Homer's Turk: How Classics Shaped Ideas of the East

by Jerry Toner

Overview

A seventeenth-century English traveler to the Eastern Mediterranean would have faced a problem in writing about this unfamiliar place: how to describe its inhabitants in a way his countrymen would understand? In an age when a European education meant mastering the Classical literature of Greece and Rome, he would naturally turn to touchstones like the Iliad to explain the exotic customs of Ottoman lands. His Turk would have been Homer’s Turk.

An account of epic sweep, spanning the Crusades, the Indian Raj, and the postwar decline of the British Empire, Homer’s Turk illuminates how English writers of all eras have relied on the Classics to help them understand the world once called “the Orient.” Ancient Greek and Roman authors, Jerry Toner shows, served as a conceptual frame of reference over long periods in which trade, religious missions, and imperial interests shaped English encounters with the East. Rivaling the Bible as a widespread, flexible vehicle of Western thought, the Classics provided a ready model for portrayal and understanding of the Oriental Other. Such image-making, Toner argues, persists today in some of the ways the West frames its relationship with the Islamic world and the rising powers of India and China.

Discussing examples that range from Jacobean travelogues to Hollywood blockbusters, Homer’s Turk proves that there is no permanent version of either the ancient past or the East in English writing—the two have been continually reinvented alongside each other.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674073142
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	03/05/2013
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Jerry Toner is a Fellow at Hughes Hall at the University of Cambridge.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 5 Gibbon's Islam

Prior to the eighteenth century, attitudes towards Islam had been predominantly, if not entirely, hostile. The term Muslim had become practically synonymous with the Turk and so was often thought to share the same attributes of barbarity, despotism and lustfulness. Much of this negativity can be ascribed to a need of Christian Europe to try and maintain a healthy distance between itself and its greatest military, religious and cultural threat. As Turkish power waned, though, and that of western European nations rose, the need to maintain such a hard divide reduced. It became possible to consider the East in a more balanced, less fraught manner. Historians, such as Edward Gibbon, were able to make use of better quality information to see Islam in a far more positive light, as is revealed in his account of the rise of Islam in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon's work, along with other writing on the Orient, was not, however, written in a void. All these texts expressed contemporary western developments: the move towards greater individualism, the questioning of traditional political structures, the challenge to religious authority. The Orient, therefore, came to be seen in relation to these ongoing debates about the nature of power and how it should be organised, and the development of ideas of progress and civilization. All this had profound implications for how the inherited knowledge of the ancients should be treated. And classics, as the highest form of learning of the day, played a central role in all these debates.

As Ayres says, Gibbon not only wrote about Rome but "cultivated certain Roman attitudes and sensibilities, and in this respect he was representative of the age." It was not just the achievements but the outlook of the great men of the Roman republic which writers such as Gibbon admired, and they tried to imitate these habits of mind in their own feelings. The first half of the eighteenth century, therefore, saw Roman aristocratic ideals adopted in upper class English culture and thought. This favouring of the neo-classical was partly a matter of aesthetics. Classics stood for what was decorous and tasteful. It was bad taste, asserted the Earl of Shaftesbury that "makes us prefer a Turkish History to a Grecian, or a Roman; an Ariosto to a Virgil; and a Romance or Novel, to an Iliad." It was also a question of morals: symmetry and proportion were seen as essential components to a good and a well-lived life. But self-interest was also at stake. Both political and social motives existed for looking to antiquity to provide suitable models for the eighteenth century. Rome, of course, had been both republican and imperial in its long history but the English elite at that time had a preference for the republican model because it suited their privileged position in the new political settlement that had been established after the Glorious Revolution. By adopting some of the virtues of the Roman republic as its ideals, the English aristocracy sought to justify the oligarchy they now formed at the same time as aggrandizing it by historical parallel. Men such as these naturally turned to the heroes of Homer and Plutarch for inspiration, since they recognised in them the same qualities of rank and title they possessed themselves.

Roman models of political and moral behaviour lent authority and legitimacy to the English elite's claim to good governance. Horace, in particular, with the emphasis on his moderation and wisdom, seemed to epitomise the kind of calm that was needed after the revolutionary crises of the previous century. His literary persona of the gentleman writer was also attractive to the landed gentry of the shires. Such men turned to garden architecture to help reinforce the elite's image of itself as guarantor of the nation's newly won liberty. The message was a simple one: the best moral and political values of classical antiquity expressed in a new harmonious relationship with nature. Tastes were to change, in particular in the late eighteenth century with a switch in fashion towards classical Greece. At a time when more revolutionary models were needed, Greece offered a more fertile seed-bed of comparisons and ideas. Writers like Horace and Virgil seemed artificial and lacking in the down-to-earth honesty of Homer. Greek religion seemed so much more sincere than the political manipulation that characterised dealings with the Roman pantheon. But whether the vogue was for the Greek or the Latin, the central importance of antiquity and its values remained the same.

