ABSTRACT
It is well-known that George Eliot researched intensively for Romola,, covering many aspects of Renaissance Florentine life. One of these aspects was the revival of the study of classical Greek, which, with the rediscovery of many ancient texts, was integral to the progress of the Renaissance in Italy. In the notebooks the novelist kept during the course of her research there are numerous references to fourteenth and fifteenth-century scholars and scholarship; in addition, the ancient texts themselves were by no means new to her. Already familiar with Latin, she had begun to learn Greek after her removal to Coventry in 1841, her teacher being the Reverend Thomas Sheepshanks, the headmaster of Coventry Grammar School. She seems to have been a good pupil, for the Reverend Sheepshanks told his granddaughter that 'he was astonished by her power of application and retentive memory'.1 By the time she came to work on Romola, she had become familiar with many of the major Greek writers, either in Greek or English. She had read the Iliad and the Odyssey, most of Xenophon, several plays of Sophocles and of Aeschylus, as well as some Euripides, Theocritus, Menander, Plutarch, Plato and Aristotle. She was to go on in the ensuing years to read more. The enthusiasm she felt for the Greek world is clear: 'I rush on the slightest pretext to Sophocles' she wrote in 1857;2 in 1858, she found Philoctetes 'one of the finest dramas in the world' (Letters, VIII, 201); in 1862, she called Aristotle 'that greatest of ancients' (Letters, IV, 4); in 1870, Lewes found it hard to 'seduce Polly away from her beloved
Theocritus' (Letters, VIII, 481); and, according to her friend the classical scholar Benjamin Jowett, Homer gave her relief from sorrow when, after Lewes's death, 'feeling that she must do something for herself, she read through, in the Greek, the Iliad and the Odyssey, because that most completely separated her from useless and painful thoughts'.3 The preference she seems to have had for Greek over Latin was common in nineteenthcentury Britain.
