Given the centrality of the Greek and Roman classics in the education of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British elites, it would be reasonable to assume that the empires of antiquity would be taken as models for their own work of empire building in modern times. Somewhat surprisingly this hypothesis has not been seriously tested until quite recently, and the present volume compiles contributions from most of the scholars who are currently at work on this topic. As with many such collections, the essays are uneven in quality, although all make useful contributions to the field. Taken together, they shed some interesting (and perhaps counterintuitive) light on the theme. The first chapter, by Kostas Vlassopoulos, offers several compelling reasons why eighteenth-century policy makers and scholars hesitated before embracing the legacy of the ancient empires. In the first place, Habsburg claims to the Roman mantle of universal monarchy made Protestants (and even some Catholics) wary of such historical analogies. Moreover, astute observers, from Montesquieu to Edward Gibbon and David Hume, all recognized that the overseas empires of early modern Europe were fundamentally commercial and transoceanic. This made modern empires different from their Roman or Greek predecessors. Finally, anxieties about the fate of liberty in the shadow of imperial expansionism increased the reluctance of eighteenth-century Britons to envision their empire as a second Rome.

Nevertheless, once this point had been established, British imperialists, especially during the era of Pax Britannica, were willing to draw out selective comparisons between Greater Britain and Greater Rome. Thus, as Rama Mantena argues, T. B. Macaulay and Charles Trevelyan justified their program of Anglicization in India by recalling the role that Latinization had played in raising English civilization to its mid-nineteenth-century heights. For others, as Margaret Williamson argues, access to the classics had to be mediated by race. She shows how H. N. Coleridge deployed classical motifs in his 1826 travelogue as a way of “otherizing” West Indian slaves. More consequentially, Johan Winckelmann’s idealization of the Greek classic form created an image of human perfection that would lay the foundation for a whole series of nineteenth-century renditions of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority. Nearly all the anthropomorphic horrors that survived into the Victorian period—facial angles, cephalic indexes, and indexes of nigrescence—were grounded in an idealized figure derived from the ancient Greeks. Yet this did not always reinforce imperialism. Indeed, as Debbie Challis notes, the notorious Aryan-obsessed anatomist Robert Knox was entirely opposed to incursions into the tropics, which he depicted as blighted, disease-ridden regions to which the master race could never adapt.

For those who were heavily invested in the empire project, racial purism always had to give way before the more subtle complexities of time and space. In the most sophisticated chapter of the book, Mark Bradley traces the reaction of several generations of Victorians to Tacitus’s biography of Agricola. By visualizing Rome’s imperial triumph through the eyes of the defeated ancient Britons, the great historian had provided modern Britons with a sharp-edged prism through which they could view the vicissitudes of their own empire. Were those who had been defeated to be redeemed by the Macaulayite vision of progress? Or was their loss to be reckoned as the extinction of a vibrant local culture that the march of imperial expansion had needlessly crushed? “To robbery, butchery and theft they give the false name of Empire,” Tacitus had imagined Calgacus, the defeated British general lamenting, “and where they create a desert, they call it peace” (quoted on 123). Here indeed was a mordant excoriation of empire that could serve equally well as an indictment of the victor or as a justification for his brutality.

Perhaps the most interesting conclusion to be drawn from this volume is that British identification with the Greek and the Roman empires became more noticeable and more significant only after Britons began to fear that their own empire was on the wane. This becomes clear in the essay by Adam Rogers and Francis Haverfield, which demonstrates that Edward Gibbon’s great Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was scanned by readers and scholars for contemporary lessons only a century after its original publication. The same line of argument is continued by Emma Reisz, who shows how many late Victorians tried to assuage their fears of falling by emphasizing the modern, scientific character of their empire. Hypothesizing that Rome had been destroyed by malaria, the classicist W. H. S. Jones became enthused by the discovery of the parasite Plasmodium since he thought it ensured that imperial Britain would not suffer the same fate. Others, presumably, were less sanguine than Jones. The microscope was hardly a robust instrument on which to hinge the future of an empire.

Yet, if the classics provided only a limited template for contemplating nineteenth-century British imperialism, the imperial context had a profound impact on the way in which the discipline of classical studies took shape. This is emphasized both in the introduction by Mark Bradley and in the envoi at the end, by Phiroze Vasunia, as well as by several authors in between. In particular, the discovery of a separate genre of “oriental classics” in the late eighteenth century reshaped the way in which the European classics were read and understood. While the European appropriation of these “other” classics was generally geared to demoting modern “orientals,” who were deemed to have degenerated far below the accomplishment of their ancestors, this was by no means universally the case. Thus, Abhishek Kaicker shows how Altaf Hussain Hali, a late nineteenth-century Muslim scholar, turned tables on Western orientalism by emphasizing the role of the Arabs in preserving knowledge of the Western classics during the Dark Ages when learning and civilization disappeared in the West. For Wallis Budge, an orientalist employed by the British Museum, the recovery of obscure poems by the early Greek poet Bacchylides had to come by way of recently discovered Egyptian papyri. To smuggle these papyri out of the country, Budge cut them up into little pieces that could be hidden in his suitcase, as David Fearn explains. When the papyri were finally displayed in London, their desecration was brazenly blamed on “ignorant” Egyptians, who could obviously not be trusted with custody of such precious artifacts. Clearly, the classics were coming to have an almost talismanic power, as the core documents on which Western superiority would be founded. If they offered little practical guidance for running a modern empire, they became indispensable tokens of superiority. British imperialists sought to monopolize these tokens, but colonials could attempt to appropriate their meaning to support an alternative set of subaltern counterclaims.