1 Since the founding of Memorial University College (MUC) in 1925 and the establishment of Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN) in 1949, the study of the ancient Greeks and Romans — their languages, history, literature, art, philosophy, religious life, and so on — has been pursued in Newfoundland almost entirely in those institutions. The first Principal of MUC was John Lewis Paton, a Cambridge-educated classical scholar and famous headmaster with a long, distinguished career in England already behind him. With Paton at the helm, the place of classical studies in the College’s curriculum seems to have been assured.1 Yet, Newfoundlanders’ interest in the ancient civilizations did not emerge suddenly, imposed from outside, a little less than a hundred years ago. On the contrary, there is much to be learned about the nature and breadth of this interest and the contexts in which it was expressed during most of the nineteenth century and the first twenty-five years of the twentieth. What is more, classical learning played an essential role in the British narrative about Newfoundland for nearly half a century, from the time of Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s voyage in 1583. Even the history of Newfoundland’s first school preserves evidence for the presentation of ancient methods and ancient wisdom in the first half of the eighteenth century.
2 Much of the material that enables this story to be told is today unrecognized, forgotten, or only dimly remembered; even what is known has not been placed in a meaningful context. This is not to say that the history of Newfoundland is replete with evidence for classical learning.2 There are, admittedly, long barren stretches in this story, especially over the last two-thirds of the seventeenth century and most of the eighteenth, for which only fruitless speculation seems possible. It is with justification that D.W. Prowse wrote in 1896:
There is, for instance, nothing from or about Newfoundland of the sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth to compare in quantity with what we find in contemporary Mexico and Latin America. There, seven universities were established in the sixteenth century alone, the earliest in Santo Domingo, Lima, and Mexico City,4 and about another dozen in the century that followed. Latin enjoyed enormous prestige in colonial Mexico and Latin America and was widely used as a diplomatic language. One of the earliest activities in the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico was the training in the Latin language of young members of the native Mexican elite, perhaps most famously Juan Badiano, who in 1552 translated into Latin an Aztec text on medicinal herbs (the Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis). Nor is there anything like the vast body of writing in Latin produced in New France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — history, poetry, and scientific writing, among other genres and forms — composed especially but not only by Jesuit missionaries. Here, for instance, the first history of Canada (that is, New France) was written, in Latin, in 1656.5
3 More than anything else, the lack of permanent, large-scale immigration into Newfoundland before the late eighteenth century accounts for the shortage of material. But it is a shortage, not a complete absence. This paper concentrates mainly on what I would identify as the three principal periods or threads in the story: in part I, the Latin “embarkation” poem of 1582 by Stephen Parmenius, as well as the efforts by Richard Eburne, William Vaughan, Robert Hayman, and a few others to promote Newfoundland to the English (most of this work was composed in England, not Newfoundland); in part II, the evidence for an encounter with classical material in the earliest schools in Newfoundland, and the much more abundant evidence for the teaching and learning of Greek and Latin in Newfoundland schools between around 1800 and 1925; and in part III, the often scattered, sometimes latent, information that demonstrates the presence of classical learning in Newfoundland society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At first sight these elements in the story look unrelated, but as I hope to show, they are connected in some rather surprising ways.6
4 Our point of departure is with Stephen Parmenius, a Hungarian from Buda who was born probably between 1555 and 1560. As a youth in Buda, he received training in Greek and Latin. He left his home in 1579, travelled to Heidelberg (and perhaps elsewhere) to continue his education, and by 1581 was in Oxford, where he made the acquaintance of several eminent people. Most consequentially, in England he met Sir Humphrey Gilbert, whom he accompanied on his voyage to Newfoundland in 1583. He perished when the ship on which he was sailing, the Swallow, ran aground off Sable Island on 29 August 1583; less than two weeks later, Sir Humphrey died at sea aboard the Squirrel, on the return voyage to England.7
5 All of Parmenius’s surviving works are in Latin, and two are especially relevant to the subject of Newfoundland: one is a classicizing poem in 330 dactylic hexameters, written in England, about Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s imminent voyage to Newfoundland; the other is a letter to Richard Hakluyt the younger, an important promoter of colonization in North America, which Parmenius wrote in St. John’s on 6 August 1583. The letter is of tremendous interest for its description of the harbour and features of the surrounding area, some still familiar today, others altered by the passage of time: for example, the super-abundance of pine trees everywhere, the variety of berries and tall grasses, the appearance of white bears,8 and, of course, the inexhaustible supply of fish (piscium inexhausta copia). Early in the letter, in common late Renaissance fashion, Parmenius incorporates a Greek word, συνονυμίζειν (sunonumizein), which is in fact his own coinage; its meaning is, apparently, “to speak in synonyms” or “to say the same thing in different words.”
