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Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinity examines Victorian receptions of ancient Rome from the French Revolution to the First World War, with a specific focus on how those receptions were deployed to create useable models of masculinity. Romans in Victorian literature were at once pagan persecutors, pious statesmen, pleasure-seeking decadents, and heroes of empire. The Roman parallel was used to capture the martial virtue of Wellington just as it was used to condemn the deviance and degeneracy of Oscar Wilde. Using approaches from literary and cultural studies, reception studies, and gender studies, this book is the first comprehensive examination of the importance of ancient Rome for Victorian ideas about masculinity. With chapters on education, politics, empire, and late Victorian decadence, it makes sense of the manifold and often contradictory representations of Rome—as distinct from Greece—in authors like Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and others.

In AD 60/61, Rome almost lost the province of Britain to a woman. Boudica, wife of the client king Prasutagus, fomented a rebellion that proved catastrophic for Camulodunum (Colchester), Londinium (London), and Verulamium (St Albans), destroyed part of a Roman legion, and caused the deaths of an untold number of veterans, families, soldiers, and Britons. Yet with one decisive defeat, her vision of freedom was destroyed, and the Iceni never rose again. Boudica: Warrior Woman of Roman Britain introduces readers to the life and literary importance of Boudica through juxtaposing her literary characterizations with those of other women and rebel leaders. This study analyzes the narratives of Tacitus and Cassius Dio alongside material evidence of late Iron Age and early Roman Britain. The book draws comparative sketches between Boudica and the positive and negative examples with which readers associate her, including the prophetess Veleda, the client queen Cartimandua, and the rebel Caratacus. Literary comparisons assist in the understanding of Boudica as a barbarian, queen, mother, commander in war, and leader of revolt. Despite the available ancient evidence, the real Boudica remains elusive. Boudica’s unique ability to unify disparate groups of Britons cemented her place in history. While details of her life remain out of reach, her literary character still has more to say.

This interdisciplinary volume of essays examines the real and imagined role of Classical and Celtic influence in the history of British identity formation, from late antiquity to the present day. In so doing, it makes the case for increased collaboration between the fields of Classical reception and Celtic studies, and opens up new avenues of investigation into the categories “Celtic” and “Classical”, which are presented as fundamentally interlinked and frequently interdependent. In a series of chronologically arranged chapters, beginning with the post-Roman Britons and ending with the 2016 Brexit referendum, it draws attention to the constructed and historically contingent nature of the Classical and the Celtic, and explores how notions related to both categories have been continuously combined and contrasted with one another in relation to British identities. Britishness is revealed as a site of significant Celtic-Classical cross-pollination, and a context in which received ideas about Celts, Romans, and Britons can be fruitfully reconsidered, subverted, and reformulated. Responding to important scholarly questions that are best addressed by this interdisciplinary approach, and extending the existing literature on Classical reception and national identity by treating the Celtic as an equally relevant tradition, the volume creates a new and exciting dialogue between subjects that all too often are treated in isolation, and sets the foundations for future cross-disciplinary conversations.

This collection addresses how models from ancient Greece and Rome have permeated Irish political discourse in the century since 1916. The 1916 Easter Rising, when Irish nationalists rose up against British imperial forces, was almost instantly mythologized in Irish political memory as a turning point in the nation’s history and an event that paved the way for Irish independence. Its centenary has provided a natural point for reflection on Irish politics, and this volume highlights an unexplored element in Irish political discourse, namely its frequent reference to, reliance on, and tensions with classical Greek and Roman models. Topics covered include the reception and rejection of classical culture in Ireland; the politics of Irish language engagement with Greek and Roman models; the intersection of Irish literature with scholarship in Classics and Celtic Studies; the use of classical allusion to articulate political inequalities across hierarchies of gender, sexuality, and class; meditations on the Northern Irish conflict through classical literature; and the political implications of neoclassical material culture in Irish society. As the only country colonized by Britain with a pre-existing indigenous heritage of expertise in classical languages and literature, Ireland represents a unique case in the fields of classical reception and postcolonial studies. This book opens a window on a rich and varied dialogue between significant figures in Irish cultural history and the Greek and Roman sources that have inspired them, a dialogue that is firmly rooted in Ireland’s historical past and continues to be ever-evolving.

