The Classical Hero

The construction of masculinity that came most readily to the minds of Victorian artists was that derived from the mythology of Greece and Rome. The classical world and its literature had created paradigms of male behaviours which the world of nineteenth-century Britain was able to remould, refashion and reconstruct for the purposes of advancing the masculine ideologies of Victorian culture. In developing the codes of male behaviour, classical myth provided – in the tales of Theseus, Perseus, Hercules, Apollo, Jason, Achilles, Odysseus, Orpheus and Pygmalion, to name the most prominent of these narratives – paradigms of masculinity which the culture appropriated because of its own strong affinities with classicism and its strong belief that in its imperial objectives and its aesthetic aspirations it was the legitimate successor to, respectively, Rome and Greece. Thinkers from Thomas Arnold to John Stuart Mill to Matthew Arnold to Walter Pater informed the culture that its most crucial prototypes rested in the cultures of Greece and Rome. Adding to this strong inclination towards the classical world were modes of acculturation and education that favoured classical texts and attitudes, whether these were in the political, marital, commercial or martial sphere. It is against the background of these discourses that artists constructed an ideology of masculinity that concentrated on the classical/mythical hero as a paradigm of nineteenth-century masculinity.