6 The historian of the European exploration of North America will be most interested in this letter, which is, after all, a dated eyewitness account, but the classical scholar is bound to be drawn instead to the poem, titled Carmen έπιβατικόν (epibatikon), “An Embarkation Poem.” Obviously Parmenius was eager to demonstrate that he knew Greek — hence the insertion of Greek words at the outset of both the letter and the poem — but he is not a show-off, since έπιβατικόν and συνονυμίζειν are two of only three Greek words to appear in Greek script in his writings.9 Quinn and Cheshire think that his misuse in the Carmen έπιβατικόν of two transliterated Greek words, which are metrically intractable in dactylic hexameter, may be evidence of his imperfect knowledge of the language, but this standard sets the bar rather high for a sixteenth-century student of the language.10
7 The content of Parmenius’s Carmen έπιβατικόν, little known today, deserves to be set out; it is essentially as follows:
8 A few fundamental themes are apparent even in this general sketch: for the people of Britain, living under the wise rule of Queen Elizabeth, it is a Golden Age; in both geographical extent and achievement, Sir Humphrey’s voyage will rival the ones that heroes like Jason and Hercules/Heracles made (Jason in pursuit of the Golden Fleece, Heracles to complete his 12 labours); in the new land he will find not Golden Fleece but, again, a Golden Age. Given these themes, given the fact that Parmenius had at the time of writing never been to the New World, and given the language in which he wrote, we expect him to have relied on certain classical works, especially in Latin, that are most pertinent to these topics.11 And that is unmistakably what we find: above all, these works are the Fourth (so-called “Messianic”) Eclogue and the second and fourth books of the Georgics, by the Roman poet Virgil (70–19 BC), and Book 1, lines 89–162, of the Metamorphoses by the Roman Ovid (43 BC–AD 17), each of which deals with the theme of a Golden Age, first presented centuries earlier by the Greek poet Hesiod (eighth century BC). There are also clear reminiscences of the “Roman Odes” of the poet Horace (65–8 BC), that is, the first six poems in Book 3 of his Odes; but whereas Horace in these Odes exalts the Emperor Augustus, Parmenius praises Queen Elizabeth.12 In tracing precise verbal sources and correspondences Quinn and Cheshire in their commentary have understandably picked the low-hanging classical fruit.13 This is not the place for detailed philological discussion of that kind, but I suspect that many more signs of Parmenius’s dependence on the above and other classical models await detection.14 However that may be, the simple point ought to be made that his use of Virgil, Ovid, and Horace is a reflection of the fact that these were the most widely read Roman authors during his lifetime and for long after.
9 Despite Humphrey Gilbert’s enterprise, and despite Parmenius’s imagination, artistic ability, and promotion of the project, no settlement would be established or attempted in the quarter-century that followed. Within months of the failure, Sir George Peckham, one of Sir Humphrey’s partners in the plan to create a settlement, saw the need to disseminate a promotional defence of colonization, which he entitled A true report of the late discoueries, and possession taken in the right of the Crowne of England of the Newfound lands, By that valiant and worthy Gentlemen, Sir Humfrey Gilbert, Knight. Here Peckham claims to have deliberated with himself not simply about the expediency of the plan but about its morality as well: possession of Newfoundland is beneficial to the British people, but is it right and lawful?15 To settle the question, he appeals not to Biblical authority but, uniquely within this work, to a classical lesson he extracts from Plutarch’s (c. AD 45– c. 120) Life of Themistocles (20). The story involves the early fifth-century BC Athenian statesman Themistocles and his great rival Aristides, nicknamed “the Just” for his unmatched rectitude and truthfulness (my own translation follows):
Here are Sir George’s reflections on this story:
Peckham invokes Aristides as a higher authority, but he never explains how he reached the conclusion that he did or why Aristides necessarily would have arrived at that same conclusion. In this case the classical model is adduced to lend an air of integrity to Peckham and his decision, and perhaps to impress his audience, but nothing in the ancient lesson logically justifies his opinion.
10 It was not until 1607 that Jamestown became the first English settlement in the Americas. The second, in 1610, was Cupids, Newfoundland, the project of the Newfoundland Company, which was made up of London and Bristol merchants, one of whom was John Guy, Cupids’ first governor. The story of the attempts at settlement on the Avalon Peninsula between 1610 and the late 1620s is well known and need not detain us long.16 There was some initial success at Cupids, but it faltered, Guy lost interest and commitment, and by the early 1620s it had essentially failed. Ten miles north of Cupids, however, another settlement took root in what is now Harbour Grace. Its first and only governor, from 1618, was Robert Hayman. In 1616 the Welshman Sir William Vaughan purchased the southern part of the Avalon Peninsula, named the area Cambriol, “Little Wales,” and the next year sent out some settlers to Aquaforte, where they fared poorly. In 1618 he appointed the experienced Richard Whitbourne to be governor of this settlement, and Whitbourne moved it a little south from Aquaforte to Renews, but it survived only a few years. More successful was the settlement that Sir George Calvert (Lord Baltimore) initiated in 1621 in Ferryland, just north of Aquaforte, where he also lived with his family from 1627 to 1629.17
11 The intense efforts to build permanent settlements in Newfoundland faced many challenges,18 and these were confronted in promotional literature. Although few original copies of it now remain, Richard Eburne’s A Plaine Pathway to Plantations, published in 1624, argues its case for settlement in the New World better than most works of its kind. It is a dialogue between Respire, a farmer, and Enrubie, a merchant. We do not know who Respire is or is intended to be, but the name Enrubie, at any rate, is a reverse spelling of Eburne. When Respire comes to visit him, Enrubie is reading for recreation a book on plantations in Newfoundland, “for want of better company and exercise,” as he says. Respire hopes he is not bothering him. In fact, Enrubie wants him to stay and sit with him under a tree, if he has the time; Respire will stay, for Enrubie’s sake. In broad outline the opening is reminiscent of Plato’s Phaedrus: the shade-tree, the book, the wish to examine the book’s contents, the need for exercise, the concern of each man over his partner’s benefit and convenience all evoke the mise en scène of the Platonic work. Eburne was vicar of the parish church in Hemstridge, Somerset, and although he may have known Greek, he shows no sign of it. But no matter: he could without difficulty have read Plato in Latin, if not in Marsilio Ficino’s translation of 1484, copies of which were everywhere by 1624, then in the 1561 translation by Janus Cornarius, or in the superior translation by Jean de Serres (Serranus) in Henri Estienne’s famous 1578 “Vulgate” edition of Plato. The point here is that Plato’s Phaedrus was easily obtainable and accessible for the Greekless reader.19
