those who write about other cultures, whether historians or travel writers: how to represent the sometimes strangely disturbing features of foreign life in ways that are understandable to an audience back home. Having studied at Oxford, though without taking a degree, and the son of an archbishop of York, Sandys had, like most educated men of his day, a profound knowledge of what we would now call classics—the surviving literature of Greece and Rome. Later in his life he was to publish a translation of part of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and he worked on another of Virgil’s Aeneid. To a man of such erudition, it was only natural that he should turn to these ancient works for resources to help him convey to his readership the kind of customs and beliefs that he had encountered in his travels in the East. His account, published in four books in 1615 as The Relation of a Journey begun an. Dom. 1610, became a standard work of reference for the area of the Eastern Mediterranean that was then under the control of the Ottoman Empire. Its carefully crafted prose is replete with classical references, mythology, and historical precedent. It was through the ancients that Sandys understood this new world, it was through the ancients that he brought it into the collective consciousness, and it was through the ancients that he delivered to his empire-envious English audience an understanding of the greatest European power of the day. All of which was done in a manner that was appropriately urbane and sophisticated for a nation with social aspirations. So when, for example, he described the procession of the crack troops of the Ottoman Empire, the Janissaries, it was not sufficient to note how they had “models of Elephants, boots, swords of wood, and the like borne before them for their ensignes: and the royall standard is no other then a horse taile tied to the end of a staffe.” Sandys felt compelled to bring in a classical comparison to explain fully to his readers the pomp, and even pomposity, of these terrifying Asians: “which though seeming rude, and answerable to their originall, doth retaine, perhaps something of Antiquity. For Homer sticketh the like in the gallantly armed (though not so spirited) Paris.”¹ For Sandys, therefore, the Turk could be fully comprehended, and indeed made fully comprehensible, only as part of a landscape that stretched back to the mythological past. To read and know classical sources was necessary to know and understand the total history and tradition of the place, a place in which the Turk had merely taken up a relatively recent residence. The Turk, therefore, was in a real sense Homer’s Turk.

Yet the effect of comparing the terrible Janissaries with the foppish Paris was also to undercut their dreadfulness. Paris was a man who, as Sandys quotes in his own translation, was overdressed to kill: “Then puts he on a helme well wrought, and brave; Plum’d with horse haires that horribly did wave.” Just how terrifying could a warrior be who paid so much attention to his appearance? Classics therefore also provided the writer with a vocabulary with which to communicate more subtle and critical readings of the Turk. Moreover, Sandys’s use of the Homeric image raised all kinds of questions about the cultural identity of Paris’s effeminacy. The conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans had itself brought out important issues about the Greekness of the Greeks and the Easternness of the Trojans. To what extent therefore could Paris simply be equated with the later Turks? To what extent were the powerful Turks comparable to the Trojans, who could only keep the Greeks at bay before finally crumbling? Was there any real prospect of this happening at the time Sandys was writing? Moreover, if the use of classical imagery was in some sense an attempt to lay claim to the classical past, to what extent did Paris’s softness actually reflect badly on those who like Sandys were staking a claim to have inherited such a tradition? By deploying a Homeric comparison, therefore, the effect of Sandys’s text was not simply to praise or denigrate the Turks, but to highlight the complexity of the traveling Englishman’s relationship with both the Ottoman Empire and the classical learning he took as his companion.

This book is not just about Homer and the Turks. It is about how English historians and travelers have used a range of classical Greek and Roman authors in formulating images of Islam and the East. It brings together much classical material relevant to the formation of English “orientalism,” in the sense of imagery and discourse concerning the East, and examines it in different historical contexts. Classicists have not examined this material in any depth, and I believe this is an important omission because of the fundamental role classics has played in the image-making of English historiography and travel literature. The topic has much modern relevance, given the importance of Islamic-Western relations at the current time, the rise to superpower status of India and China, and the West’s need to come to terms with that. Although there has been some excellent work done on the ways in which the Orient has been represented in the West, particularly in the imperial period, very little has been done on the centrality of classics to this process.² This is an oversight, given the fact that many British travelers and historians who had contact with the East were well versed in the classics. The classics were considered a natural part of a proper education, and so it was equally natural for these writers to turn to these sources for inspiration, authority, and explanation. It is sometimes hard for us in the twenty-first century to realize just how potent a force the study of classics used to be among the educated, primarily the wealthy, classes. Classical authors were copied, read, and cited with ease in the original tongue. Quotes from the works of the ancients combined common currency with prestige. Nor did knowledge of classics serve only to mark off an elite. Antiquity, for many, represented the pinnacle of what human civilization could achieve, and its great writers provided much-loved ideals of thought and art. This shared treasure trove of knowledge brought with it certain collective expectations and influences, with the result that many writers shaped what they saw and chose to narrate according to an assumed facility of classical knowledge among their readers. As David Holton says, “It was inevitable that travelers to classical lands should relate their contemporary observations to their knowledge of the civilizations that had formerly flourished on the same territory.”³ Classics helped express views, provided models and exemplars, it provided a repertoire of rhetorical styles, imagery, comparisons, tropes, and representative figures. Classics acted as a prism through which writers saw the object of their study, one that refracted the images they saw.

