Shaping Rome through ‘Contactual’ Experience

Chapter 1 addresses Jones’s reception of the Roman Empire, which was marked indelibly by his personal experience of war and his growing disillusionment with the British Empire. Charting the transition from patriotic fervour—which drove him to enlist as a private in the First World War—through to post-war frustration with British imperialism and propaganda, provides the necessary context to examine the form, language and political ideology which underpin his early Roman poetry and visual artworks. This chapter explores the development of Jones’s vision of Rome across the period he was writing In Parenthesis (1937) and through his presentation of the experience of the ordinary soldier. In his poetry, Roman legionaries are also British Tommies, and their common humanity becomes the transhistorical unifier of all armies. It concludes by contextualising Jones’s creative approach to merging past and present within wider twentieth-century literary movements that were refashioning the relationship between ancient Rome and modern Britain.