12 Enrubie and Respire show themselves to be astonishingly erudite conversation partners. Enrubie draws constantly upon the Bible, of course, but he also quotes classical Latin sources generously, usually with accompanying translation, and in addition he refers frequently to well-known stories from the classical world (see Appendix 1). For example, Eburne cites Roman justifications for colonization as precedents for the settlement of Newfoundland, drawing upon passages from both Livy and Cicero in the process. In particular, he argues that immigration to Newfoundland will relieve demographic, economic, and other pressures currently being exerted on England. He was not the first to cite ancient support for just this purpose. Parmenius himself had earlier identified the problem (lines 27–36, 268–72), and in one of the prefatory poems written to commend Sir George Peckham’s treatise (above), John Hawkins points out that the Romans, the Athenians, and the Greek contingent in Troy resorted to the same practice in less straitened circumstances (lines 11–20):
Hawkins does not apply only historical precedent, as Eburne did, but even adduces Greek legend, suggesting, apparently (through mention of the Argives and Achilles’ Myrmidons), that the Trojan War was a colonizing enterprise.21
13 Respire’s role in Eburne’s work is mainly to toss questions at Enrubie, which allow him to enlarge on the arguments for successful settlement, and all but one of the Latin quotations are from the merchant’s mouth, not the farmer’s, but Respire does show wit and insight. For instance, when the prospect is raised of inducing schoolteachers to settle in the New World, Respire holds that “scholars nowadays are most of them of a tender breed and such as will hardly brook the seas; and England is provided of many good means of maintenance for them and therefore they will be loath to seek after less and worse otherwhere.”22
14 Without question the most remarkable work of propaganda in support of settlement came from the pen of the aforementioned William Vaughan, the founder of Little Wales (Cambriol).23 In 1626, 10 years after his purchase of that part of the Avalon, and after a string of disasters, Vaughan published The Golden Fleece, a wandering, bloated, but in its own way impressive, allegorical treatise.24 It deserves our attention not because it tells us much that is precise about Newfoundland itself — it is doubtful that Vaughan ever visited the island — but because it is loaded with classical themes and references.25 Here Vaughan calls himself Orpheus junior, and his settlement Colchos; Apollo is the supreme, wise judge who holds court over all; and golden fleece await the entrepreneur.26 But Vaughan is truthful, for Newfoundland is not an El Dorado in the literal sense (Pt. 3, ch. 1):
15 Parmenius, Peckham, Eburne, and Vaughan all wrote their works before or without setting foot in Newfoundland. Unencumbered by reality, they could readily idealize the project of settlement, portray the island as a place of potentially great wealth, and misrepresent the kind of world that would be created there. Often they did so by drawing upon literary sources or historical models from a remote Greco-Roman past. Robert Hayman’s circumstances were different.27 He lived in Harbour Grace as its governor from 1618, and while there he composed a book of epigrams on many themes, published in London in 1628, which he called Quodlibets, literally “What pleases (you)” or “What-you-wish.” Hayman knew William Vaughan; they were both born in 1575, they both attended Oxford University, Hayman at Exeter College, Vaughan at Jesus College, and their compositions were both promotions of settlement in Newfoundland. Hayman’s classical learning is occasionally on display in his verse; for instance, here he compares Newfoundland with Socrates (Book 2.94):
The classical elements of a Golden Age freedom from labour, care, and want insinuate themselves into his poetry (Book 1.117):
16 Hayman’s original verse, however, is not the literary activity most relevant to the present study, for Hayman was a translator into English of a substantial number of the Latin epigrams by the prolific John Owen (c. 1564–c. 1622). Owen’s epigrams achieved tremendous popularity in the seventeenth century, and he was clearly a Latinist of unusual, even astonishing, virtuosity who was familiar intimately with his ancient epigrammatical antecedents, above all the Roman poet Martial.30 Hayman’s translational patterns and predilections must be the subject of a different study, 31 but here it is worth contemplating the simple fact that before he travelled to Newfoundland, he made the decision to take with him a copy of Owen’s epigrams, and once he was in Harbour Grace — on an island populated perhaps by nobody else who knew Latin — he dedicated a considerable part of his time to the translation of a contemporary work of Latin poetry. That seems an extraordinary thing, and a fair claim can be made that Hayman was one of the very first Latinists in North America.32 He has not, however, received the recognition he deserves.33
17 As far as we know, Newfoundland’s earliest school was established in Bonavista a hundred years later, in 1727. What can be said about its founding, its operation, and its curriculum has been well set out by Hans Rollmann and Bonita Power.34 The character and limited goals of this humble institution give us little reason to expect that we will find any classical content in its activities. And yet we can be confident that some of its pupils, at any rate, made at least a minimal acquaintance with ancient wisdom and educational methods. Early in its history the school adopted as a basic textbook Henry Dixon’s The English Instructor; or, The Art of Spelling Improved, which was first published in 1728 and would be reprinted, sometimes in modified form, many times throughout the eighteenth century.35 Like other primers of its day (as well as those from as much as two centuries earlier), the sequence of instruction followed a well-established pattern.36 Children learned the alphabet, then a long list of syllables consisting of one or two consonants and a vowel, often in all possible permutations, and then monosyllabic and polysyllabic words (the latter comprising words of up to seven and eight syllables). Readings consisting of only monosyllables, and of monosyllables and disyllables, followed the monosyllabic and polysyllabic lists, respectively, all based on Biblical teaching. Many moralizing sentences and anecdotes then appear, frequently grouped in alphabetical order according to the first word of each sentence. Dixon’s book ends with a series of fables, but the whole is heavily larded with Christian prayers and hymns.