The Importance of Classics

Classics was able to act in so pivotal a way because it sat at the heart of English education. Classics rivaled even the Bible as a widespread, flexible vehicle of Western thought.⁴ Of course, when we talk of English education, we mean primarily the education of English elites. Classics was instrumental in the teaching of the wealthy and, indeed, for centuries “provided one of the main sources of their social distinction.”⁵ In fact, classical education was always an exclusive practice used to define membership of an elite.⁶ This class element to the term classics was evident from its first usage. The second-century writer Aulus Gellius ascribed to the Latin writer Fronto the use of classicus; he says he heard Fronto tell “some learned and eminent poet,” in a discussion about correct linguistic usage, to “investigate whether any orator or poet, provided he belongs to that older group—that is, some first-class [classicus], first-rate [literally ‘land-owning’] writer, not one of the lowest class—has ever said ‘four-horse chariot’ in the singular and ‘sand’ in the plural.”⁷ From the outset, therefore, classic writing has been about high socioeconomic status, perceived quality, notions of proper usage, and, conversely, the kind of high-class writing that the poor could not manage to do.

By 1711 the plural term classics was used in English to designate the corpus of Greek and Latin literature.⁸ The lack of a term before that reflected the fact that for most educated people, classical literature was literature. For upper-class Englishmen in the late medieval and especially early modern period, classical education was the only kind of humanistic higher education available. Even then, the range of classical authors studied was constrained to a far narrower range of authors and texts than was to become available later. To some extent, then, the use of classical motifs as a means to understand the Orient was not really a matter of choice. If some early English travelers, for example, thought that the Turks were Trojans, this was not an attempt to understand the Turks, but, as far as these authors were concerned, a simple matter of historical fact. Viewing them in these classical terms was a predominating frame of reference they had to understand all reality, not only the “oriental other.” It is certainly true that their classical education colored all of their perceptions, not just those concerning the Orient. Nevertheless, some degree of choice will always exist: a privileging of a classical analogy above one from the Bible, say. Limited though this choice might seem by comparison with later periods, when the opportunities for historical and literary comparison had expanded dramatically, within the context of the period classics did not represent the complete palette available. And even if it were not accepted that this represented much in the way of genuine choice, the use of comparative material did offer writers a wide variety of ways to express themselves. Such imagery in early English writers, and the specific analogies or allusions they employed, represented positive selections on these authors’ part. It was how they thought they could best say what they wanted to say and get their message across to their readership.

The late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the high-water mark of classicism in England. But this was also a period when classics was starting to lose its significance. Ancient texts were no longer so necessary for practical matters such as law, medicine, philosophy, mathematics, and agriculture. England was at the forefront of the scientific revolution that was rendering many of these old authorities obsolete, and against such a background classical knowledge became “an accomplishment, not a necessity—except for social purposes.”⁹ The end of the eighteenth century, however, saw a revival of interest in Greek and Roman culture, which was fostered in part by the Romantic enthusiasm for the Greek revolt against the Turks, by the discovery of the ruins of Pompeii, and above all by the growing importance of the public schools.¹⁰ As Suzanne Marchand has observed in her study of German orientalism in the age of empire, the growth of interest in the study of classics was also part of a cultural renewal, over and against the landed aristocracy, baroque culture, and orthodox clergy of the previous era.¹¹ In fact, a close, formative relationship existed between the study of oriental languages and the study of classical antiquity. Both relied on the same well-educated, liberal, and middle-class social group for their health, even if the growth in the academic study of oriental literature also helped to destroy a narrow Christian and classical canon of works.¹²

