How Ancient Greece Shaped the British Raj

The British colonisers who travelled to India from the 18th century onwards were steeped in the Classics; they knew their Greek and Latin (if not the languages of India) and quoted liberally from Horace and Virgil. Not all Britons, of course – but it was not a small contingent who took ancient Greece and Rome with them to the subcontinent. In part, Classics was an affectation; speaking Latin was a sign that you were polished, well read and sophisticated, and acting like a gentleman was important to English self-regard during the Raj. But connections with Greece and Rome went deeper: the British saw their actions in India through the lens of their classical educations and understood their decisions in the light of Graeco-Roman antiquity. Some imagined themselves as marching in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, while others preferred Julius Caesar or Augustus. For some, the epic poems of Homer bore startling similarities with Sanskrit epics and were a basis for cultural comparison; for others, Virgil’s Aeneid offered guidance on how to be imperial and civilised at the same time. When Indians and Britons encountered each other from the middle of the 18th century to the middle of the 20th, the ancient Greeks and Romans were also present.

Finding Alexander

For the early administrators of the East India Company, as for other European adventurers and travellers in India, Alexander the Great and his journey through the region was a source of fascination. Alexander provided a point of contact between Graeco-Roman antiquity and Indian civilisation. William Jones, the Welsh philologist and orientalist, is famous for having devised the theory of Indo-European languages while he was a judge in Calcutta in the late 18th century. In 1793 he also identified the figure of ‘Sandrocottus’, a ruler mentioned in ancient Greek texts, as Chandragupta, the founder of the Maurya Empire and a slightly younger contemporary of Alexander. This offered historians a means for synchronising ‘European’ and ‘Indian’ chronologies and to give Gregorian dates to events in Indian history. Chandragupta, henceforth, could be said by European historians to have begun his reign in 320 BC.

But Alexander’s appeal was not only historiographical. He was the greatest conqueror of antiquity, and his movements in the Indus Valley were interesting for that reason alone. As Iskandar, he was the subject of Arabic and Persian tales that had made their way to India long before the arrival of Europeans; as Sikandar, he was the subject of Indian romances that went back centuries. British operatives embraced these traditions, but also devoted a huge amount of time and energy to thinking about his route and trying to make sense of the surviving accounts of his travels. These ancient sources, written by figures such as Arrian and Plutarch, are hard to interpret and sometimes contradict each other – the challenge of deciphering them generated a vast number of responses.

Every modern traveller and agent of the East India Company in northwest India seemed to have – or develop – his own theory about Alexander’s route and motives. What was the precise path that he took through the mountains of Afghanistan? Did he come across a cult of Dionysus on his march towards India and, if so, where? Where was the camp on the Hydaspes (Jhelum river) and where did he cross it? In the 1830s the soldier and archaeologist Charles Masson collected thousands of Indo-Greek coins that he discovered in the North-West Frontier. Masson argued that Mittun, or Mithankot – the source of many of his coins – was the site of an Alexandria established by the conqueror in antiquity, and was therefore a suitable trading post for the Company. (He also thought that the ancient site of Harappa was the Sangala mentioned by Arrian.) Masson was accompanied in his coin-collecting by Mohan Lal, a Kashmiri Brahmin, who wrote his own accounts of his travels in the northwest and retained an interest in Alexander and the Greeks.

General Sir Charles Napier, who in capturing Sindh with brutal force in 1843 was following in Alexander’s footsteps, was aware of the path he trod. The story of him sending a dispatch to Lord Ellenborough that simply read ‘peccavi’ (‘I have sinned’, implying, also, ‘I have Sindh’) is likely just a story. But if a good story is what you’re after, look no further than Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ (1888), a masterpiece which draws much of its emotional force from Alexander’s regional fame. The inhabitants of Kafiristan in that tale believe the rascally Daniel Dravot to be a descendant of Alexander and worship him accordingly – until things go awry, of course.

