Turner states that until the late 18th century, England looked to Rome and the Christian era as its cultural precursors. With “only peripheral roots in Greece,” he writes that “Greek antiquity began to absorb the interest of Europeans in the second half of the eighteenth century when the values, ideas, and institutions inherited from the Roman and Christian past became problematical.” With Rome, a problem was its war-like culture. The main problem with Christianity was its metaphysical superstructure in a world increasingly dominated by science. Turner’s theme is that extensive, value-laden and interest-driven perspectives pervaded these Victorian era studies on ancient Greece. Of Victorian intellectuals he writes that, “just as their selectivity in describing Hellenism did not allow them to see ancient Greece truly or to see it whole, neither did it permit them to probe the inner depths and nether side of human nature. Their Hellenism almost denied the existence of the nonrational, aggressive, and self-destructive impulses in humankind.” There was this “reading of contemporary moral propriety into the Greek experience” and “as the values of a peace-loving, respectable, bourgeois society and liberal state were projected onto the ancient Greek world, people who wished to protest or escape those values could do so by revising or rejecting that image of Greece.” Greece was a blank slate and “Greece could represent almost any value or outlook that a writer wished to ascribe to it.” The writing on Greece during the Victorian age was of “overwhelmingly amateur character,” Turner continues and the work “was almost always derivative of theological or ecclesiastical concerns or related directly to matters of current politics, morals, or aesthetics.” The scholarship was “engaged”: “Disinterested or dispassionate criticism was simply not the order of the day….And in this period before scholarship had become thoroughly professionalized, readers normally expected the consideration of the past to carry implications for the present.” Thus, many writers saw Greek thought as the foundation for the Christian past. They “regarded the Greeks as having displayed the highest moral character that human nature could assume without the light of the Gospel.” The Victorian Platonists, fighting the attacks against Christianity, read Socrates to be the pre-Christ figure who held up Absolute Truth in the face of the Sophists and their modern-day counterparts, the materialistic utilitiarians. For one writer, the polis of the Republic even became the “church.” Much of this Turner critique comes to a head with the final chapter on the “Victorian Platonic Revival.” The “divinely inspired,” troublesome elements of Plato (Forms, Recollection, Immortality) were re-interpreted or explained away. Plato was about the limits of reason; his work was not subject to logical treatment or “discursively reasoned argument.” To interpret him properly required the necessity of faith and the use of myth. These were seen as the vehicles for “‘the religious wants of man.’” The Good was God. Plato’s thought was a “surrogate for Christianity” and Plato became “Christianized.” Other thinkers stripped this religious superstructure from Plato’s thought and Plato became the secularized seeker of the Absolute. The book ends with the foremost articulator of this perspective, Benjamin Jowett, who, Turner argues, told the next three generations “how to interpret” Plato. His goal was to introduce “Plato as a philosopher whose thought could sustain traditional moral values and inculcate a new sense of secular duty among the educated classes of the nation.” Jowett, who was once a liberal theologian, got around problematic Biblical passages by stating that the “interpreter of the Bible had to attempt to enter the mind of the prophet, evangelist, or apostle and ‘“to distinguish the words of Scripture from the truths of Scripture.’” This, Turner argues, is the same approach that Jowett applied to Plato and it’s a legacy encountered today – those who tell us how to read Plato, including the proper appreciation for the subtleties of “irony” and “myth,” even if a plain reading of the text might suggested otherwise. On this point, Turner comments that “…Greek studies came to bear profound marks of Victorian religious, philosophical, and political preoccupations, the not always faint outlines of which may still be discerned in the scholarly examinations of the Greek heritage in our own day.” Other than a few surprising spelling typos in the text, and one glaring misalignment of a paragraph, the book is excellent in all respects.
