Athens: Its Rise and Fall

With Views of the Literature, Philosophy, and Social Life of the Athenian People

Edward Bulwer Lytton, Oswyn Murray

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415320870
• eBook ISBN: 9781134359974
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Athens: Its Rise and Fall, originally published in 1837, is the most important and readable of the Victorian histories of ancient Greece. It stands alongside Macauley and Carlyle as a great historical work of British Romanticism, and anticipates the thinking of George Grote and John Stuart Mill on Greek history by over a decade.

Originally published in two volumes, this new one-volume edition includes the text of the never-before published 'third volume' on which he was working at the time of his death, recently rediscovered by Oxford academic Oswyn Murray.

An absolute must for any scholar of ancient Greece.

Book VI (a fragment)
FROM THE START OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR TO THE BATTLE OF DELIUM, bc 432/1–bc 424/3

Transcribed and edited by Oswyn Murray

INTRODUCTION

Oswyn Murray

At an early stage in my researches, I came across a remark in one of the biographies of Bulwer Lytton that, although only the first two volumes of his Athens had ever been published, he had in fact completed the entire work in manuscript. This not unnaturally excited my curiosity, since he had proclaimed that his work would continue in two additional volumes, “and close the records of Athens at that period when the annals of the world are merged into the chronicle of the Roman Empire”; and I was especially anxious to discover how, having so successfully idealized Athens in the period of its rise and zenith, he would manage to treat of its “Fall” .

Further research led to the discovery of the manuscript of Athens in the Hertfordshire Archives, where it had been deposited (along with many other papers) for safe keeping by the Lytton family. It was a tense moment when, one day in autumn 2002, I travelled to Hertford to inspect the brown paper parcel which contained the manuscript. There indeed was the complete manuscript of the published section of Athens, a bundle of many hundred pages of closely written text, covered with multiple corrections and additions, such that it was effectively indecipherable—although presumably the copyist or printer had managed to create the published text from it.

But there too was another parcel, with a note on the cover sheet in a hand not that of Bulwer Lytton, stating, “ ‘History of Athens’ Vol. III. Never Published. Probably Finished in 1837.” In fact a number of indications show that the manuscript derives from the early 1840s: a statement in Lytton’s handwriting on the cover of ms. 2/3, which is a fair copy of the beginning of the book, reads “Athens—1843”; this presumably was the date at which he began (and laid aside) the preliminary revision of the work that he was currently working on. A letter to Bulwer Lytton preserved with the ms. (2/14a) is dated “20th March, 1844” (see below); this is a reply to a query on the topography of Pylus, which must have been solicited by him at the time when he was writing that section of his narrative, one of the latest episodes in the text. Again a section of manuscript which is on lighter and smaller paper has been inserted in 2/14; its content is drawn from a work hitherto unknown to me, but clearly of importance to Bulwer Lytton, which he referred to as “St John’s Manners of antient Greece”; this work, J.A. St John, The History of the Manners and Customs of Ancient Greece (3 vols) was published in London in 1842. It seems therefore that he was still at work on the manuscript between 1842 and 1844; the account given in the preface of the posthumous Knebworth edition (quoted above, pp. 15–16), of Bulwer’s gradual abandonment of his Athens in the face of the competition from first Thirlwall and finally Grote, is correct: the unpublished section refers to the later volumes of Thirlwall (whose work was completed in 1844), and may well have been finally abandoned around 1846, on the publication of the first two volumes of Grote’s History of Greece, to which it does not refer, in the expectation that Grote’s work would one day reach the Peloponnesian war. These first volumes of Grote containing his theory of Greek myth were indeed so far in advance of Bulwer’s views of 1837 that he might well fear (unnecessarily, as it turned out) that the later volumes would supersede rather than complement his own efforts. What is now revealed is in fact how completely Bulwer anticipated all the main points of Grote’s narrative of Greek political history, and how his own sense of political life makes his narrative of this period infinitely more convincing than that of Grote.

The unpublished manuscript D/EK/W12/2 consists of a large number of quarto sheets loosely made up into booklets, and written on one side of the paper only—approximately 500 manuscript pages, with occasional insertions and notes on the opposite page. This manuscript is clearly the first draft of the third volume; it contains few alterations, and is relatively easy to read. It offers a fascinating insight into Bulwer Lytton’s method of composition.

