Classicising Crisis

The Modern Age of Revolutions and the Greco-Roman Repertoire

Barbara Goff, Michael Simpson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351115483
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Geopolitical shifts and economic shocks, from the Early Modern period to the 21st century, are frequently represented in terms of classical antecedents. In this book, an international team of contributors - working across the disciplines of Classics, History, Politics, and English - addresses a range of revolutionary transformations, in England, America, France, Haiti, Greece, Italy, Russia, Germany, and a recently globalised world, all of which were accorded the classical treatment.

The chapters investigate discrete cases of classicising crisis, while the Introduction highlights patterns among them. The book asks: are classical equations a prized ideal, when evidence warrants, or linkages forced by an implacable will to power, or good faith attempts to make sense of events otherwise bafflingly unfamiliar and dangerous? Finally, do the events thus classicised retain, even increase, their power to disturb and energise, or are they ultimately contained?

Classicising Crisis: The Modern Age of Revolutions and the Greco-Roman Repertoire is essential reading for students and scholars of classics, classical reception, and political thought in Europe and the Americas.

1 ‘Innovation’ and revolution in seventeenth-century England

Rachel Foxley

Thomas Hobbes famously put the blame for the English revolution of the 1640s and 1650s partly on MPs who had been overly influenced by their reading of ‘the bookes written by famous men of the ancient Graecian and Roman Commonwealths concerning their Policy and great actions’ and hence had fallen ‘in loue with their [popular or republican] formes of gouernment’ (Hobbes 2010: 110). Hobbes’s depiction of an ideological and one-sided classicising of politics as a driver of the English revolution was itself very partisan and provocative, and historians have been sceptical about how extensively or deeply contemporaries classicised the crisis of the mid-seventeenth century. Scholars of republicanism have given the greatest significance to classicising language in this period, identifying ‘classical republicanism’ as one crucial intellectual and cultural component of the revolution as it developed into the 1650s, but not necessarily (there is debate on this point) as an antecedent of the revolution (Pocock 1975; Peltonen 1997; Skinner 2002; Worden 2002). Certainly when the only republic in English history was established after the execution of Charles I in 1649, its advocates turned to classical texts and examples to justify it; and certainly those classical texts and examples had been the mainstay of grammar-school and university education (Peltonen 2013). But the ways in which texts were read (e.g. by commonplacing for moral exempla), and the political culture within which they were read, might well mean that rather than strenuous arguments for republicanism, the elements of classical culture which were actually pervasive in early modern England were fairly trite and moralising sentiments about public duty which were easily reconciled with monarchical rule (see Cust 2007 for a suggestive example; Sommerville 2007; Cox Jensen 2012). In this chapter I see the classicising impulse as both pervasive and pointed, bipartisan and polarising. This chapter examines the classicising of crisis itself – the classicising of the very idea of regime change or revolution – by tracing the classicising concept of novae res or ‘innovation’ which was a common trope in the understanding of politics in early modern England. This was not initially a classicising impulse evoked by an actual, revolutionary crisis; it was commonplace at least from the start of the century. Indeed, the tropes surrounding ‘innovation’ often suggested that the classics provided an ever-relevant guide to human nature and political morality, and evoked a comfortably timeless view of political life in which the threat from ambitious ‘innovators’ would constantly recur but also constantly be averted. This recourse to the classics thus served to warn but also to reassure. However, as we will see, classicising (Aristotelian) arguments about the dangers of ‘innovation’ also began to be deployed in ways that pointed to possibly irreversible revolutionary changes, and which may indeed have contributed to the polarisation which enabled the revolution.

Discussion of ‘innovation’ prior to the civil war matters, because scholars have not always seen early Stuart people as inhabiting a conceptual world which had a place for notions of revolution. Even once the revolutionary events of the 1640s broke out, contemporaries were likely to call the events they lived through a ‘rebellion’, a ‘civil war’ or a period of ‘troubles’, and there has been an episodic scholarly debate about whether they ever called them a ‘revolution’ and what they meant by that if they did. Under Italian influence, ‘revolution’ did become a political term, and sometimes managed to shake off its astronomical connotations of circularity; it is possible to find examples of ‘revolution’ denoting unidirectional political change, perhaps achieved with a degree of violence, from the later 1640s onwards (Snow 1962; Hill 1986; Rachum 1995; Harris 2000; Cressy 2006: 17–24). This scholarship has undoubtedly shown that revolution in something like our sense of the word was (or became) thinkable in this period, but in showing the impact of the mid-century events on the usage of the term it might be in danger of suggesting that this was not the case before the 1640s. Once we abandon the assumption that the early modern term for revolution must have been ‘revolution’, we can see that there was actually a rich set of discourses and assumptions about revolution in the pre-war period, focused on the widely-used term ‘innovation’. The historiography addressing the term ‘revolution’ is thus very incomplete as a discussion of early modern conceptions of revolution. This chapter will suggest that while both inchoate sides repudiated rather than embraced revolutionary ‘innovation’, their capacity to imagine it nonetheless promoted the mutually defensive polarisation which led to war.

