Ritchie Robertson, in his insightful review of Richard Whatmore’s The End of Enlightenment: Empire, commerce, crisis (February 2), rightly stresses the urgency of historical knowledge in combating the dominance of war and fanaticism in the public sphere. I was surprised, however, that he made no reference to Cromwell’s republican Commonwealth. The most perceptive critic of that era was John Milton, who, long before Friedrich Schiller or Mary Wollstonecraft, recognized the dangers of revolt because, unlike Thomas Paine (mentioned also by Robertson), he was deeply “aware of ancient history” – “the known rules of ancient liberty”, he called it. He understood that it was “a fatal mistake to think that giving people liberty would make them virtuous” (Robertson’s precis of Wollstonecraft’s analysis), and that when “moral possibility is lacking” there can be no hope of “making true freedom the basis of political association” (his summation of Schiller’s thinking in Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man). In the sonnet beginning
“I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs”, Milton writes of those That bawl for freedom in their senseless mood, And still revolt when truth would set them free.
Licence they mean when they cry liberty; For who loves that, must first be wise and good; But from that mark how far they rove we see, For all this waste of wealth, and loss of blood.
A similar current of thinking is evident in his prose works, where he writes “that honest liberty is the greatest foe to dishonest licence” in Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, and defends his argument for divorce as an example of true liberty as against false licence in Tetrachordon. In Tenure of Kings and Magistrates he argues that “None can love freedom heartily but good men; the rest love not freedom but licence”. It is possible that Wollstonecraft and Schiller had both read Milton. What is certain is that their thinking is far from original.
Singing Horace
I thank Llewelyn Morgan for his kind words (Letters, February 2), but disclaim any “tones of outrage”. Weary resignation would be nearer the mark. I know all too well that he and “most other scholars” take it as a self-evident axiom that all references in Horace to singing to the lyre are necessarily metaphorical. I was hoping to elicit some good reason to justify that view, but no such luck: all we get is a repetition of it. Let me spell out the problem.
In Tristia 4.10 the exiled Ovid was deliberately providing autobiographical information (“accipe, posteritas!”). Remembering the poets he used to hang out with as a young man, he mentions Macer reading (aloud), Propertius reciting and Horace singing to the lyre, but Virgil he only saw. On the “necessarily metaphorical” premiss, with poems existing only as arranged on a page of papyrus, that would have to mean “I used to read M
