'The bright blue sky of Rome and...the vigorous awakening of spring' : re-evaluating Percy Shelley's debt to ancient Roman literature

Abstract

This thesis reevaluates Percy Shelley’s engagement with classical literature. Scholars have typically given more attention to the allusions to Hellenic literature and culture in Shelley’s poetry than Roman. In the ancient world, Roman literature is sometimes portrayed as being second-rate to Greek literature. This was often the case during the nineteenth century too: Shelley himself suggests that Rome was an imitator of Greece in his A Defence of Poetry. However, through close analysis of the allusions to ancient Roman texts found in four of Shelley’s major works, I propose that Roman literature had a valuable, far-reaching impact on his writing. This thesis traces Shelley’s debt to authors from the Roman republic and empire in four chapters that examine the following works: Queen Mab (1813), Prometheus Unbound (1820), The Cenci (1820), and The Triumph of Life (1822). I read the ancient texts in the original Latin as Shelley did. In the latter three chapters, I analyse Shelley’s engagement with Latin literature in conjunction with his response to being immersed in the topography of Italy, as seen in his Preface to Prometheus Unbound and his letters from his time there. What emerges from closely reading the above works in this way is the understanding that ancient Roman literature played a crucial part in the formulation of Shelley’s radical discourse on a range of philosophical, political, and ethical topics, including his criticism of organised religion and his advocacy of vegetarianism. This thesis posits that Roman literature influenced Shelley in specific, meaningful ways, as did the Greek that he read. I argue that the philosophers, epicists, lyric poets, and tragedians of ancient Rome permeated Shelley’s imagination and influenced how he expressed some of his most renowned and distinctive ideas.