CLASSICAL ASSOCIATION OF IRELAND
July 2016
Classics and Irish Politics 1916-2016 and Classical Influences in Irish Culture
The Conference and Seminar posters. Left: created by Chantelle Snyder, Office of Communications, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame. Right: The Parthenon, Athens (1891/2) by Nathaniel Hone II (graphite and watercolour on paper, reproduced with the permission of the National Gallery of Ireland).
From the 20th-23rd of June, the Royal Irish exploitation of classical models in post-colonial Academy and Trinity College Dublin co-hosted societies, where the classical, which normally an international conference on ‘Classics and represents the coloniser, is re-appropriated and Irish Politics 1916-2016’, sponsored by the re-purposed for a nationalist agenda.1 Ireland University of Notre Dame. The conference very rarely features in such discussions and addressed for the first time, in an academic indeed Ireland is a unique case in this context, context, how models from Greek and Roman since the Irish (unlike other colonised peoples) antiquity have permeated Irish political were very well versed in Greek and Latin before discourse over the past century. The centenary the British plantations began in the sixteenth of the 1916 Easter Rising provided a natural century. For the Irish, then, classical sources can point for reflection on Irish politics, and the aim be viewed as indigenous to the people and are of this conference was to highlight an undernot necessarily models appropriated from the appreciated element in Irish political discourse, coloniser. namely its frequent reliance on and reference to Twenty-six speakers from universities in classical Greek and Roman models. Ireland, Britain, continental Europe, and North As the papers in the conference made America addressed the conference theme from a clear, Irish engagement with classical models is range of perspectives. Topics included ancient complex. Rome, for example, could easily serve ideals and 1916, primary epic and radical patriotism, Irish classicism and empire, tensions as a model for imperial domination, and thus could represent Britain in Irish thought. The issue is complicated, however, by the power and influence of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, the use of ecclesiastical Latin, and the popularity of certain classical Roman authors like Virgil among Irish readers of Latin. Greek resistance to Persian invasions could represent resistance to empire, and parallels were drawn between Greece and Ireland by authors like Pádraig Pearse and W.B. Yeats. Nevertheless, a tension existed in Irish political thought between seeking inspiration in Greek models and creating an independent national Irish At the Trinity Long Room Hub. Back row: Iarla Manny, Donncha identity. Much has been published in recent O’Rourke, Damien Nelis, Brian McGing, Fiachra Mac Góráin, Cillian O’Hogan. Front row: Suzanne O’Neill, Siobhán Hargis, years on the tensions associated with the Isabelle Torrance, Hazel Dodge. (Photo: Lottie Parkyn)
2