18 This method for teaching children to read finds its origins in classical antiquity in nearly all its elements: the thorough learning of the alphabet at the outset, followed by most or all basic syllables; the introduction of monosyllabic and polysyllabic words (as in Dixon’s work, the breaks between syllables were clearly marked); exercises in reading by means of single sentences and anecdotes chosen for their high moral content; and more advanced reading that involved, above all, selections from Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey (the latter less frequently); fables (of Aesop or Babrius) were sometimes included.37 The advent of Christianity altered the content of the reading material (though not at first), but it did not change the fundamental method by which the material was delivered.38
19 No eighteenth-century student would know that the way in which he or she was learning to read originated with the ancient Greeks and Romans.39 Those who progressed far enough into Dixon’s The English Instructor, however, would be confronted explicitly with ancient material, both in the fables near the end of the book and in the sentences and anecdotes in earlier sections. For instance, faced with the challenge of writing sentences in single and double lines (monostichs and distichs) that begin with the letters Q, X, and Z, the author drew upon classical material:
The next section, “A collection of sentences” (again arranged in alphabetical order), includes anecdotes on Quintilian, Xenophon, Xenocrates, and Zeno (twice). Here are three examples:
The arrangement of these sentences and anecdotes in alphabetical order according to first letter takes its inspiration from the sequence of the Latin Sententiae (“Sayings”) of Publilius Syrus (died 43 BC).
20 Some of the material is classical in origin even if not obviously so. Many of the moralizing two-line epigrams are not original to Dixon but find their genesis in the Distichs of Cato (Disticha Catonis), which were composed (or compiled) in Latin probably in the third or fourth century AD and quickly became a staple of the European educational curriculum throughout late antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and after.41 Since Dixon’s The English Instructor came to be printed and published in both England and America and achieved widespread use on both sides of the Atlantic, eighteenth-century Newfoundland students who learned from it were being provided with an educational and cultural experience similar to that offered to young people elsewhere in the English-speaking world. It was an experience heavily influenced by classical methods and content.
21 In the second half of the nineteenth century, right up to the founding of Memorial University College in 1925, the study and teaching of Latin and ancient Greek and of the ancient world in general were mainly the business of Newfoundland’s schools, especially those in St. John’s.42 Fred Rowe, the historian of education in Newfoundland, implied in 1952, though he did not claim outright, that Greek was taught in a school in St. John’s for the first time in 1817.43 His evidence — an advertisement published in the first newspaper in St. John’s, the Royal Gazette — seems to be reliable, and by the nature of the case we can suppose that Latin was taught to some students before that time, but only perhaps when the island’s population began to increase rapidly, in the 1790s. Latin and ancient Greek were important elements in the curricula of three interdenominational schools that emerged in the 1840s, in St. John’s, Harbour Grace, and Carbonear.44 By the middle of the nineteenth century, Latin had a secure place in the curriculum of the denominational schools in St. John’s: the Roman Catholic schools, i.e., St. Bonaventure’s College (males) and Littledale Academy (females); the Church of England Schools, i.e., the St. John’s Collegiate School, later to become Bishop Feild College (males), and Bishop Spencer College (females); and the Methodist College. By contrast, the position of Greek was solid only at Bishop Feild and St. Bonaventure’s. Teachers of Latin and Greek in all these schools frequently came from the British Isles and Ireland, usually with top-flight training. For instance, Charles Durnford Newman, a graduate of Wadham College, Oxford, arrived in 1844 to be the Collegiate School’s first master. In 1858 William Cowper Maclaurin (variously spelled in our sources also as MacLauren, McLauren and McLaren) was appointed Professor of Classics at St. Bonaventure’s by Bishop John Mullock on the recommendation of John Henry Newman, on whose advice Mullock relied for other appointments as well.45 Arriving at the end of our period was Maude Joyner, who began to teach at Bishop Feild College in 1921 — the first female teacher at Bishop Feild, but with some duties at Bishop Spencer — after receiving Firsts in both Greek and Humanity (i.e., Latin) in 1910 from the University of St. Andrews.46 At St. Andrews she would have been taught by John Burnet, the distinguished editor and interpreter of Plato (among other things), and by the equally brilliant but austere Wallace Lindsay.47 Her 10 years of further training and experience in Scotland made her an exceptionally well-qualified teacher of Classics.
