British Classics Outside England: The Academy and Beyond

7: J. A. K. Thomson and Classical Reception Studies: American Influences and “Classical Influences”

129 iBarbara F. McManus J. A. K. Thomson and Classical Reception Studies American Influences and “Classical Influences” Chapter 7 The field of classical reception studies identifies itself as “a fairly new area of prominence in anglophone scholarship” (Hardwick and Stray 2007b, 2). Its recent growth has certainly been noteworthy, with the 2004 foundation of the Classical Reception Studies Network in the United Kingdom and a burgeoning series of books produced primarily by British scholars (Hardwick 2003; Martindale and Taylor 2004b; Martindale and Thomas 2006; Hardwick and Stray 2007a). In an article on “Reception Studies: Future Prospects,” James Porter asks, “Is it too soon for the renewed field of reception studies to turn reflexively upon itself and to examine its own traditions from a critical and metatheoretical perspective?” (Porter 2007, 473). This essay aims to provide some background for such an examination of reception studies by looking at a British pioneer in this field, J. A. K. Thomson, whose work has been almost completely overlooked by modern classicists. Research in the later reception of classical antiquity owes its new prominence and legitimation as a modern field of inquiry chiefly to the work of classicists in the United Kingdom, with American classicists increasingly following the lead of their British colleagues. The genesis 130 Barbara F . McManus of J. A. K. Thomson’s work in reception studies, however, can be found at least partly in the United States, providing an excellent illustration of the principle that influences rarely operate in only one direction. Thus an exploration of Thomson’s place in the history of reception studies will also illuminate a little-known two-way relationship between British and American classics in the first half of the twentieth century. AMERICAN INFLUENCES On 19 September 1919, a 40-year-old Scottish classicist stepped off the gangplank of the S.S. Denis onto American soil. James Alexander Kerr Thomson1 had come to the United States to take up a one-year position as visiting lecturer at Harvard University, hoping that this would lead to some kind of permanent academic employment, since he had been eking out a living through part-time university teaching, secondary teaching, and examining in Scotland and England. Although America was to offer him another temporary position, as a sabbatical replacement at Bryn Mawr College in 1921–1922, his future was in London as professor of classical literature and chair of the classics department at King’s College, a post he obtained in 1923 through the help of his mentor and friend Gilbert Murray (for a detailed study of Murray and Thomson, see McManus 2007). Nevertheless, his two years in the United States, teaching at an all-male university and at a liberal arts college for women, gave him a first-hand perspective on American education, which was greatly augmented by his life-long friendship and shared summers with Grace Harriet Macurdy, professor of Greek at Vassar College (see McManus, this volume). During his years in the United States, Thomson had many opportunities for personal observation of the American classical community; besides teaching at Harvard and Bryn Mawr, he presented a paper at the 1919 annual meeting of the American Philological Association in Pittsburgh and made a lecture tour that included Vassar and what he described in letters to Murray as “the perfectly enormous Universities of Michigan and Illinois,” examples of “those great State-owned machines run on strictly business principles” (25 May 1920; 15 January 1923: GM 171.232–33; 172.71–72).2 His impression was not generally favorable. When Harvard asked him to contribute an article to Harvard Studies in Classical Philology (Thomson 1920), he wrote Murray that he was not perfectly satisfied with his piece, but “it would be difficult to be more depressing than some of the Studies. It is strange that American scholarship, even when very good, should tend to be so dull” (15 July 1919: GM 171.226–27). Many years later he expressed much the same opinion to Sir Stanley Unwin when asked whether Allen & Unwin should commission a J. A. K. Thomson and Classical Reception Studies 131 translation of Burckhardt’s Griechische Kulturgeschichte: “Have you any means of discovering whether there is an American translation on foot? American classical scholars, not being as a rule very original, go in much more than English for translations from German” (30 November 1953: AUC 615/20).3 On...