The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature

809 Pages·2015·25.77 MB·English

by  Gilbert Highet

THE
CLASSICAL
TRADITION
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
Th at gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
Th e weary, wayworn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Th y hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Th y Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece
An the grandeur that was Rome.
THE
C L A S S I C A L
T RA D I T I O N
GREEK AND ROMAN INFLUENCES
ON WESTERN LITERATURE
BY
GILBERT HIGHET
with a new foreword by
HAROLD BLOOM
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York Oxford
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First published in 1949 by the Clarendon Press, Oxford
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1957
Reissued in paperback, 1985, by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Highet, Gilbert, 1906–1978.
The classical tradition.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Literature, Comparative —Classical and modern,
2. Literature, Comparative—Modern and classical.
PN883.H5 1985 809 85-15477
ISBN 0–19–500206–7 (pbk.)
ISBN 978–0–19–937769–5
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
FOREWORD
t eighty-three I am about to commence my fi fty-eighth year of
A
full-time teaching at Yale. In this phase of an academic career
I confi ne myself to small discussion groups of senior undergraduates,
just twelve in each, so as to allow time for frequent individual meetings.
Th ese recent years one group centers upon Shakespeare, the other on
American literature from Emerson to Hart Crane.
With the more gifted students, I urge that they study Greek and
Latin, as I did as a Cornell undergraduate (1947–1951). In old age I
remain grateful to my mentor M. H. Abrams, who encouraged me
when most I needed it, and to the classicists who taught me Greek and
Latin: Friedrich Solmsen, Harry Caplan, James Hutton, and Gordon
Kirkwood. Because of them I learned to read closely in Homer, Plato,
the Athenian dramatists, Pindar and the Greek historians, as well as
Vergil, Lucretius, Horace, Ovid, and other Latin poets.
Th ese digital days, relatively few students study the classical
tongues, or even the history of the English language. It is unrealistic
to expect otherwise, a sad conviction that induces me to write this
foreword to Gilbert Highet’s Th e Classical Tradition.
I read Highet’s book when it appeared in 1949, and I gained by
its clarity and comprehensiveness. Two generations later, I have just
reread it, and I fi nd it still to be invaluable.
Highet begins by asserting that our world is a “direct spiritual
descendant of Greece and Rome,” which may have been only a partial
truth sixty years ago and is scarcely accurate in 2013. Th at hardly
seems to me a fl aw in his book, where the argument is less important
than the cavalcade of infl uences and connections that he charts in
English, French, Italian, Spanish, and German literature. His learning
is vast and thorough, and he had the gift of popularizing without
debasing or oversimplifying major works of the literary imagination.
Scope indeed is this book’s strength: from Dante and Chaucer
through Milton on to Montaigne, Shakespeare, Goethe and the
Romantics, and fi nally to James Joyce.
Under T. S. Eliot’s sway, Highet stressed benign transmission
between classical tradition and individual talents. Eliot himself, in
other writings, told darker stories about literary lineages. I admit to an
interest here since I have passed a lifetime teaching and writing about
vi FOREWORD
the anxiety of influence, that joy and anguish of contamination by
which later writers creatively misread what is handed down to them.
Highet might not have been pleased to be told that his Arcadian
pastures were minefields, yet he provides a cornucopia of materials for
students of the influence process.
I give as one instance, among many, Highet’s account of the great
Italian High Romantic poet, Count Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837).
Here is its eloquent peroration:
His closest links in classical literature are with Lucretius the Epicurean, who
believed that creation and the life of man were a pure accident, having no
significance beyond itself; that nature was neither kindly nor hostile to us, but
indifferent; and that the only sensible purpose of living was to attain, through
well-spaced and well-chosen pleasures and an intelligent understanding of
the universe, a calm and reassured happiness. Like Lucretius, Leopardi is a
materialist; like him, he admires the charm of the Greek deities, although he
knows that they have really no effective connexion with our world; like him
he looks at human excitements and efforts with astonished pity, as we do at
an ant-hill struck by a falling apple. But—here is the fundamental difference
not only between Leopardi and Lucretius, but between many modern poets
and nearly all Greco-Roman poets—the conclusion which Leopardi draws is
that life, because of its futility, is a cruel agony where death is welcome; and
the conclusion of Lucretius is that life, if properly understood and managed,
is still liveable. Even Greek tragedy does not mean that life is hopeless; but
that, at its most terrible, it still contains nobility and beauty. Perhaps because
of the sickness which afflicted both Leopardi’s body and his soul, he was