Fascination with Alexander also had a strategic and military dimension. The British were concerned that Napoleon or the Russian tsar might be tempted to follow in Alexander’s footsteps and invade India. If you were a land-based invader, the reasoning went, would you not be tempted to follow the very route into India taken by the most successful conqueror in the ancient world? The title of David Hopkins’ book, published in 1808, sums up the author’s concerns at length: The dangers of British India, from French invasion and missionary establishments: to which are added some account of the countries between the Caspian Sea and the Ganges; a narrative of the revolutions which they have experienced, subsequent to the expedition of Alexander the Great; and a few hints respecting the defence of the British frontiers in Hindostan.

In 1808 Mountstuart Elphinstone, later governor of Bombay, had been sent to Kabul on account of anxieties over Napoleon’s intentions, which seemed real enough. His Account of the Kingdom of Caubul, which appeared in 1815, was weighed and analysed by scholars of Alexander (for clues about his ancient route) and by Company officials and administrators in turn. Elphinstone was a voracious reader – in many literary traditions including Indian and Persian – and was also widely read in the Greek and Roman authors. The diaries and journals he composed in India and Afghanistan include references that range from Homer, Sophocles and Euripides to prose authors such as Thucydides and Xenophon and the orator Demosthenes. His observations and casual asides show how far things have changed in the last 200 years. It is difficult, despite the various wars in the Middle East, to imagine any officer from the past 50 years writing in their diary such a sentence as: ‘I breakfasted with Kennedy, and talked about Hafiz, Saadi, Horace, and Anacreon. At nine I left him, and went to the trenches.’

British officials in India were not shy about telling their correspondents how industrious and diligent they were, but the frontrunner in this field was surely Thomas Babington Macaulay, historian and colonial administrator, who on some mornings in India read Greek and Latin for three or four hours before breakfast. Reading his diaries and letters can be an intimidating experience. The latter, especially, also reveal a pompous man who took himself very seriously. His influence was immense: his so-called ‘Minute’ of 1835 helped put English at the centre of educational policy in India, championing the use of English over Indian languages in schools and colleges. This document refers to the Greek and Latin classics as a parallel to underline the importance of teaching English: ‘What the Greek and Latin were to the contemporaries of More and Ascham, our tongue is to the people of India.’ Macaulay’s ‘Minute’ bears no small responsibility for the widespread use of English in South Asia today.

Interestingly, Macaulay’s letters indicate that the idea for his most famous literary work, the Lays of Ancient Rome (1842), came to him while he was in the Nilgiris, a mountainous region in the south of the subcontinent, and that he composed most of the Lays while in ‘exile’ in India. Ostensibly about Rome, the poems are really a British man’s reflection on service, valour and devotion to country. They were the creation of a man serving in India and dreaming of Britain by writing about Rome.

Emperors and poets

While Alexander loomed large in British accounts of Indian history, there was a problem: his empire was short-lived. On his early death in 323 BC it splintered into several parts and his generals more or less divided up the conquered lands among themselves. He did not provide a model for a long-lasting empire.

Athens and Sparta were frequently eulogised and studied by the Victorians, but their empires were small. The Assyrian, Egyptian and Persian empires offered a kind of precedent, but they were not regarded as European or ancestral in the way that the Greeks and Romans were. The model had to be Rome. Julius Caesar thus achieved a kind of heroic status in 19th-century Britain and, in the eyes of writers such as J.A. Froude, was comparable to that other ‘JC’, Jesus Christ. ‘Strange and startling resemblance between the fate of the founder of the kingdom of this world and of the Founder of the kingdom not of this world, for which the first was a preparation’, wrote Froude in his Caesar: A Sketch (1879): 

Each was denounced for making himself a king. Each was maligned as the friend of publicans and sinners; each was betrayed by those whom he had loved and cared for; each was put to death; and Caesar also was believed to have risen again and ascended into heaven and become a divine being.

