scholia - University of Otago

'Three Nineteenth-Century Classicists of African Descent', M. V. Ronnick
with Gladstone specifically about the life and poetry of Homer and about
classical studies in general. Gladstone himself was a keen student of Homer and
had published Homeric Synchronism: An Enquiry into the Time and Place of
Homer in 1876. In a letter dated 20th April 1860 at Monrovia, Blyden asked
Gladstone to send him a list of texts he wanted. These included Milton,
Shakespeare, Herodotus, Homer, Cicero and Gladstone's own work on Homer.
Both men had an abiding love for the Latin poet Horace (65 BCE-8 CE).
Gladstone published his translation of Horace's Odes in 1894 and Blyden
peppered his correspondence from 1857 to 1905 with quotations from Latin
authors. Although Blyden quoted a variety of writers such as Vergil (70 BCE-
19 CE) and Juvenal (c. 65-c. 135 CE), his favorite was Horace, and he drew
freely from his Odes, Epistles and Ars Poetica.
Blyden soon became a prolific writer and scholar who used hi s training
in the classics to document and defend his theories about civilizations on the
continent of Africa. He was an eager student of languages and had knowledge
of French, Spanish, Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic. Blyden's interest in the
ancient world stimulated him to put together one of the fust articles written by
a person of African descent to be printed in an American journal. This was his
essay entitled 'The Negro in Ancient History,' which was published in the
Methodist Quarterly Review in January 1869. In the inaugural address he
delivered as president of Liberia College in January 1881, he declared his
allegiance to the classics. In his speech, entitled 'The Aims and Methods of a
Liberal Education for Africans,' he said:
Modern Europe boasts of its period of intellectual activity, but none can equal,
for li fe and freshness, the Greek and Roman prime. No modem writers will
ever influence the destiny of the race to the same extent that the Greeks and
Romans have done.
A few paragraphs later Blyden averred that
what is gained by the study of the ancient languages is that strengthening and
disciplining of the mind which enables the student in . . . life to lay hold of,
and, with comparatively little difficulty, to master, any business to which he
may turn his attention.
By the end of his life Blyden had decided that the time was not right for a
great migration of African-Americans to Liberia. From the start he had met
with considerable opposition to the idea and had come to see a lack of spirit
and intellect among Americans, both black and white. Their pronounced
preoccupation with material things led him to declare that the
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