Every great figure of the nineteenth century—from Gladstone, Carlyle and Ruskin, to Byron, Tennyson and Yeats, or Lyell, Darwin and Huxley—read histories of ancient Egypt and argued about their content. They recognised Egypt as a focal point in disputes over human origins, patterns underlying human history, the status and purpose of the Bible and the cultural roles of the classics. Egyptian archaeology ingrained its influence everywhere from the lecture halls of the ancient universities, to the devotional aids of rural Sunday schools and the plots of cheap sensation fiction. This study shows how Egyptology’s development over the century after decipherment of the hieroglyphic script can only be understood through its entanglement in the historical, scientific and religious contentions that defined the era. This interest was inseparable from Egypt’s status as a Bible land. Rapidly changing forms of nineteenth-century Egyptology were defined by new assumptions about what the Bible was and what its cultural status should be. Almost every leading Egyptologist of this period published works of theology, while religious thinkers—conservative and radical—embraced the study of ancient Egypt with staggering intensity. In the mid century Egypt played a powerful role in radical biblical criticism. By the end of the century, however, the Egyptology of Petrie and the Egypt Exploration Fund was instrumental in a broad fight-back of popular religion against all forms of elite criticism. Readers of Egyptology aimed to synthesise their interpretation of ancient Egypt in accordance with their attitudes to other controversial themes: geology, literal readings of the Bible, Darwinian evolution or historical renderings of Homer. Conversely, Egyptologists recorded their commitment to this public and their debt to a host of geologists, astronomers, theologians and novelists. Drawing on the archives of individuals, Egyptological organisations and museums, this study shows how the unprecedented transformations in this period’s cultural life shaped Egyptology, and how Egyptology in turn drove these transformations on, shaping the society in which it was formed.

The ink and stylus tablets discovered at the Roman fort of Vindolanda are a unique resource for scholars of ancient history. However, the stylus tablets in particular are extremely difficult to read. This book details the development of what appears to be the first system constructed to aid experts in the process of reading an ancient document, exploring the extent to which techniques from artificial intelligence can be used to develop a system that could aid historians in reading the stylus texts. Using knowledge elicitation techniques (borrowed from artificial intelligence and engineering science), a model is proposed for how experts construct a reading of a text. A prototype system is presented that can read in image data and produce realistic and plausible textual interpretations of the writing that appears on the documents. Incorporating knowledge elicited from experts working on the texts, and utilizing image processing techniques developed in engineering science to analyze the stylus tablets, the book includes a corpora of letter forms generated from the Vindolanda text corpus, and a detailed description of the architecture of the system. This research presents the first stages towards developing a cognitive visual system that can propagate realistic interpretations from image data.

This work is a completely rewritten version of The Fasti of Roman Britain (1981), with biographical entries for all senior officers and higher officials who served in the island from AD 43 to 409. All new governors, legionary legates, senatorial tribunes, procurators, and fleet prefects discovered since 1981 are included, and the entries for those previously known are revised. Translations of all sources are also added in this edition. There are sections on local government; governor’s staff; the careers of senators and procurators in the principate; the subdivisions into Upper and Lower Britain, then into four, and finally five, provinces; and the late Roman civil and military system. Further, imperial visits or involvement in British affairs are discussed in detail. These include Claudius’ participation in the conquest and his victory celebrations; Hadrian’s visit in 122 and the building of his Wall; the building of the Antonine Wall; Severus’ expedition, 208-211; the usurpation of Carausius and Allectus; Constantius’ recovery of Britain and Pictish campaign; Constantine’s proclamation as emperor at York and possible later visits; Constans’ expedition in 343; Stilicho’s defence measures; and the end of Roman rule. This book offers a narrative history of Roman Britain, with full citation of sources. The analysis of the background and careers of hundreds of individuals sheds light on the way the Roman Empire worked during a period of over 360 years.

War, Liberty and Caesar is chiefly an attempt to address aspects of early modern English literary and political culture between ca. 1580 to 1650, through the sometimes illuminating prism of the reception of a classical text. It is also a study of that text itself, through the medium of early modern engagements. It examines and interprets responses to Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile across many different forms of discourse, trying to balance an account of the cultural assumptions and practices which shaped Lucan for early modern readers with a sense of the historical specificity of individual engagements, and an evolving narrative of pre-Civil War English writing. It argues that there were many sides to reading Lucan in the period but that collectively many if not most readers used Lucan to express aspects of a troubled, changing political experience. It examines readings of Lucan by a number of important early modern English authors, including Ben Jonson, Samuel Daniel, Christopher Marlowe, Philip Massinger and John Fletcher, Abraham Cowley, and Thomas May. The number and variety of engagements with Lucan in the period suggest it could be called an ‘age of Lucan’.