"Conciones ad populum" (1795)

That title means ‘addresses to the populace’, or alternatively ‘sermons for the public’ (the Latin concionor means ‘I preach’ or ‘I harangue’). In 1795, Coleridge sold 1/- tickets to public lectures in an attempt to raise funds for the Pantoisoctratic scheme he and his friend Robert Southey were planning. His first address was delivered, probably in January 1795, in the schoolroom of the Corn Market in Bristol under the title ‘A Moral and Political Lecture’. Worth a shilling of anyone's money, surely! Soon after (probably in February 1795) this was published as a pamphlet by Joseph Cottle.

The lecture is critical of Pitt's government, and styles the Revolutionary upheaval in France as ‘a warning to Britain’: ‘Revolutions are sudden to the unthinking only. Political Disturbances happen not without their warning Harbingers. Strange Rumblings and confused Noises still precede these earthquakes and hurricains of the moral World.’ This elision of the political and the moral is the key thing: Coleridge is not just saying that government needs to be less oppressive, that bread needs to be cheaper and so on (although he is saying that); he is arguing that we need to reorient politics by moral principles.

Coleridge gave other political lectures in Bristol in 1795 (perhaps as many as eleven) and wrote, it seems, many of the historical lectures Robert Southey contemporaneously orated—much of this material has been lost. Conciones ad populum (1795) reprinted a revised version of the ‘Moral and Political Lecture’ (dialling down some of the anti-Government rhetoric a little; people got sent to prison for sedition in the 1790s) and added to it a second lecture ‘On the Present War’, attacking ‘this unjust because unnecessary’ conflict with France, and the suspension of Habeus Corpus which Pitt's government had effected, using the war as pretext.

Coleridge is hot against the government:

War ruins our Manufactures; the ruin of our Manufactures throws Thousands out of employ; men cannot starve: they must either pick their countrymen's Pockets—or cut the throats of their fellow-creatures, because they are Jacobins. If they chuse the latter, the chances are that their own lives are facrificed: if the former, they are hung or transported to Botany Bay. And here we cannot but admire the deep and comprehensive Views of Ministers, who having starved the wretch into into Vice fend him to the barren shores of new Holland to be starved back again into Virtue. [CC 1:68-9]

He's equally hot against the established church:

It is recorded in the shuddering hearts of Christians, that while Europe is reeking with Blood, and smoaking with unextinguished Fires, in a contest of unexampled crimes and unexampled calamities, every Bishop but one voted for the continuance of the War. They deemed the fate of their Religion to be involved in the contest!—Not the Religion of Peace, my Brethren, not the Religion of the meek and lowly Jesus, which forbids to his Disciples all alliance with the powers of this World—but the Religion of Mitres and Myfteries, the Religion of Pluralities and Persecution, the Eighteen-Thousand-Pound-a-Year Religion of Episcopacy. [CC 1:66-67]

There's a lot of classical allusion in this volume, unsurprisingly enough (one of the ideas Coleridge had for raising Pantisocractic funds was a book called Imitations from the Modern Latin Poets—a shame this came to nothing, really). You can see, above, that the second part of the two-part Conciones opens with an epigraph from Statius's Thebiad. In what was, really, quite a daring move, Coleridge has blanked the last, key word in that quotation under a little row of asterisks. He's inviting us to check the original and see what he has done.

What had he done? Well: the first bit, about the ‘bellum infandum’, the unspeakable [or unnatural] war, is from Thebiad 3:71-77, and means ‘you have brought unnutterable war upon us, you murderer! No omens approve your actions. A desolate multitude of ruined houses and thousands upon thousands of dead souls, hovering night and day, will haunt you with the worst terrors.’ The second bit is from a different, earlier bit of the Thebiad [2:458-60] and, in the way Coleridge has positioned it, identifies the ‘murderer’, the man responsible for the war, in its last asterisked word:

Tu merito; ast horum miseret, quos sanguine viles
coniugibus natisque infanda ad proelia raptos
proicis excidio, bone ***!

‘You will deserve this fate, for the pitiable many whose lives you dispose of so cheaply, they and their wives and children, taken and tossed to death in gahstly butchery, good ***’. Turn to Statius and you'll find the missing word: rex, king. It's a straightforward attack on George III. People were imprisoned and transported for less.

Why Statius? All Roman epic exists in the shadow of Vergil. Of the many that were written in the first century only four have survived into modern times: Lucan, Valerius, Silius and Statius; and of those, Statius's Thebiad is probably the best (Lucan's Pharsalia is full of fine stuff, but remains unfinished, truncated by the fact that, in AD 65, its author was hounded into suicide by the tyrant Nero). And there's a particular breach between Vergil and Statius. The Aeneid exists, inter alia, to praise Augustus, and remains a monument to the divinely wise political and military authority of its hero. The Thebiad, written a century later, came into being in a very different political situation: ‘a gulf divides Vergil from Statius; between them lay the decline of the principate into an undisguised and unfettered autocracy: Augustus was betrayed by his successors’ [David Vessey, Statius and the Thebaid (Cambridge Univ. Press 1973), 5-6]. Under the violent rule of Domitian (a figure Statius publicly and repeatedly praised, as writers who prefer not to be executed will tend to do when they live under tyranny) ‘Statius turned to the dramatization of the often trivial activities of his friends and patrons and to the mythological epic’. No De Bello Civili-style contemporary relevance for Statius, but instead a retreat to distant Greek myth, in which explicit praise for the dominus et deus that was Domitian is balanced by an unflinching representation of the horrors of war and coded critique of secular authority of reges.

[A PS. There are some other classical quotations too, not all of which have been identified. When the first lecture was reprinted in the Conciones (not, that is, in its original pamphlet form) it is retitled ‘Introductory Address’ and opens with a Greek epigraph:

That means: ‘always, then, have I been a lover of Liberty; but in many who call themselves Liberty-lovers there is much that is destructive and hateful’. It's Coleridge's own concoction: he found the word φιλελεύθερος, lover-of-freedom, democrat in Polybius 4:30.5; but the rest of this quotation simply fits STC's own argument in the Conciones too well.]