Even more relevant was Augustus, the first emperor of Rome and the founder of an imperial dynasty. It was he who laid the foundations for a long-lasting, multiethnic, multiracial empire – and he who faced the challenge of maintaining and consolidating the imperial expansion won by armies before him. Perhaps the late Victorians identified with Augustus because they felt that the problems he faced were similar to their own: developing an imperial bureaucracy, maintaining peace on the borders and keeping colonial subjects happy. In the magisterial 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, H.F. Pelham described Augustus as: 

one of the world’s great men, a statesman who conceived and carried through a scheme of political reconstruction which kept the empire together, and secured peace and tranquillity and preserved civilization for more than two centuries.

Along with Augustus another classical star shone ever brighter in the last decades of the 19th century: Virgil, author of the Aeneid. Though his reputation ebbed and flowed over the centuries, Virgil’s place in the classical canon was never really in doubt. William Gladstone dismissed Virgil as a court poet or a minstrel for hire in his Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age (1858): ‘The feebleness and untruth of the character of Aeneas’, wrote Gladstone, ‘was due to the false position of Virgil, who was obliged to discharge his functions as a poet in subjection to his dominant obligations and liabilities as a courtly parasite of Augustus.’ But Gladstone was unable to drown out Virgil’s admirers. The cult of Virgil and Rome (Christian and non-Christian alike) reached new heights in Britain by the end of the 19th century. In an essay described in the Encyclopaedia Britannica as ‘the most famous English essay on Virgil’, Frederic Myers said that Virgil was ‘the earliest and the official exponent of the world-wide Empire of Rome, the last and the closest precursor of the world-wide commonwealth of Christ’. Aeneas was compared to Abraham and Christ. A hero who made painful sacrifices for the gods above, he gave up his love of Dido, queen of Carthage, in order to press on with his mission and found a settlement in Italy. Nation over self: the British Empire was built on such stories of personal sacrifice.

Appreciation of Virgil’s sweeping tale was accompanied by a renewed appreciation of his language and versatility. His genius for the right turn of phrase meant that he was a reliable source of quotations, not least on matters of state. Jupiter’s words to Venus, recounted in Book One of the Aeneid, were a staple in Victorian classrooms: ‘For them I set no limits in space and time: I give them empire without end.’ No less resonant for the English reader were Anchises’ revelations to Aeneas in Book Six, here in Dryden’s magnificent translation:

Rome, ’tis thine alone, with awful sway,
To rule Mankind, and make the World obey;
Disposing Peace, and War, thy own Majestick Way.
To tame the Proud, the fetter’d Slave to free;
These are Imperial Arts, and worthy thee.

These prophetic words reverberated throughout the British Empire. Robert N. Cust, a member of the Indian Civil Service, in his Memoirs of past years of a septuagenarian, wrote that he recalled those very lines when he found himself ruling over millions in India before he had turned 30. Cust was far from alone. Numerous memoirs and journals of imperial service quote Virgil or allude to his poetry. Field-Marshal Earl Wavell followed his tenure as viceroy of India by becoming president of the recently founded Virgil Society upon his retirement in 1947 (the society’s first president was T.S. Eliot).

The passages in Virgil that prophesied Rome’s greatness acted as a balm to British readers and assuaged their fears of decline and fall. Edward Gibbon had evoked the prospect of imperial decline in a style that was riveting, exquisite and grandiose all at once. His grasp of detail was breathtaking, as was the lesson that he delivered to his many attentive readers. If even the Roman Empire came to an end, how could the British Empire hope to escape the same gloomy fate? Macaulay turned the problem on its head. Echoing Virgil, he told Parliament in July 1833 that the day when the British handed back sovereignty to Indians would be Britain’s finest time. The task of imperial rule would be over and Britons would return the nation to a grateful people whom they had themselves trained in the arts of government. ‘It may be that the public mind of India may expand under our system till it has outgrown that system’, said Macaulay: 

that, having become instructed in European knowledge, they may, in some future age, demand European institutions. Whether such a day will ever come I know not. But never will I attempt to avert or to retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day in English history. 

