"A School Boy’s guide to Infidelity”: Religion, Politics and Poetry in Jacob Bryant’s Trojan War

When the venerable English antiquarian, mythographer and contrarian Jacob Bryant declared in 1796 that Troy and the Trojan War were works of fiction with no direct historical basis he triggered a dispute the vehemence of which surprised even him. Bryant, a man who for all his intellectual adventurism was by temperament, scholarship, and connection an altogether establishment figure, was accused of ‘bestial’ Jacobinism, ‘dangerous rage’, and an irresponsible scepticism that undermined revealed religion and the Enlightenment itself. This article explores the raw cultural nerve touched by Bryant’s bizarre but unfairly neglected Homeric writings.
The article is not about who was right or wrong about the Trojan War but focuses on Bryant’s religious and political apostasy in the eyes of the Loyalist press. Firstly, it will consider the exact nature of Bryant’s scepticism and the fate of the Anglican Enlightenment in the context of counter-revolutionary discourse. Next it will consider whether this scepticism about Homer is in any way out of line with Bryant’s earlier defence of Judeo-Christian truth and what that comparison might tell us about the cultural politics of the 1790s, before, thirdly, demonstrating how Bryant reaches for a different way of valuing Homer as literary rather than historical artefact. Taken together, this more nuanced understanding of Bryant allows for a fuller appreciation of the relationship between religion (and religious apologetic), antiquarian philology, political ideology and Romantic poetics during the French revolutionary era, and a greater awareness of the ways in which current critical responses continue to be shaped by the arguments of the period.