But if classics benefited during this period from liberalism, its survival at the core of English liberal education in the nineteenth century was a function of political conservatism. Classics came to be associated with the virtues of the aristocracy, as opposed to the disquieting middle-class desire for progress and meritocracy. In response to this middle-class challenge, elite institutions such as the public schools, Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and British governmental offices all tried to raise their collective drawbridge and maintain upper-class status by making it academically harder to get in. This they achieved by placing greater emphasis on knowledge of Greek and Latin.¹³ With the acquisition of empire, Britain’s public schools were to place even more emphasis on the seemingly timeless advice on ruling that ancient texts were thought to offer. Not only were Greek and Latin believed to help train the mind and make good citizens, but a profound knowledge of the history of the Roman Empire was held to be indispensable for the administrators of British overseas possessions.

The study of Greek and Roman cultures was used to validate British imperialism. Latin and Greek became steadily more important in the second half of the nineteenth century as Britain sought to increase the number of “gentlemen imperialists” leaving Oxford and Cambridge. Between 1892 and 1914, 49 percent of recruits to the Indian Civil Service came from Oxford and 30 percent from Cambridge. Most of those from Cambridge had read mathematics, and most of those from Oxford had studied classics. Although the ICS entrance examinations were in theory open to anyone within the British Empire, the heavy emphasis on the learning of Latin and Greek by a young age made it extremely difficult for any Indians to succeed. The period 1904–1913 saw 501 Europeans pass the examinations and only 27 Indians.¹⁴ As Phiroze Vasunia has noted, the British operated their empire on a “racialized notion of civility,” with British civil servants conceptualized as gentlemen who knew Latin and Greek.¹⁵ The desire for colonial administrators to be highly skilled in such arcane arts as Greek verse composition reflected the British self-image of themselves as being both the inheritors of the classical tradition and its surpassers.

Classics was deeply engrained in political life in the nineteenth century. Studying classical orators such as Cicero was part of rhetorical training, and quoting from classical authors was a recognized stylistic engine in the House of Commons, as members “watched a piece of oratory moving from point to point, to culminate in the expected passage from Virgil or Horace.”¹⁶ Classically trained members of Parliament knew what passages were likely to come up and must have enjoyed the sense of class superiority and solidarity that this expectation provided. But classics in the Victorian period was not only the preserve of the political elite. Knowledge of antiquity also helped form and identify an important segment of the burgeoning middle class. In Victorian Britain the class structure was marked to a large extent by knowledge of Greek and Latin in elites, Latin among gentlemen, and English among the masses. The important point to note is that classics never only belonged to one simple and definable class. The mushrooming of public schools in the late nineteenth century saw many of the middle class exposed to the supposed benefits of classical education.¹⁷ W. D. Rubinstein has calculated that as many as 25 percent of the young British population would have been incorporated into the value system of the elite by means of ordinary secondary schools aping the distinctive features of public schools: houses, uniforms, games, and the teaching of classics.¹⁸ Even if this figure is the maximum possible for the candidate group for elite recruitment and the reality was much lower, it shows how the British imperial elite did not draw simply from the aristocratic class. Nor was classics wholly unavailable to the working classes, nor were they indifferent to it, as cheap translations became increasingly available through the public library network.¹⁹

The Reception of Classics

What will be abundantly clear by now is that as English needs changed, classics itself was adapted to meet them. Writers used classics to help them reflect their own contemporary agendas. It is striking that Elizabethan travelers, Gibbon, and Indian civil servants all had in common their education in, and often love of, the classics. But seeing the East with classical eyes did not mean picturing the peoples and cultures of the East in the same way. No simple continuity existed in views of the East from antiquity down to the modern era. As the complexity of English relations with the East increased, classics also had to shift to reflect the changes in cultural and intellectual life in England caused by those changes in that relationship. Classics was not, therefore, a fixed pole of comparison. Rather, what people understood by classics and what they thought the ancient world represented was under constant reformulation. The relationship between classics and the East was never stable, and indeed, it was this very instability that made classics such a useful resource for writers seeking to portray the Orient to their audiences back home.

I have focused on examining the reception of classical ideas in Engl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I: Contexts
• Part II: Texts
• Part III: Afterwords
• Notes
• Index