To be fair, the elite also had more altruistic motives for turning to the past. The Roman republic had been based on the individual's duty to serve and defend it. They tried to use the image of Roman republican ideals to establish a more unifying image of individual freedom that was not incompatible with the notion of either aristocracy or constitutional monarchy. To read the classics was, therefore, to publicly express devotion to freedom. Gibbon was later to point out that it had been loss of freedom, of virtue, and of honour that had been central to Rome's decline and inseparable from it. The Glorious Revolution had also enshrined religious toleration, save for Catholics, and ancient Rome was able to furnish a "model of toleration" and a "rational and natural religion whose pietas underpinned civic-minded virtus." The importance of morality to the aristocratic idea of government meant equally that they saw it as a prime mover in the rise and fall of nations. Hence Gibbon's image of decline and fall "stressed the need for the British to consider morals for the survival of their own empire." The cause of that decline - luxury and corruption stemming from immoderate greatness - had resulted in a loss of liberty and a move towards absolute monarchy. The flow of wealth and power to Britain from its oriental acquisitions and business interests posed a direct moral threat to the survival and health of the polity.

The genuine sense of nostalgia for the ancient past that many English gentlemen so clearly felt went hand-in-hand with the knowledge that they were far removed from it. This was brought painfully home to them when travelling in what had once been the Eastern and North African provinces of the Roman empire. The true classical Orient lay hidden beneath the surface detritus of the modern Ottoman empire and its post-classical religion. These needed to be swept away – literally in the case of archaeology, metaphorically when it came to conceptualization – if the eternal truth of the classical world was to be rediscovered and recreated. Collecting antiquities was not just some quaint pastime; it was a way for the gentleman to generate a network of tangible reconnections with the ancient fonts of knowledge.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Part I Contexts

1 Classicizing Orientalisms 3

2 The Uses of Classics 28

3 Classics and Medieval Images of Islam 49

Part II Texts

4 Traders and Travelers 73

5 Gibbon's Islam 105

6 The Roman Raj 133

7 Empires Ancient and Modern 162

8 Colonial Adventures 198

Part III Afterwords

9 Screen Classics 229

10 America Roma Nova 248

Notes 271

Index 303

Editorial Reviews

In this unusually accessible academic work, Cambridge classics fellow Toner explores how classical learning has affected English perceptions of the East. For centuries, travelers and historians from Britain drew upon Greek and Roman plays, poems, and histories as “imaginative resources” for describing and trying to understand the cultures of Islam and “The Orient” that seemed alien. Toner ranges widely, from medieval to contemporary sources, to prove his thesis, emphasizing histories, such as by Edward Gibbon, and travelogues, from both famous names like Sir Richard Francis Burton and T.E. Lawrence and less recognized writers like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, perhaps the first secular European woman to chronicle Islamic practices. The concluding section considers the classics’ ongoing relevance, from popular entertainments like The English Patient and 300 to the op-ed pages. Toner focuses on representations of the East, rather than the region itself, showing how “the classical past has helped justify, sanction, and authenticate the English present,” while carefully distancing himself from Edward Said’s Orientalism theory, criticizing it as overly simplistic. While Toner’s argument is disappointingly modest in the end, the work makes a useful addition to understanding Western ideology and should appeal to academics and motivated laypeople alike. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

This is an engaging, timely study of an important and challenging subject.

Choice - C. E. Bene

An eminently readable, well documented, and informative book.

Dimitri Gutas

Toner is a passionate and illuminating guide on the fascinating subject of how the classics has for centuries molded our perceptions of the East and continues to do so today.

Madeline Miller

Writing for a general readership, [Toner] covers in an accessible style a great deal of material from the Byzantine age to the present day, showing numerous ways in which allusions to classical authors have been used to express western (and particularly English) ideas of the East.

Bryn Mawr Classical Review - Tim Rood

Expertly traces how the Greek and Roman classics were used in constructing images of the East...This brisk and intelligent study shows the extent to which the classics created many of the presumptions (and prejudices) of the modern political world.

The Scotsman - Stuart Kelly

Toner’s thesis is both convincing and important. Greek and Roman literature did crucially shape subsequent Western perceptions of the Orient and, in doing so, was only slightly less important than biblical references and Christian theological preoccupations.

Literary Review - Robert Irwin

In this stimulating study, Jerry Toner guides us through an extensive body of English political works, historiography, and travel literature dating from medieval times through to the present that draw upon classical Greek and Roman authors to create images of Islam and the East.

Richard Hingley

[Homer's Turk] gently chips away at modern scholarship about Western writing about the Orient...The merit of Toner's book lies in disabusing ideas generated by 'Orientalism.' Homer's Turk explores the world of early Western travel writing and observations about the Middle East and India. The question he tries to answer is how Europeans, who lacked any frame of reference except ancient Greece and Rome, tried to represent the East to their readers. This was a simple enterprise of making sense of a different world. A reading of the book makes clear that links between power and knowledge were more imagined than real. In this, he is among a new generation of writers who have taken a skeptical look at the issue...A splendid effort.

Mint - Siddharth Singh

In this erudite work of survey, synthesis, and analysis, Toner (director of studies in classics, Hughes Hall, Univ. of Cambridge, U.K.) examines the ways in which English historians and travel writers used the classics as a scaffold for understanding and constructing images of the East through allusion and analogy. His scope is both broad and deep, exploring English notions of Islam, Arabs, and Turks, from the first forays into the Orient through the decline of British imperial might in the postwar period. The real strength of this work is the framework Toner establishes, arguing the flexibility of the classics, and their utility as a mechanism for British social cohesion and as a tool to separate Britain from the East. This framework provides scholars with tools for analyzing both the texts presented here by the author as well as others in independent study. VERDICT This academic work requires knowledge of British imperial history, both Greek and Roman literature, and a smattering of Latin. For the specialist interested in the use of classics, historiography, or image making, this is an excellent piece of scholarship.—Evan Anderson, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames

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