Faithful unto Death: Militarism, Masculinity and National Identity in Victorian Britain

By Rosemary Barrow

Abstract: In this chapter, Barrow uses Poynter’s Faithful unto Death and other Victorian artistic works such as Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii to explore the way in which the golden-age Roman Republic was idealised in British culture in the decades following the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny. She shows that the Roman soldier was lionised for his supposedly unbreakable ‘stoicism, integrity and patriotic courage’, even in the face of severe danger. Such virtue was seen as necessity for the maintenance of the British Empire, whose ranks, this author notes, were staffed by civil servants educated in the Classics for whom the image of the dutiful, self-sacrificing Roman military man bent on furthering the glory of Rome was key.

Chapter in the following edited volume: Graeco-Roman Antiquity and the Idea of Nationalism in the 19th Century, edited by Thorsten Fögen and Richard Warren. Published by De Gruyter, 2016. 305 pages.

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