Palimpsest

Abstract

‘I wish to enter a protest against the use of the Trojan Women or any other Greek tragedy as a means of furthering a peace movement, raising money for the Red Cross, or stirring up sentiment for any specific cause, however worthy’, it is stated in a complaint to The English Journal’s ‘Round Table’ section in 1915.¹ ‘These great expressions of Greek genius’, the author continues,

have a message of their own which is of infinitely greater moment to the world than even the European war. To use them as mere instruments of propaganda is a crime against art. It is almost like robbing the sheeted dead. […] The Greek figures were hopelessly overlaid by visions of bursting shrapnel in the Carpathians and Cossack raids in Eastern Prussia. Why should anyone be allowed to deface these lovely glimpses of the antique world by spraying over them an ill-smelling tincture of modernity? (Balaustion 1915: 398)