Literature

John Raymond profiles a man whose forbears had fought to win the Republic. Henry Adams, however, witnessed and testified to the birth of a nation.

Two very different French travellers, a romantic and a realist, have left us their opinions of the rising civilization of the United States. Arnold Whitridge assesses two contrasting historical viewpoints.

How accurate are Shakespeare’s historical plays? Harold F. Hutchison compares the dramatist’s account of Richard’s downfall with the actual course of events.

Possibly some innate realism prevented the Mesopotamians from seeing death other than objectively. But the Epic of Gilgamesh remains an eloquent witness to the poignancy of their interrogation of the meaning of human life and destiny. S.G.F. Brandon.

E. Badian introduces Cicero, the master of Latin rhetoric, who long strove to preserve the traditional Republican oligarchy, but who perished at the orders of a military triumvirate that came to represent “the reality of power” in Rome.

Francis Watson delights in Defoe's inimitable personage not only as the hero of one of the greatest of all adventure stories, but “as the portrait of an Englishman, a representative of the contemporary middle class, with a Protestant stimulus to hard work, founding a new age of commercial, industrial and political development.”

Peter Green introduces Hesiod, a Boeotian farmer who, towards the end of the eighth century B.C., wrote his poem known as The Works and Days. His cantankerous, radical, earthy views present a remarkable contrast to the stylised grandeur of the contemporary Homeric vision of Greek society.

On March 9th, 1762, in Toulouse, a Huguenot merchant was broken on the wheel for a crime that he had not committed. “It is because I am a man,” declared Voltaire, that he undertook the defence of the unhappy Calas family. His efforts, writes Edna Nixon, produced a drastic reform of the French judicial system.

Far more interesting than Byron's romantic hero, who also inspired a celebrated circus act, is the real Mazeppa, as described in this article by L.R. Lewitter.

D.M. Walmsley analyses the plentiful artistic and personal connections between the explorations of the Virginia company and the Bard.