57: Watership Down and the Classics
Written by Andrew Stevens
Full references:
Richard Adam’s biographical note in the Puffin edition of Watership Down describes him as having “more than a passing acquaintance with the giants of English literature”(1)…
...The three great epics...Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid do seem to feature throughout the novel, as does the wider Greek Epic cycle...There are...scholarly works on structural similarities and narrative technique between the poems and the novel, Chapter 2 of Dr Hannah Parry’s 2016 thesis “The Aeneid with Rabbits: Children's Fantasy as Modern Epic”(2) is one fine example....
Chapter 1 opens with a quote from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, the story of the Greek king’s...homecoming after the sack of Troy...the destruction of a former home also matches how Aeneas tells his story to Queen Dido in Virgil’s Aeneid (3).
...the available evidence strongly suggests that the English translation of the Agamemnon excerpt is Adams’ own (4).
...The Warren of the Snares has been likened to the Lotus Eaters from the Odyssey (5)
...The Anabasis has been described by Michael Flower as the “master-plot” of the escape story in Western literature (6)...
...A parallel exists between the Anabasis and Watership Down...
Classical culture and history combine in the character of Bigwig...Before the battle, some sources state that the Persians invited the Greeks to lay down their arms and have their lives spared. They are said to have replied simply “Molon labe – come and get them” (10)...when Bigwig invites his Russian Warship of an opponent to “silflay hraka, u embleer rah”(11), his humour is crude, perfect and feels very Spartan.
It is easy to draw a comparison of Hazel...and Bigwig...to Odysseus and Ajax in the Little Iliad...Bigwig’s contempt for the idea of Hazel being superior to him in Chapter 11 (12), shows his view at this point that a strong rabbit could never answer to a weaker one. At the novels’ climax, we learn in his explosive, revelatory statement of “My Chief Rabbit has told me to defend this run …”(13) that, unlike Ajax, Bigwig has accepted his and his rah’s positions...
A final note on Classics in Watership Down is the title of Chapter 48 (14). Dea ex Machina means “Goddess out of the Machine”...
1 WD p.479
2 Parry, pp.33-53
3 Parry, p.39
4 Bridgman, pp.161-2
5 Parry, pp.40-2
6 Flower, p.47
7 Anab. 4.7.11
8 Rood, 2004
9 WD, p.134
10 Cartledge, p.142
11 WD p.451
12 WD, p.68
13 WD p.454
14 WD, p.458
Primary sources
Adams, Richard (1972) Watership Down, Puffin Books, Harmondsworth
Xenophon Anabasis in Waterfield, R. (trans.) (2005) The Expedition of Cyrus, Oxford, Oxford Worlds’ Classics
Secondary sources
Bridgman, J. (1990) The Writing, Publication and Literary Context of Watership Down. PhD Thesis, University College London, London
https://www.proquest.com/docview/1924932476/3D1CFE091B584D0APQ/4
Cartledge, P. (2006) Thermopylae – The Battle that Changed the World, London, Macmillan
Flower, M.A (2012) Xenophon’s Anabasis or The Expedition of Cyrus, Oxford, Oxford University Press
Parry, H (2016) The Aeneid with Rabbits: Children's Fantasy as Modern Epic. PhD Thesis, Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand https://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/handle/10063/5222
Rood, T. (2004) The Sea! The Sea! The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination, London, Duckworth Overlook
Further Reading
Hardwick, L. (2003) Reception Studies: New Surveys in the Classics, Greece & Rome, New Surveys in the Classics, no. 33, Oxford, Oxford University Press
Andrew Stevens, March 2022