Recent debate has shifted away from overt attention to the causes of the civil war. From the 1940s, a shifting coalition of liberal ‘whiggish’ and socialist or Marxist historians had aimed, ultimately with limited success, to pin down the economic and social preconditions for something like a ‘bourgeois revolution’ in pre-civil-war England (for discussions of these debates and the revisionist reaction see Gurney 2015; Richardson 1998; Hutton 2004; MacLachlan 1996). The vehement rejection of such interpretations by revisionist historians from the 1970s onwards often brought with it a rejection of the label ‘revolution’ for the mid-century crisis, and a concomitant assertion that mindsets in the pre-war period were profoundly ‘unrevolutionary’. The English ‘revolution’ has now re-emerged from the revisionist attack, not as an exemplar of any socio-economic structural model of the causes and consequences of revolution, but as a recognisably revolutionary set of processes in social, political, and cultural terms (Peacey 2013; Como 2018). These processes – the mobilisation of the public, polarisation, and radicalisation both in politics and religion – accelerated rapidly under the pressure of the crisis. Revolutionary aims emerged largely as a result of the developing crisis. I suggest that the conceptions of revolution present before the civil war did, as revisionists might have expected, serve to inculcate a reflexively antirevolutionary mindset. Nonetheless, these pervasive conceptions of revolution also primed people to detect and denounce the warning signs of revolutionary intent, fostering precisely the defensive activism and increasing polarisation which we now see as driving the incipient revolution.

‘Innovation’ could mean something like regime change or revolution because it often acted as a translation or English analogue of the Latin phrase novae res (literally ‘new things’) as the Oxford English Dictionary confirms. Modern dictionaries of classical Latin translate ‘novae res’ or ‘res novae’ as ‘political innovations’, ‘constitutional changes’, and ‘revolution’. ‘Innovation’ might also, as we will see, translate Aristotle’s terminology of revolution or regime change. But ‘innovation’ was far from a neutral term for regime change, because it had inherited the very consistent and striking pejorative connotations of the Latin novae res. Benoît Godin, examining the evolution of the broader concept of innovation rather than the connection with novae res, has argued that a ‘prohibition episteme’ effectively banning innovation applied from the Reformation to the nineteenth century (Godin 2015: 8). Here I argue that the pejorative quality of ‘innovation’ was often derived from its specifically classical revolutionary connotations, but was reinforced by this cultural rejection of innovation in a broader sense. The implications of this are far-reaching, because ‘innovation’ was one of the keywords of early Stuart political discourse.

This chapter will first outline the remarkably consistent Roman usage of novae res, and then show that this strongly pejorative Roman discourse conditioned early modern conceptions of revolutionary ‘innovation’, making it almost impossible to imagine a revolution actually succeeding. An analysis of the translation of novae res into English demonstrates that ‘innovation’ is one of a cluster of terms which could be used to denote revolutionary change in English, including, by the later seventeenth century, ‘revolution’ itself. The following section analyses the significance of this revolutionary sense of ‘innovation’, a pervasive term in early seventeenth-century religious and political debate, for our understanding of political culture in the years before the civil war. Revolutions were not beyond the bounds of early Stuart imaginations, but the desire for ‘innovation’ was always attributed to ambitious or turbulent opponents, whose ambitions were likely to be thwarted. However, the range of meanings of ‘innovation’ in early modern English, combined with Aristotle’s warnings about the origins of revolutions, meant that anxieties about religious change could be – and were – quickly converted into accusations of revolutionary intent, whose implications spilled over into politics too with implied charges of democratic or absolutist ambitions. Aristotle’s analysis also made it easy to accuse rulers, as well as the ruled, of revolutionary innovation, meaning that mutual accusations sprang up which started to drive a dangerous process of political polarisation. Tracing the usage of this apparently conservative, pejorative notion of ‘innovation’ thus takes us much further into the genesis of the English revolution than we might expect.

Novae res in Latin literature

Novae res occurs in classical Latin in very particular contexts. Firstly, the political change or revolution the phrase denoted was almost always in the future. Novae res were the stuff of plans or activities – seditious or subversive plans against the established authorities – and were hardly ever described as actually being achieved. These novae res were often feared by the authorities and fomented by dissatisfied people, whether subjects of Roman imperial rule in more distant provinces or Romans marginalised by poverty or political circumstance. Texts reported fears that the material for novae res might be dangerously available, whether that material consisted of dissatisfied soldiers or civilians, or supplies of arms (Tacitus, Histories 1.6; Ammianus Marcellinus, 20.9.9; Suetonius, Julius 35.1). Such material could be particularly dangerous in the presence of an ambitious or discontented eminent individual, or under particular social, economic, or political conditions. Sallust engaged in this kind of sociological analysis of revolution, noting that when Manlius was stirring up the plebs in Etruria, they were particularly ripe for revolt because of poverty arising from the domination of Sulla (Bellum Catilinae 28.4). Often, however, the analysis was explicitly timeless in its attribution of the desire for novae res to the lower levels of the population. It was simply in the nature of the ‘plebs’ or ‘volgus’ to desire ‘novae res’:

Nam volgus, uti plerumque solet et maxume Numidarum, ingenio mobili, seditiosum atque discordiosum erat, cupidum novarum rerum, quieti et otio advorsum.