22 That this kind of recruitment represented a pattern is neatly demonstrated by an entry in the inaugural issue of the Spencerian, the magazine of Bishop Spencer College, in 1921. It reproduced a three-act Latin script by two students, Dorothy Fraser (age 16) and Doris Mews (age 17), entitled Ecce Veniunt! Gaudeamus Igitur (Look, they are coming! Therefore let us rejoice). Here are the first few lines:48
Alas for Maude Joyner, who was one of the schoolmistresses (magistrae) from Britain so anticipated by Dorothy and Doris. Newfoundland would not be a golden isle for her, since she remained at Bishop Feild for only two years.49
23 An interesting, indeed a crucial, episode in the story of the teaching of ancient Greek in Newfoundland is connected with the advent of the Rhodes Scholarships in 1904, one of which has been allocated to Newfoundland every year since inception. The questions about the Scholarship by which school administrators in Newfoundland were initially seized included these: Should the Rhodes not be open mainly to students who were leaving school, and their maximum age be 19? Was it fair to Newfoundlanders that all candidates be required to have two years of undergraduate study behind them? And what of Oxford’s requirement that students demonstrate a knowledge of Greek? William Blackall, then Headmaster of Bishop Feild College, wrote on these matters to W.T. Stead (1849–1912), friend of Cecil Rhodes and one of the trustees of his will.50 Blackall received a reply in June 1903, which he published in The Feildian (10.9–10 [1903: 110]): “Did you see Mr. Parkin who has written a confidential report which I have read as to the best method of selecting Rhodes scholars? He made a tour through Canada and the United States and has now gone to South Africa.” “Mr. Parkin” is Sir George Parkin, the indefatigable founding Secretary of the Rhodes Scholarship Trust, and a Canadian born in New Brunswick.51 Stead, for his part, was misinformed: Parkin had not yet been to Canada; the visit was still in prospect. It was a regrettable error, since Blackall became irate over what Stead told him, as we learn in the same issue of The Feildian (110):
24 In the next issue of The Feildian (11.3 [1904: 47]), cooler words were spoken by Canon William Pilot, then Superintendent of the Church of England schools, on what had come to be called locally “the Rhodes Scholarship question”:
25 The Methodist College, however, was much less pleased than Canon Pilot about the requirement that potential Rhodes Scholars demonstrate some attainment in Greek, to which he alludes above. In its magazine, The Collegian, the school’s Headmaster, Robert Holloway, wrote (8.7–8 [1903: 161–162]):
26 By March 1904 answers still had not emerged, and Blackall showed little sign that he had calmed down, even though he now knew that Parkin’s visit was still to come (The Feildian 11.4–5 [1904: 76–77]):
27 For its part, St. Bonaventure’s showed no dismay about the Greek requirement, or about anything else to do with the Scholarship. It was from this school that Newfoundland’s first Rhodes Scholar, Sydney Herbert, came in 1904; he had graduated from the College four years earlier and begun the study of Greek only six months before sitting for the entrance examination for the Rhodes (held in lieu of Responsions).55 Contemporary records indicate that at this time there was a pretty substantial bump in the number of students studying Greek at St. Bonaventure’s, Bishop Feild, and the Methodist College,56 but when Oxford University dropped compulsory Greek in 1919, the death of the subject in Newfoundland’s schools would follow soon after.57 Parkin had his own views about where the study of Greek currently was and where it was headed; they are contained in an unpublished short essay, “The study of Greek,” which he wrote in 1905, the year after “the Rhodes Scholarship question.”58 Latin, of course, continued to thrive in Newfoundland’s schools long after Greek had given up the ghost. In fact, the watershed year for its demise, with concomitant impact on enrolment at MUN, was 1969.59
28 In 1882, Thomas Talbot published Newfoundland: or, A Letter addressed to a Friend in Ireland in relation to the Conditions and Circumstances of the Island of Newfoundland, with an especial view to emigration. Talbot had taught school in Harbour Grace, Carbonear, and St. John’s — his subjects included the Greek and Latin languages — and he had also served as Representative in the House of Assembly for St. John’s West. In this book he reflects on, among other things, the physical changes that St. John’s had undergone since he first came to Newfoundland from Ireland 45 years earlier, in 1837:60
When he arrived in 1837, the population of the island was about 75,000 and that of St. John’s less than 15,000. By 1882, Newfoundland’s population was approaching 200,000 and that of St. John’s was about 30,000. Talbot’s judgement about the changing face of the city must have been influenced especially by the construction of a few neo-classical buildings and some others that show neo-classical influence. The single outstanding example is the Colonial Building, constructed in 1850 and home of the Newfoundland legislature until 1959. In 1882, residents of St. John’s could see reflexes of classical architecture also in the façades of the Athenaeum, built on Duckworth Street to be the cultural centre of the city,61 the Customs House on Water Street, and the Library at St. Bonaventure’s College, as well as in details on Devon Place, a grand home on Forest Road (c. 1845). Other structures postdate 1882: the Royal Bank and HSBC buildings on Water Street (1893, 1913), the Masonic Temple on Cathedral Street (1894), the St. John’s Courthouse (1904), the Commercial Cable Company Building (1915), and the former Parade Street campus of Memorial University College (1924).62 Talbot had lived through the fire that devastated St. John’s in 1846, so buildings of stone or brick promised permanence and greater security than those of wood, but in Newfoundland as everywhere else, these same qualities were projected also by the neo-classical style itself, especially as applied to institutional buildings.