The hand is fluent and confident; the words are usually legible, but the letters are not well formed: it is the general shape of the word, rather than a careful calligraphy that enables one to read the text, and sometimes one can be grossly misled at first reading. The author composed as he wrote, in a phrase or a sentence at a time: he used a quill pen, well filled with ink, and the pen would continue in action with a series of dashes or dots, as he waited for the next phrase to come into his mind. From time to time the pen would degenerate into a broad brush, until it was resharpened with a penknife, or another pen taken up. Apart from these running marks on the page there is little punctuation; words are capitalized almost at random;¹ the ampersand is used instead of “and” almost universally. It is clear that the author is thinking as he writes, with an extraordinary fluency and a remarkable turn of phrase; he leaves it to his amanuensis or typesetter to normalize the punctuation. There is indeed a half-suppressed excitement and an immediacy of response to the subject matter, which explain the vividness and dramaticimpact of his style: he writes as he thinks, in short bursts as the phrases come fully formed into his mind. The author is completely caught up in his subject; and, even when he is following a source such as Thucydides closely, he imparts a new vivacity to the original.

The unpublished section of Bulwer Lytton’s Athens is a narrative history of the period from the events leading up to the start of the Peloponnesian war in 431 bc to the ninth year of the war (423 bc). It covers the events recorded in the first four books of Thucydides’ History; there are full accounts of the causes of the war, the evacuation of the Attic countryside in the face of invasion, the siege of Platæa, the funeral oration of Pericles, the Great Plague of Athens, the death of Pericles, the struggle of rival Athenian leaders and the rise of the demagogues, the growth of the “revolutionary spirit” throughout Greece, and the great Athenian victory over the Spartans at Pylus. The later stages of the narrative are concerned with the rise of Cleon, his character and his military and political successes. This is the first positive picture of Cleon known to me. The story breaks off with the preparations for the northern campaign in which both Brasidas and Cleon were killed, and the way was opened for the conclusion of the first part of the war with the Peace of Nicias concluded in 421 bc. The narrative of the first war, known as the Archidamian war (after King Archidamus, the Spartan royal general), is therefore virtually complete.

But Athens remains at the height of her power: we are not really in a position to understand how Bulwer would have envisaged its fall, still less how he would have dealt with the succeeding three centuries before the Roman conquest. In the course of his account he gives us some clues as to how he would have treated the revolutionary oligarchical movements in Athens of the period 411–404 bc—from a radical perspective, and in terms of the trahison des clercs (betrayal by the intellectuals) which modern writers agree destroyed Athens.² Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this story would have been how he dealt with “the splendid Alcibiades” (Book VI ch. IV sec. I), whose youthful excesses as an Athenian dandy he begins to describe, and whose character so closely resembled that of Bulwer Lytton himself: his contemporaries often noted the parallel with “the young Alcibiades” for praise or criticism, and Bulwer was clearly flattered by it. He would surely have offered a critical self-portrait worthy of the author of Pelham; we might compare the dramatic presentation as a Regency masque of the great scandal of the profanation of the Eleusinian Mysteries, in the youthful fragment Scenes from “Athenian Revels” (1824) by his contemporary Lord Macaulay.³

The main source of Bulwer Lytton’s narrative is of course Thucydides, studied in the newly published (1830–35) three-volume edition of Thomas Arnold, Lytton Strachey’s “eminent Victorian”, reforming headmaster of Rugby, and Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford (now chiefly remembered as the father of Matthew Arnold). He also made extensive and intelligent use of other authors such as Aristophanes and Euripides, as well as the biographies of Plutarch and the parallel historical narrative of Diodorus. References to modern works are relatively common, and include especially the work of St John mentioned above and the English translation of August Boeckh’s Public Economy of Athens (1828).

Since Thucydides is the main source for this section of his history, I have not thought it worth reproducing the more simple narrative sections: there is much on military events, especially in north Greece, which is merely a retelling in exuberant early Victorian prose of the narrative in Thucydides; and there are a number of speeches which Bulwer Lytton has translated or adapted at length from his author. My selection of passages from the manuscripts concentrates on those aspects of the history of the period where Bulwer Lytton reveals his own opinions and comments on events. I have included a small number of characteristic comments; the longer passages are concerned with the siege of Athens, the plague, and the development of Athenian political life within the beleagured city—a series of imaginative recreations of the mental state of Athenian society which are of outstanding vividness and insight. Finally I have included a full account of the events at Pylus in 425, in order to demonstrate the power of Bulwer Lytton’s narrative technique and his emotional involvement in these dramatic events.

