The Invention of Jane Harrison

249 Pages·2000·4.1 MB·English

by  Mary Beard

REVEALING ANTIQUITY
. 14 .
G. W. BowersockG, eneralE ditor

The Inventiono fJ ane Harrison
MARY ~EARD
7
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2000
Copyright © 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in che United Scates of America
Library of Congms Cataloging-in-P11blicatiDona ta
Beard, Mary.
The invention of Jane Harrison/ Mary Beard.
p. cm. - (Revealing antiquity ; 14)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-674-00212-1
1. Harrison, Jane Ellen, 1850-1928.
2. Classical philology-Study and teaching-England-Cambridge-History.
3. Literature and anchropology-England-Cambridge-Hiscocy.
4. Classicists--Great Britian-Biography.
5. Archaeologists--Greac Britain-Biography.
6. Mythology, Classical-Historiography.
7. Newnham College-Biography.
I. Tide. II. Series.
PA85.H33 B43 2000
938' 007' 202--dc2 I 99-086699
Designed by Gwen Nefsky Frankfeldc
Contents
Foreword ~ii../
Preface
XI
Illustrations xiii
Prolegomena
1 1
Mrs. Arthur Strong:
2
Apotheosis and After Life 14
3 U nanimism 30
4 Myths of the Odyssey in Art
and Literature 37
5 Introductory Studies in Greek Art 54
6 Alpha and Omega 85
7 Ancient Art and Ritual 98
8 Hellas at Cambridge
109
Pandora's Box
9 129
10 Epilegomena 161
Lifelines 165
Notes 1½
Major Archival Sources
217
Bibliography 219
Index
225

Foreword
by G. W. Bowersock
The series Revealing Antiquity was designed to illuminate new
approaches to the culture of the ancient Greeks and Romans in a
form that would be both exciting to general readers and reward
ing to professional scholars. It is often wrongly supposed that
these two constituencies have nothing in common, even though
the most influential works in the field prove exactly the oppo
site. Ronald Syme's The Roman Revolutiona nd E. R. Dodds's The
Greeksa nd the Irrational are two superb examples of revolution
ary works of scholarship that have won a broad and appreciative
general audience. The books in the present series are obviously
on a more modest scale but have a comparable objective. Each is
designed to be traversed in one or two sittings and to leave be
hind a clear image of a significant part of the classical past and
its timeliness for the present. From the first volume on Dionysus
to the latest on the end of the Roman Empire, we have endeav
ored to place new research and fresh perspectives in an engaging
format.
The thirteen volumes that have been published so far all di
rectly illuminate the ancient world. But since any choice of
topic is a reflection of the time in which it is chosen, works that
reveal antiquity also inevitably reveal their authors and their
age. The name for our series is deliberately ambivalent. The
viii • Foreword
word revealingc an function as a verbal noun with antiquity as its
object (in that we hope to reveal antiquity), but it can also func
tion as an adjective (in that antiquity can itself be revealing).
Antiquity can reveal us just as much as it is revealed by us. This
is the first book in the series to exploit that other sense of Re
vealing Antiquity-what the study of antiquity tells us about
ourselves. A modern pioneer in the interpretation of Greek ar
chaeology and religion, who was equally a pioneer in opening up
classical studies to women after generations of male domination,
seems a worthy subject.
Mary Beard's vivid and infectious prose has been able to
invest a mass of documents, to which she has had access in Cam
bridge (England), with all the fervor with which they were orig
inally written. The emerging celebrity of the young Jane Harri
son in the last two decades of the nineteenth century reflects
the growing prestige of archaeology at the time as well as the
dominant role of German professors, upon .whom Schliemann's
discoveries at Troy had conferred unanticipated authority. Dr.
Beard evokes Harrison's popular lectures in London. Harrison
used lantern slides and plaster casts in a dramatic and innovative
attempt to escape from the tyranny of ancient texts through the
interrogation of works of art.
Thus we see the process whereby Jane Harrison revealed an
tiquity to an astonished and admiring world. But we also see the
turbulence of her own career in Victorian England and the forces
that drove her to interpret the Greeks as she did. Dr. Beard calls
up from her documents, through riveting detective work, a vir
tually unknown connection between Jane Harrison and another
pioneering woman in the field of ancient art, Eugenie Sellers
(Mrs. Arthur Strong), whose scholarly reputation is wholly tied
to her study of Roman antiquities. She participated in Morelli's
revolution in the analysis of ancient objects by means of affini
ties in tiny details, a revolution better known today from Beren-
Foreword• ix
son and from Beazley's work on Greek vase painting. In the Lon
don of the 188os, amid Victorian theatricals and lectures for the
general public, we find Harrison and Sellers working together,
and even living together. In later years neither, it appears,
wanted to remember their shared beginnings.
Proceeding from her discoveries about Mrs. Strong, Dr. Beard
goes on to attack the foundations of the supposed school of Cam
bridge Ritualists, to which the recent history of classical schol
arship has conspicuously attached her. In a recent article in the
journal Arion (vol. 7, no. I (1999]: 184) Karl Galinsky has la
beled the anecdotal character of much of this so-called history
of scholarship "Wissenschaftsgeschichte-liWte.h"a t Dr. Beard has
provided is an altogether refreshing and heady brew. The con
coctions of J. G. Frazer and F. M. Cornford, which were fed into
the mainstream of modem literature through T. S. Eliot's The
WasteL and, are reexamined here. We can watch the construction
of reputations and the imperfect recollections of participants,
notably the aged Gilbert Murray. This is a case study in the ten
dentiousness of archival sources and the efforts of an older gener
ation to secure the future through the careful selection of the
documents it leaves behind.
Greece itself is part of this story. No work on antiquity can (or
should) avoid the country where the classical past was played
out. Jane Harrison and her friend take their place in a long and
distinguished line of intrepid English women abroad. Unlike
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Turkey in the previous century,
she had ample companionship from compatriots and European
scholars traveling abroad with classical antiquity on their mind.
But a Mediterranean country was still a strange and liberating
force for a Victorian gentlewoman.
Dr. Beard's book works on many levels at the same time. It is
a record of a doomed friendship between two gifted women with
a passion for ancient art. It is a memorable account of the dawn
x • Foreword
of archaeology in Britain and the post-Schliemann era in Greece.
It is a reminder of Victorian manners and tastes. And, when all
is said and done, it uncovers the process by which the art of clas
sical Greece became a key to unlocking those myths and rituals
that lay at the core of the civilization of Pericles and Plato.