29 Talbot, however, plays a larger role in our story. Apart from his activity as a schoolteacher and Member of the House of Assembly, he also wrote books, two of which were on classical subjects, while a third consisted of both translations of Greek and Roman poetry and original verse.63 The first was published in Montreal in 1872, entitled Ancient Philosophy; or, The Enchiridion of Epictetus, and Chrusa Epe [Golden Sayings] of Pythagoras — translated into prose and verse, with large and copious notes, explanatory of the different systems of the Grecian philosophy; and scriptural references in illustration of the moral precepts inculcated by these philosophers. A review of the book in the Montreal Gazette was reprinted in March 1873 in the St. John’s Morning Chronicle. The reviewer was enthusiastic: “The land of fog can at length boast the possession of an accomplished classical scholar, and we, as brother colonists, share with the Newfoundlanders in the reflected honor that attaches to those countries celebrated for the genius and culture of their authors.” There follow no substantive criticisms of his book, and we may suppose that Talbot was pleased with this review, and pleased as well to have his compatriots read it in the local paper. Then in 1881 his Enchiridion of Epictetus was given wider distribution through its publication in London, and another of his books was also published there in the same year, entitled Greece and the Greeks; or, a Historic Sketch of Attic Life and Manners. These books were reviewed (without attribution) in England in the Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art.64 Both reviews are remorseless; the opening of the second provides a flavour:
After that it gets much worse, but there is no point in quoting any more. For all this reviewer’s poison, it must be acknowledged that although unkind, he is accurate. The verdict must be that these two books are the work of an enthusiastic, well-meaning dilettante.
30 It is difficult to describe comprehensively the place that classical learning had in Newfoundland society (distinct from the educational system) in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The writing and publication of Talbot’s books represent unique events — attempts at what we today call “classical scholarship” — but other products or activities on a smaller scale can be found. Catholic clerics in particular used Latin as a medium of communication, of course. 65 The polymath Moses Harvey (1820–1901) published in The Maritime Monthly an article on the Roman catacombs and a two-part article on Pompeii.66 There is a report of a lecture delivered in the Athenaeum in 1877 by A.J.W. McNeilly, “‘When Astraea shall return’ or the coming of the new golden age” 67; the reference to Astraea is drawn from Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, the so-called “Messianic.”68 In 1938 a writer in the Newfoundland Quarterly reports that around 1888 the same McNeilly published in one of the local papers (source and date unspecified) a send-up of Horace’s Satire 9 in Book 1, called “Against Bores and Such,” adapted to the contemporary Newfoundland scene. Only the beginning could be recalled:
In 1899 in the Tribune Holiday Number, a Christmas annual, Bishop Howley published a translation of Horace, Odes Book 3, 25 — remarkably so, since it is an invocation to the god Bacchus.70 And books on Greek and Roman history and culture, for general readers and not only for students, could be purchased from local sellers and borrowed from the collection in the Athenaeum, though after its destruction in the fire of 1892 St. John’s did not have a public library again until 1936.71
31 All this does not amount to very much,72 but one source has proved to be a gauge of the classical presence in Newfoundland among people who cared about such things. The Newfoundland Quarterly (NQ) is Canada’s oldest operating magazine, designed at its inception in 1901 to be “a literary magazine of interest to Newfoundlanders at home and abroad.”73 I have combed all 100 issues up to 1925 for relevant evidence. Of course, the very trivial does not deserve much notice, or else it has value only for its humour. For instance, we learn that Laurence O’Brien, representative for St. John’s in the House of Assembly (1841–50), who succeeded in having many roads built in various outports near the city, was called “The Colossus of Roads,” and, in an obvious play on words, an article on fly-fishing was authored by “Exocoetus Volitans,” the Linnaean term for a species of tropical flying fish.74 Other casual references — to Caesar, Cicero, Seneca, Aeschylus, Euripides, Homer, Socrates, Quintilian, Josephus, and so on — do not tell us much, each on its own,75 but their sheer number and the facility with which they are usually incorporated into essays or, occasionally, poems say a good deal about the authors’ level of comfort with classical antiquity. Consider one example, the sixth stanza in the eight-stanza poem Limericks, by Eros Wayback (a.k.a. Edward St. George) in NQ 6.1 (1906: 12). The subject of the stanza is a woman recently arrived in the Underworld:
Facilis descensus — “the descent is easy,” but here with the meaning “an easy descent” — is drawn from Virgil’s Aeneid Book 6, line 126. The fuller context includes lines 128–29: Tros Anchisiade, facilis descensus Averno . . . sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras, / hoc opus, hic labor est. — “Trojan, son of Anchises, the descent by Avernus is easy . . . but to retrace your step, and to escape to the upper breezes, this is the task, this is the hard work.” It is, admittedly, one of Virgil’s most famous passages. But that is the point: the author is not parading his learning so much as giving his audience a good chance to identify the allusion, and incongruity is then registered through the transposition from Latin epic to a vastly more humble form of poetic expression. The hallmark of the limerick — when not obscenity — is verbal invention, and the insertion of a short, familiar Virgilian phrase puts that quality on display.
