Classical Mythology, 7th Edition - obinfonet: dia logou

688 THE SURVIVAL OF CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY
Forced to deplore when impotent to save:
Then rage in bitterness of soul to know
This act has made the bravest Greek thy foe."
He spoke; and furious hurl'd against the ground
His sceptre starr'd with golden studs around:
Then sternly silent sat.
ROMANTICS AND VICTORIANS
By the end of the eighteenth century, Pope's heroic couplets were no longer considered
the appropriate vehicle for classical myths. Like the German romantic
poets mentioned earlier, English poets used the myths to express the effect of
classical literature and art on their own emotions. John Keats (1795-1821) was
inspired by the Greeks, although he knew no Greek, and expressed his admiration
and enthusiasm in the sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer and
the Ode on a Grecian Urn. He used the myth of Diana and Endymion as the basis
of his long poem Endymion, in which other myths (Venus and Adonis, Glaucus
and Scylla, Arethusa) were included. His slightly older contemporary and
friend, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), was very widely read in the classics
and translated many Greek and Roman works. His drama Prometheus Unbound
used the Aeschylean hero to express his views on tyranny and liberty.
Prometheus is the unconquered champion of humanity, who is released from
his agony while Jupiter is overthrown. "I was averse," said Shelley, "from a catastrophe
so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of
mankind." Thus, in the tradition of Aeschylus and Euripides, Shelley changed
the myth for his own moral and political purposes. His poems are full of allusions
to classical mythology. One of the greatest, Adonais, is his lament for the
death of Keats, whom he portrays as the dead Adonis. Aphrodite (Urania)
mourns for him, as do a succession of personifications, including Spring and
Autumn (Adonais 16):
Grief made the young Spring wild, and she threw down
Her kindling [growingl buds, as if she Autumn were,
Or they dead leaves; since her delight is flown,
For whom should she have waked the sullen year?
To Phoebus was not Hyacinth so dear
Nor to himself Narcissus, as to both
Thou, Adonais.
Shelley and the Romantics anticipate the uses of classical myths in nineteenth-century
literature, art, and education. 7 In England the classics remained
the foundation of formal schooling, and the knowledge of classical mythology
was widespread if not very deeply understood. Increasingly the learning of classical
literature was linked to morality, a process that was furthered by the doctrines
of Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), who in Culture and Anarchy (1869) saw