Studies on the Reception of Plato and Greek Political Thought in Victorian Britain by Kyriakos Demetriou (review)

Within classical reception studies, the nineteenth century is a favourite period. Since the publication of influential studies by Richard Jenkyns, Frank Turner, Christopher Stray, and Norman Vance, the number of discussions about the Victorian reception of the Greco-Roman past has steadily grown. Much of the work is rigorous, perceptive, and methodologically sophisticated, and the boom in Victorian classical reception studies is a reason to celebrate. This expensive addition to the Variorum series is a collection of previously published articles by Kyriakos Demetriou, who has written widely about classical reception in the nineteenth century and who teaches at the University of Cyprus. The articles, published between 1995 and 2009, are concerned with the reception of Plato and, to a lesser extent, the history of ancient Greece. Many deal with George Grote, about whom Demetriou has commented extensively elsewhere; in fact, Demetriou is the editor of a magnificent, multi-volume compendium of nineteenth-century responses to Grote that appeared in 2004.

Grote is best known for his History of Greece, which was published in twelve volumes between 1846 and 1856. This work dramatically reimagined the history of Athenian democracy and is one of the central texts responsible for promoting early Athenian history as an originary golden age. Grote even argued that Alexander the Great was not a Greek of the same purity as Aeschylus and Thucydides and charged him with the dilution of Hellenism and the corruption of the Hellenic ideal. Temple Stanyan, Oliver Goldsmith, William Mitford, John Gillies, and other writers before Grote wrote histories of Greece, but none of them could summon the narrative power of the former MP and philosophical radical. One author who came close was Connop Thirlwall (bishop of St. David’s in Wales), whom Demetriou discusses and who completed his history of Greece in eight volumes between 1835 and 1844. But Thirlwall’s work “disappeared under the heavy storm of Grote’s twelve-volume apparatus,” and Thirlwall himself generously described Grote’s history as a “glorious monument of learning, genius and thought” (II .87).

Many of these articles are concerned with Grote’s writings on Plato and especially with his study in three volumes, Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates (1865), published some ten years after the completion of his history. Grote’s work helped lead to a radical reassessment of Plato’s writings in the second half of the nineteenth century. For Thomas Taylor and the Romantics, Plato was associated with the mystical tradition and with late antique Neoplatonism. Grote opposed this approach to Plato, as he opposed the German Platonism of thinkers such as Friedrich Schleiermacher. Demetriou sketches in detail the conceptual debt that Grote owes to James Mill and J. S. Mill and makes clear that Grote’s arguments would not have been possible without the Mills, especially the younger Mill. Demetriou writes that Grote’s Plato “integrated extensively Mill’s insights about the values of individuality, freedom and self-development into a framework which remained tied to the empiricism he shared with Mill. . . . Plato should be read in the light of On Liberty, a work that provided to Grote, inter alia, the analytical and conceptual framework to develop and enlarge his interpretive scheme” (VII.38).

Demetriou paints on a broad canvas. He portrays not only the contributions made by Grote to Platonic studies in the nineteenth century but also the changing landscape of Platonic interpretation across the whole of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. He takes his reader from Taylor through to Benjamin Jowett and beyond, and argues forcefully that many late nineteenth-century British Idealist readers of Plato were, in effect, arguing against Grote’s views. But the championing of Plato by the Idealists led, in turn, to a reaction against the Greek philosopher, who came to be regarded “as the prophet of fascism” and at least “partly responsible for the emergence...