32 Some classical references are perhaps less successful but of considerable interest nonetheless. One of these is from Rev. M.F. Power, “Where and whereby the Mic Mac dwells” (NQ 10.1 [1910: 16]). Without naming his source, Power opens with a purple summary of the dramatic setting of Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, which involves the characters Socrates and his younger friend Phaedrus:
The setting of Plato’s Phaedrus is among the most prominent and influential expressions of the ancient literary locus amoenus, that is, the ideal or mythic “beautiful place,” evoked especially in pastoral poetry; in the Renaissance it becomes the site of the Golden Age.77 It is this feature that makes the Platonic dialogue attractive to Power and useful for one of the themes of his article, for the Mi’kmaq of Bay d’Espoir, who are here labelled “supremely happy,” are also described by him as inhabiting “undiscovered country” containing “fields of the blessed.” This is essentially the world that Parmenius, Peckham, Eburne, Hayman, and some others tried to sell to their English contemporaries 300 years earlier.
33 Our focus in these hundred issues of the Quarterly is on the appearance of Latin quotations, translations of passages from ancient Greek and Roman literature, and summaries of other specific ancient passages. The conservative tally, according to Appendix 2, comes to 18 different authors and nearly 50 different passages, mainly in Latin, sometimes in translation (especially the Greek passages), and including a few paraphrases. Even a cursory look at this index reveals the impressive dominance of the Roman poet Horace. Fully a third of the passages in question are from his works, and they are chiefly quotations in Latin, with a few references to specific passages as well. How to account for this attraction? At a general level we can say that Edwardian literate culture was comfortable with Latin quotation; this is, after all, a society in which an article in the Quarterly (7.2 [1907: 19]) about the opening of the new Ayres furniture store in 1907 could end with the invocation esto perpetua, “may it be everlasting” (a stock phrase, to be sure). At a more specific level we should know that it is in the character of Horace’s poetry to invite quotation, specifically because of its frequent expression of universal sentiments; Rudyard Kipling, exactly contemporary with this period, called him “the soundest Platitudinarian that ever was.” 78 This characterization is easy to illustrate from four especially famous and popular reflections, all from the third book of Horace’s Odes, and all appearing in the Quarterly within a period of less than 15 years:
34 But more to the point, Horace’s poetry, especially his Odes, was at this time a staple of the literary canon for students of Latin in the English-speaking world, as it was throughout Europe, and as it had been for centuries. Horace himself feared, presciently, that this would be the fate of his poetry.80 In Newfoundland, Books 1, 2, and 3 of Horace’s Odes were each at different times standard fare for students of Latin. Writing in the Quarterly in 1912 of his business trips around the island, William Blackall, by now the inspector of Church of England schools, recounted that the reading material he would bring with him included an edition of Horace’s Odes: he did not want his Latin to get “rusty,” and he enjoyed what he called the “dainty bits” in Horace’s poetry.81 The late first-century Roman Quintilian, himself a kind of “inspector of schools,” had said much the same of Horace, that “he is full of pleasantness and charm” (Training in Oratory 10.1.96: plenus est iucunditatis et gratiae). In the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Horace was “supremely, the gentleman poet” and “a kind of honorary Victorian.”82 The most recent similar response to Horace that I can find is from John Carey, now emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. In his recent autobiography he writes about the affection he had for Horace and the attraction that the poet exercised upon him in formative years. In 1951 he was interviewed for undergraduate admission to Oxford by about 12 men and was asked whether he thought Horace or Virgil the greater poet: “I answered instantly, ‘Oh, Horace,’ and they all laughed, except one who seemed to be asleep.”83
35 Of special interest are the purposes for which Horace’s poetry is put to use. More than any other single context, it is in articles about angling, more specifically fly-fishing, of which there are many in the first 15 years or so of the Newfoundland Quarterly. It has always been one of the most popular recreations in Newfoundland and Labrador, and in the first decades of the twentieth century it was among the main activities put on display in the successful effort to draw American tourists.84 The special attraction exercised by quotation from and allusion to Horace in this context lies in his exquisite treatment and descriptions of nature. The evocation of nature is a commonplace in literature on angling, running from the Treatise of Fishing with an Angle, attributed to Dame Juliana Berners (second half of the fifteenth century) and Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler (1650s), through Thoreau and Hemingway, to Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It (1976).85 In the Quarterly, there is a symbiosis between fly-fishing and nature — as one writer expresses it, “all good anglers are lovers of nature”86 — and it is given further depth through the many black-andwhite photographs of the rivers, streams, and ponds that await the angler. These articles and the province’s contemporary advertising campaign also paint a picture of an unspoiled land of serenity, a locus amoenus, in a Golden Age. This image has long been an element in perceptions of Newfoundland and in its people’s assumptions about their land. We have already seen it in the works of the earliest writers about the island. It is apparent also in some of Newfoundland’s place names — Paradise, Heart’s Content, Heart’s Delight, Placentia/Plaisance and Avalon come to mind at once — and it received an official, government imprimatur in the late 1960s with the application of the slogan “Canada’s Happy Province” to all automobile licence plates.87 The famous advertising campaign for the province’s tourism industry, launched in 2006, relies on some similar conceptions of the place.
