Alexandra LIANERI Appropriating Ancient Democracy: Pericles’s Funeral Oration in Nineteenth-Century Britain

This paper investigates how translations of Pericles’s Funeral Oration contributed to the establishment and justification of modern democratic politics in nineteenth-century Britain. It suggests that the image of the Athenian city constituted in the translations acted to marginalize the negative connotations democracy had until the late eighteenth century and legitimize the ideology of liberal-democratic politics.

Translations of the Oration produced an ideal of democracy that was directly related to the historical advancement of liberal capitalism and challenged the older social structures and relations this enterprise entailed. This move involved a process of rewriting of Thucydides’s text, which substituted the ancient Greek conception of citizenship (evoking the unity of the social and the political aspects of the polis) for the modern ideal of individuality, which stemmed from the division between the civil-social and the political sphere. Hence while ancient democracy, as it is represented in the Oration, constructed a conception of the subject as a citizen, whose identity was articulated in and through the polis, nineteenth-century translations defined the subject as an individual, whose identity was realized in the context of the civil domain. This ostensibly consistent interpretation was, however, at the same time undermined by conceptual gaps, contradictions and antinomies, which were inscribed in the translated texts and formed the basis for their self-critique and problematization. Hence the translations in question did not merely celebrate an ideal of individuality as the ultimate aim and justification of democratic politics, but also questioned this ideal, by evoking aspects of the Athenian democracy that were incompatible with the modern.

My conclusion will not only emphasize the specific historical significance of these translations in nineteenth-century Britain, but will also seek to outline a theoretical problematic concerning our approach to the translation of classical works. This problematic will suggest the necessity for a historical understanding of translations, which does not reduce the translated work to a more or less faithful transfer of the original, but attempts to account for translation choices in terms of the cultural and social conditions of their production.