Description

Gasp at the use of Classics to attack Tom Paine and Dr Samuel Parr by John Wilde, Professor of Civil Law at Edinburgh University from 1791 to 1800. Despite his own social rise from birth into a family which run a tobacconist’s shop, Wilde flaunted his classical education to deride Paine during a lecture to the Edinburgh Society for the Friends of the People in 1793.

Wilde proposes that Paine is unintelligent:  ‘I cannot bring myself to think that he is a man of any abilities, even in the low cast to which he belongs. It is evident (though sometimes it is clear that he wilfully mistakes) that from stupidity he cannot comprehend the meaning of sufficiently simple propositions.’

Wilde can’t bear that Paine has an admirer in the most respected Hellenist in the land, Dr Samuel Parr. ‘It is no doubt true,’ concedes Wilde, ‘that Paine here and there expresses himself forcibly. But so does a fishwoman at Billingsgate.’ Wilde then compares Paine with two ancient figures, using long untranslated quotations from Latin and Greek authors to underline his own superior education. Paine is like C. Servilius Glaucia as described by Cicero in his Brutus, ‘by far the vilest man alive, but experienced and shrewd and most of all laughable.’ Wilde then compares Paine with Thersites, the soldier who threatened the kings’ authority at Troy, and quotes a long passage in the Greek of Dionysius of Halicarnassus to prove it.

But the killer blow is kept for the end. Wilde says he knows he may appear ‘foolish to quote  Greek when speaking about Mr Paine’  [The implication is that Paine is far too ‘low-caste’ to have anything to do with Greek]. But then Wilde changes his target: the available (Latin) translations of ancient Greek are abominable, and he hopes that the good Dr Parr GIVE UP POLITICS and do some translating into English.

Wilde has called Paine ‘low-caste’, a ‘fishwife’, stupid and ridiculous. He has derided a famous classical scholar for commending any of Paine’s ideas. He has exhibited his own knowledge of Latin and Greek in an attempt to disguise learning as moral high ground. It is a shame that no record exists of Wilde’s Edinburgh audience’s reactions.