Pater the Classicist: Classical Scholarship, Reception, and Aestheticism ed. by Charles Martindale, Stefano Evangelista, Elizabeth Prettejohn (review)

This is that uncommon thing, a book of the conference with real coherence and significance. Pater’s profession was that of a classics don at Brasenose College, Oxford, and most of his work is infused with Hellenism in at least a general sense, but his directly classical writings have been rather neglected. This volume is an attempt to redress the balance. In the nature of things, these essays are a mixed bunch, but the predominant thrust is to find out what Pater did in the field of classical interpretation and to provide a mostly sympathetic account of it. Robert Fowler makes a reflective and not exaggerated case for the value of Pater’s ideas about Greek religion (he is not the first to point out that Pater said some things that were being said by Nietzsche at about the same time), and he suggests that Pater may still teach us something about method, if not fact. Elizabeth Prettejohn gives a learned and lucid analysis of “Pater and Sculpture” — fair-minded enough not to conceal that he took most of the facts from Overbeck and decorated them with his own graceful arabesques. The book opens with an evangelizing piece from Charles Martindale (including the eccentric claim that Pater is a suitable model for classicists today), which makes rather a good case for the coherence and consistency of his thought in this area. What Martindale cannot do is turn Pater into a good classical scholar. Pater’s one article fully on a work of Greek imaginative literature, Euripides’s Bacchae, is crude and foolish; it is willfully omitted from Martindale’s chapter, and barely mentioned elsewhere. This book does valuable service, but the parts of Pater that lastingly matter are still the Ur-Proustian exploration of personal experience (Marius, The Child in the House), the expression of a certain kind of aestheticism, and a few purple set pieces, like the famous rhapsody on the “Mona Lisa.” He was right not to stick to the day job.