36 On 1 July 1916, at Beaumont Hamel on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 272 of 790 members in the Newfoundland Regiment were killed and another 438 wounded. In the writing on Newfoundland’s contribution to the Great War, one expects that line 13 of Horace, Odes Book 3, 2 would make an appearance somewhere in the Quarterly: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” These may be Horace’s most famous words, and they are quoted constantly and everywhere during the war and for some years after. And the line does appear, as we shall see; but well before then, about six months after the catastrophe of 1 July, it is Horace’s ultimate model, the late seventh-century BC Spartan poet, Tyrtaeus, who is quoted (fragment 10, lines 27–30), in the anonymous article “Our Heroic Dead” (16.3 [1916: 5]):
There is poignancy in placing those lines beside a sentence from a letter by the American poet Alan Seeger to his mother, which was reproduced in the fall issue of 1917 (17.2: 30): “If I should not [return], you must be proud, like a Spartan mother, and feel that it is your contribution to the triumph of the cause whose righteousness you feel so keenly.”88 When Horace’s line is used, it is at the moment that the war is ending, in an article entitled simply “Loyalty” (18.2 [1918: 12]). The author of that article is no Newfoundland version of the famously malignant Professor Kantorek in the 1930 film production of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, who utters the line before all the carnage takes place (a role more prominent in the film than in the novel),89 but rather a young woman named Catherine Harris, writing after it.90 Both Kantorek and Harris use the line for a rhetorical crescendo, Kantorek with terrible irony, Harris without a trace. Some may be surprised by that lack of irony (and perhaps by the sex of the person using the line in the Quarterly), but unlike in Britain, Canada and Australia, no anti-war literature seems to have been produced in Newfoundland in the last years of World War I or in the twenties, and no anti-war sentiment seems to have been expressed in the Quarterly.91
37 Classical quotation and allusion dry up almost entirely in the Quarterly between the end of the Great War and 1925. The two notable exceptions occur in the addresses given by the island’s Governor, Sir Charles Alexander Harris, at the ceremonies held in 1920 and 1922 in Bannerman Park to commemorate the war dead. In the first of those years he quoted Horace twice, both from the third book of the Odes, poem 30: exegi monumentum aere perennius, and non omnis moriar multaque pars mei / vitabit Libitinam (lines 1, 6–7; see above). In the second address, he made extensive reference to Pericles’ Funeral Speech in Thucydides’ History (Book 2, 35–46).92 Notwithstanding the aversion to anti-war writing in Newfoundland, I wonder whether this apparent rejection of classical models is to be connected with the disillusionment caused by the war and consequent disdain for the culture with which it was associated — an outlook that precipitated also the discontinuation of compulsory Greek at Oxford and Cambridge in 1919 (see above).93 We see the disillusionment, if not cynicism, in, for instance, the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, and it is brought out powerfully in All Quiet on the Western Front, the greatest of all anti-war films.
38 Classical learning had a presence in many of the signal moments and lines of development in the history of Newfoundland: in its settlement and frustrated attempts at settlement, and in the stated justifications for these attempts; in the education of its people, from the humble beginnings of the first schoolhouse, throughout the period of large-scale colonization, up to the founding of Memorial University College; in confirming unbreakable historical and cultural bonds with the mother country; in connecting the island culturally with the larger Western world and its foundations and norms; in endowing its built environment with an aura of stability, security, and prosperity; in helping to give expression to the beauty of the place, sometimes in near-mythic terms, and to convey a sense of belonging; and in confronting Newfoundland’s most tragic losses. Readers will have no trouble identifying the most prominent recurring themes in this classical presence: the “Golden Age” and its freedom from toil, the locus amoenus or “(mythically) beautiful place,” and the wondrous land at the end of a momentous voyage of discovery. The emergence of these themes, however, should not obscure the fact that the story is by no means a simple one.
39 Some other evidence for classical learning is known and could have been presented. 94 No doubt more exists that is unknown; perhaps some of it would be significant. But the former would not change the picture presented here, and we can be confident that the latter would modify it only on the margins, if at all.
While travelling through the United States during the last two years in connection with the organization of the Rhodes Scholarship scheme I have constantly been made aware of the slight importance given to the study of Greek at many centres of American education. Even the small quantity of Greek required to pass the Responsions examination at Oxford, which is the only qualifying test applied to candidates for the Scholarship, has proved a stumbling block to great numbers of those who have aspired to become Rhodes Scholars. It has often been suggested [superscript addendum in pencil: “to me”] that the tide is now setting so strongly in the United States against the study of Greek as an unpractical and comparatively useless subject that our chance of getting the ablest young Americans as competitors for the Scholarship would be greatly improved if we could induce Oxford to relax regulations which now make Greek a compulsory study for the ordinary undergraduate up to the time when he has passed the first public examination.
[For further discussion about the obstacle that the Greek requirement presented to American candidates for the Rhodes Scholarship, see Alexander (2001: 114–115).]
An earlier version of this paper was delivered as a public lecture at the annual conference of the Classical Association of Canada, held in St. John’s in May 2017. For advice on specific questions and for much information besides, I am grateful to Ms. Colleen Field, Centre for Newfoundland Studies, Memorial University of Newfoundland; Dr. Ágnes Juhász-Ormsby, Department of English, MUN; Dr. Bernie Kavanagh, Department of Classics, Queen’s University; Dr. Denyse Lynde, Department of English, MUN; and the staff of the Newfoundland and Labrador Provincial Archives. I also received much help and encouragement from the editor of Newfoundland and Labrador Studies, Dr. James Feehan, and from the journal’s three anonymous readers. None of them, however, is responsible for any errors.