This section of his narrative in particular was immediately relevant to the greatest contemporary event in the history of modern Greece, the destruction by the combined fleets of Britain, France, and Russia, of the Turkish fleet at the battle of Navarino in 1826—an event which was surrounded by controversy at the time, when it was both alleged and denied that the British admiral in charge had exceeded his orders (in fact the British Foreign Secretary had died during the campaign, and British policy had changed), and also insinuated that the French fleet had surreptitiously shelled the Russians in an act of “friendly fire” in revenge for Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. Whatever the undoubtedly devious and conflicting intentions of the ill-matched allies, the destruction of the new Ottoman fleet ensured the liberation of Greece from Turkish rule and the creation of the modern kingdom of Greece. No contemporary European could fail to be moved by Bulwer’s dramatic representation of an earlier battle in what he firmly and correctly believed, against the opinion of contemporary scholarship, was a virtually unchanged Bay of Navarino.

It was therefore with considerable excitement that I found a loose letter inserted in Bulwer Lytton’s manuscript from someone whom (after a brief period of puzzlement) I recalled was actually the British admiral in charge at the battle of Navarino. Edward Codrington had been removed from active service as a result of his heroic exploit or monumental blunder, and spent the rest of his life in a vain attempt to vindicate his reputation. At this date he was in fact a fellow Member of the reformed Parliament; and it is clear that Bulwer Lytton, worried by the scholarly controversy about the ancient topography of the Bay of Pylus that he found in Arnold’s commentary on Thucydides, had written to his colleague requesting the opinion of one who had actually fought in the bay. Codrington’s response is hardly conclusive, but nevertheless historically interesting:

2/14a Letter on black-edged mourning paper from Sir Edward Codrington commander of the allied forces at the battle of Navarino, and from 1832–9 liberal MP for Davenport.

92 Eaton Square
20th March, 1844

Dear Sir Edward,

You have led me into a view of Navarin which I did not contemplate. I have read the references in both the books & also the description of Col. Leake; I must say his description seems to me very good. The map in Doctor Arnold’s book appears to me quite correct, as indeed it must be, being copied from Captain Smith’s survey. As to the width of the entrances round Sphacteria, historians are very subject to mistakes of that sort, even in these times: but certainly it would require many more such craft as those people had to fill up the space than is calculated on by Thucydides. The result however of my perusal of these books, is, a conviction that I am much less capable of deciding the knotty points in dispute than yourself or either of the authors before me.—I certainly understood when in the harbor of Navarin, that it was the ancient Pylus, & that what the map marks Paliocastro was old Navarin.

Your very sincere & faithful
Edwd Codrington

As you are good enough to mention my proceedings in those parts favorably, I would propose your perusing my defensive papers: but that someone has borrowed them without my recollecting whom, & has not yet returned them.

The manuscript

I give the selections from the manuscript in the correct order of the various sections, with brief notes on the manuscript. The punctuation and capitalization have been normalized in the spirit of the published sections of the work, although I have allowed the author to retain his capitals when they appear to be used for dramatic effect. The author began numbering his chapters and paragraphs, with the assumption that book V would continue (as originally stated in the published version) to the death of Pericles. Chapter divisions continue to chapter III; paragraphs are numbered as far as chapter III paragraph IX (see my note there). In the transcription I have renumbered the chapters to begin as Book VI, while respecting Bulwer Lytton’s paragraph divisions and their numeration as far as possible until they run out. All changes to his numeration are printed in italics, with the original numbering in square brackets.

The manuscript is numbered D/EK/W12/2, and consists of a...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• WELCOME
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• DEDICATION
• ADVERTISEMENT
• BOOK I: FROM THE EARLIEST PERIOD TO THE LEGISLATION OF SOLON TO BC 594
• BOOK II: FROM THE LEGISLATION OF SOLON TO THE BATTLE OF MARATHON, BC 594–bc 490
• BOOK III: FROM THE BATTLE OF MARATHON TO THE BATTLES OF PLATÆA AND MYCALE, bc 490–BC 479
• BOOK IV: FROM THE END OF THE PERSIAN INVASION TO THE DEATH OF CIMON, BC 479–BC 449
• BOOK V: FROM THE DEATH OF CIMON, BC 449, TO THE DEATH OF PERICLES, IN THE THIRD YEAR OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR, BC 429
• BOOK VI: (A FRAGMENT) FROM THE START OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR TO THE BATTLE OF DELIUM, BC 432/1–BC 424/3
• BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED BY THE AUTHOR