It was not only Indians who found that sentiment disingenuous and condescending; at any rate, the fear of decline haunted British writers throughout the second half of the 19th century. By the 20th century, the fall of the Empire was taken as inevitable.

Made in Oxford

Macaulay was implicated in another imperial innovation, the Indian Civil Service, the ‘steel frame’ which was effectively responsible for the day-to-day administration of the Raj. Entrance to the ICS, founded in 1858, was based on competitive examinations designed from the outset to appeal to – or favour – Oxford and Cambridge graduates. Greek and Roman subjects were given a significant weighting in the mark scheme. Benjamin Jowett, Oxford luminary and scholar of Greek, had joined Macaulay on the committee that advocated reform of the previous style of examinations in 1854. Together, they called for a wholesale revision of the old system of choosing civil servants.

They were evidently successful in achieving their goals as, in the first year of the exam, 70 per cent of the successful candidates were from Oxbridge. Jowett was in thrall to the idea that his students would run the Empire in the mould of Plato’s guardians, and he encouraged his students to join the ICS. Between 1888 and 1905, three successive viceroys of India –Lansdowne, Elgin, Curzon – were from Balliol College and all were students of Jowett.

Classics was for generations the subject of choice for the British elite, and to an extent the story of Classics and British India is also the story of how the British upper classes raised their young. Eton and Oxford play important roles in this account, as we would expect. Eton can count some 20 prime ministers among its old boys, while Oxford can claim to have educated about 30. Classics occupied a dominant place in these institutions from the 19th century into the 1960s. This conjunction of prestigious schools and Oxford Classics was responsible for shaping the British Empire, and especially the empire in India, in profound ways. The historian Richard Symonds pointed out in his Oxford and Empire: The Last Lost Cause? (1986) that in 1938, six of the eight provincial governors in India had read Greats at Oxford and the other two had also been students at the university. And this was just before the Second World War, by which time British political elites were turning away from Classics towards other subjects. Of the men and women who have been prime minister since the Second World War, only two read Classics at university, Harold Macmillan and Boris Johnson, both of whom went to Eton and Balliol. Perhaps that explains the traces of imperial fantasy and nostalgia one discerns in the words and actions of those two politicians. Macmillan, it should be said, volunteered for the war effort in 1914 and did not graduate.

An anecdote involving Macmillan shows how classical antiquity continued to cast a shadow over India well after independence. In 1958 prime minister Macmillan attended a banquet in his honour in New Delhi. He and his wife, Dorothy, were being entertained at Rashtrapati Bhavan, the official residence of the president of India and formerly the viceroy’s palace. Dorothy Macmillan found herself sitting opposite a portrait of her grandfather, Lord Lansdowne, who was a student of Jowett and himself the viceroy of India for almost six years. Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister, turned to Macmillan and said: ‘I wonder if the Romans ever went back to visit Britain?’ 

The empire writes back

In 1908 Mahatma Gandhi was in a prison cell in South Africa, translating Plato’s Apology into Gujarati, probably from an English translation. Gandhi’s version appeared in Indian Opinion, the newspaper that he edited for the Indian diaspora community in South Africa. His translation was circulated in India and, in 1910, banned for sedition by the British authorities along with Hind Swaraj (‘Indian Home Rule’), which resembled a Platonic dialogue. By 1915 Gandhi was back in India and, by 1919, the Indian National Congress was encouraging its members to read and circulate the outlawed material, with the effect that these texts, so obviously inspired by Plato, became part of the anti-colonial movement. It was not Plato whom the colonial administrators feared: many of them had read the Apology and the Republic in their student days and would have known the Greek. What troubled the regime was that these texts were written and presented by an Indian and that he was writing in opposition to colonial laws and attitudes. Gandhi saw the revolutionary power in Plato’s texts – and turned them against the British Empire.
 

Phiroze Vasunia is Professor of Greek at University College London.