Hobbs, A. (2018) Who lied? Classical heroism and World War I. Classical Receptions Journal, 10 (4). pp. 376-392. ISSN 1759-5134
Abstract
Owen’s rejection of Horace’s dulce et decorum est pro patria mori as ‘the old lie’ prompts for me two questions: 1) Who exactly does Owen think lied? And is he justified in thinking this? 2) To what extent does Owen’s rejection of Horace’s words also amount to a critique of the classical tradition more generally, on the grounds that classical conceptions of war and heroism have proved utterly inadequate to the task of articulating the horrors of twentieth-century trench warfare? I argue that Owen’s main target is a number of poets, including Jessie Pope and Henry Newbolt, who recruited sanitized receptions of the classics to exhort young men to lay down their lives for their country. However, it is not clear that any of these, or Horace himself, is actually lying. Owen as a keen student of Roman and Greek culture employed classical themes in various poems. Although classical literature offered rich and nuanced conceptions of warfare, its emphasis on the supererogatory and named individual heroes meant that new conceptions of heroism needed to be developed in World War I to cope with the conditions of often anonymous industrialized trench warfare, in which even doing one’s duty could seem heroic.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an author produced version of a paper subsequently published in Classical Receptions Journal. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > Department of Philosophy (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 01 Feb 2018 16:27 |
Last Modified: | 24 Nov 2020 17:01 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Oxford University Press |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1093/crj/cly014 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:126910 |