never able to fight through to this truth. At least, not consciously. Yet, as an
artist, he grasped it. His chief debt to classical poetry and his truest claim to
equal the great lyric poets is that he sees his tragic subjects with sculptural
clarity, and describes them with that combination of deep passion and perfect
aesthetic control which we recognize as Greek (Highet, pp. 433–434).
Highet is precisely correct about Leopardi, but curiously upbeat in
regard to Lucretius, and nobly wrong about the Athenian tragedy of
Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Lucretius pragmatically is more
negative even than Leopardi, while Athenian tragedy is as hopeful
as King Lear and Macbeth. Still, Highet’s comprehensiveness helps
to set the mind into motion. He returns me to Aeschylus, Lucretius,
and Leopardi, though he himself declines to absorb their powerful
negations.
My graduate mentor, Frederick A. Pottle, biographer of James
Boswell, and champion of Wordsworth and Shelley, taught me to ask
of every work of literary scholarship, Is it useful? By that test, Highet’s
FOREWORD vii
The Classical Tradition is an admirable work. I have a preternatural
memory, particularly for poetry, yet I cannot hold in my head all the
vast concourse of vital literary tradition that this book offers me. It is
an honorable and lasting aid at this darkening moment.
Beyond that, it has many surprises, because Highet’s erudition was
profound. To read vernacular European literature you must be aware
of Ovid, who informed (among many others) Chaucer, Montaigne,
Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Joyce. Much the same is true of Homer,
Plato, and Vergil who also run like threads through the fabric of
the Western canon. Highet shows a deftness at the scholar’s art of
weaving together a kind of tapestry of allusions, returning again and
again to individual re-entrances of abiding masters.
Best of all, Highet demonstrates that the classical literary past is
always present, that though much is taken, much abides:
The true relation between the modern world and the classical world is
the same, on a larger scale, as the relation between Rome and Greece. It
is an educational relationship. Rome was wealthy and powerful. Much of
its wealth and power was used for sensual pleasures—drink and the races,
parties and yachts, expensive furniture and gorgeous clothes. But, taught by
Greece, many Romans also used the wealth and power of their state to make
possible, for everyone who could read then and thereafter, a stronger and
more sensitive life of the mind. Now we remember them. Some tremendous
conquerors we know, and some tyrants: Caesar, and Nero, and—who was it
who beat Hannibal? The millionaires we have forgotten, except as ridiculous
figures who had dishes of nightingales’ tongues and heated gold swimming-
pools. But those we still know and admire are the men (whether rich or poor)
who used their brains: the self-made lawyer who, after reaching the top of his
profession and holding the highest state offices, made himself a persuasive
voice for much of the most difficult Greco-Roman philosophy; the farm-boy
who, putting the whole Roman destiny into a heroic Greek shape, inspired
Dante and Milton and Tennyson and Hugo and many others; the slave’s
son from the barren south whose thrifty father sent him to Greece, and who
returned to write, first satires on the greedy rich, and then songs of temperate
happiness and deeply based patriotism, which have amused, charmed, and
strengthened hundreds of thousands of modern men. These are Cicero,
Vergil, Horace. In Greece we remember Homer, Plato, Sophocles, Aristotle,
while the rich and powerful and luxurious and ambitious have ceased to exist.
Only thought and art live (Highet, pp. 548-549).
This, the penultimate paragraph of Highet’s “Conclusion,” idealizes
yet once more, but I am moved by the analogue of “an educational
viii FOREWORD
relationship” between Greece and Rome, and the two together, with
us. For that is the contribution of Highet’s massive book: to remind
us that we go back to the classics as Montaigne and Shakespeare did,
in search of provocation that always is a necessity.
Where shall we find meaning, in our lives of works and days? On
sleepless nights, an affliction of old age, one searches for what will
suffice. Frequently, I recite Walt Whitman or Wallace Stevens or Hart
Crane to myself, but sometimes older memories return, a chorus from
Aeschylus or part of an ode of Pindar’s: what transforms signification
into meaning is the sorrow of the years or at better moments the
pleasures of poetry itself.
As the product of an early Hebraic education, I have always felt
some sense of alienation from classical tradition. Education has
mitigated that estrangement, yet something in me is still cut off
from ancient Greek agonistic striving for the foremost place and
from Roman authority, with its drive to augment the foundations.
Highet hardly would have regarded me as his destined reader, but
upon rereading The Classical Tradition sixty years after its original
publication, my admiration for the book’s mastery both of design and
of detail in chronicling classical influences upon Western literature
remains undimmed. I knew Highet only briefly and slightly, but in
old age I am grateful to him for his learning and his passion. His book
lives and will go on living.
Harold Bloom