The common throng, as usual—and especially so in the case of the Numidians—was of a fickle disposition, prone to rebellion and disorder, fond of revolution and opposed to peace and quiet.

(Sallust, Bellum Jugurthinum 66.2)

In the Bellum Catilinae, Sallust similarly noted that ‘omnino cuncta plebes novarum rerum studio Catilinae incepta probabat’ – ‘the whole body of the commons out of eagerness for change [‘novae res’] approved Catiline’s undertakings’, and elaborated that this was simply ‘more suo’ – ‘according to their usual custom’, because the urban poor will always envy their betters (‘bonis’) and long to overthrow the status quo (Sallust, Bellum Catilinae 37.1). Tacitus similarly generalised (about the ‘populus’ rather than the ‘plebs’): ‘populo, ut est novarum rerum cupiens pavidusque’ – ‘the populace, allured and terrified as always by revolution’ (Tacitus, Annals 15.46). ‘More suo’, ‘ut est’, ‘uti plerumque solet’ – Sallust and Tacitus both naturalised or generalised the restless or revolutionary tendency of the people or the commons. In Livy we see the same social judgement on those who seek novae res, although expressed with less explicit social determinism: those who fled to the sanctuary newly founded by Romulus were a ‘turba … sine discrimine liber an servus esset, avida novarum rerum’ – ‘a miscellaneous rabble, without distinction of bond or free, eager for new conditions’ (Livy 1.8.6). Of course, this popular desire for change or revolution reflected the virtually proverbial fickleness of the ‘mobile vulgus’ (the fickle crowd); almost by definition ‘levissimus quisque’ (‘the most light-headed persons’) sought ‘novas res’ (Livy 24.1.7; Livy 1600: 509). This sense that the desire for ‘novae res’ was not just a matter of political and economic circumstances, but of moral character too, is reinforced by the fact that keenness for novae res was frequently also depicted xenophobically as a national or ethnic characteristic. Like Sallust on the Numidians, Livy attributed a native desire for revolution to Spaniards: ‘ipsorum Hispanorum inquieta avidaque in novas res sunt ingenia’ – translated colourfully by Philemon Holland in 1600 as ‘the naturall disposition of all Spaniards, unconstant, busie, and evermore desirous of novelties and alterations’ (Livy 22.21.2; Livy 1600: 444). Foreigners – particularly those responding restlessly to Roman rule – thus joined the mass of the Roman people in being seen as prone to and excitable to revolution.

Novae res were consistently associated with strong emotion. The descriptions we have already encountered of people as ‘avidus’ or ‘cupidus’ or ‘cupiens’, driven by intense desire, show that it was dangerously strong or uncontrolled emotion which drove people towards novae res. Individuals who sought revolutionary change for their own purposes might mobilise and manipulate this ready emotion in the wider population (e.g. Caesar, Gallic War 3.10; Tacitus, Histories, 1.5, 1.6; Sallust, Bellum Catilinae 28.4). Such tropes drew on the familiar figure of the Greek demagogue and his mutually opportunistic relationship with the people, flagged up in Aristotle’s descriptions of regime and constitutional change (Aristotle, Politics 1304b 21–1305b 39).

While in the Roman literature people were constantly motivated by desire for, or occasionally fear of, this kind of regime change or revolution, novae res hardly ever seemed to actually happen. Novae res were glimpsed only at a certain moment in the potential unfolding of a revolution, and the term may have led readers to expect the ultimate defeat of the attempted revolution. Here a gap opens up between Roman and Greek treatments of revolution: Aristotle, Plato, and Polybius had discussed the occurrence of revolutions, and Aristotle was strikingly matter-of-fact about the factors which brought them about. In contrast, Roman discussions of novae res tended to be pejorative, and to stand apart from discussion of actual changes of regime; such changes seem to have been glossed not as examples of novae res but as ‘mutatio rerum’, ‘commutatio rei publicae’, ‘conversiones rerum publicarum’ and so on (Hatto 1949: 500–1). Novae res ten...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1. ‘Innovation’ and revolution in seventeenth-century England
• 2. Classicising the American crisis, 1760–89
• 3. Virtue, representation, and the politics of ancient Greek history during the 1790s in Britain
• 4. The night of the statues: Revolution and classicism in Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of this World
• 5. Classicising the woman question in nineteenth-century Greece
• 6. ‘What’s the Roman Republic to me, or I to the Roman Republic?’: Victorian classicism and the Italian Risorgimento
• 7. Classics, crisis and the Soviet experiment to 1939
• 8. Seeking new classics in a crisis: Modernity as ancient history in German thought
• 9. Of Minotaurs and macroeconomics: Greek myth and common currency
• Index