Edward Dodwell in the Peloponnese: mountains and the classical past in nineteenth-century Mediterranean travel writing

This chapter argues that a full account of modern responses to mountains needs to give more attention to the influence of classical precedents and models; and more specifically that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel writing from mainland Greece offers fertile ground for seeing that influence in action. I start by outlining two distinctive features of the portrayal of mountains in Mediterranean travel writing. The first is the phenomenon whereby ascending a hill or a mountain makes the classical past more clearly visible. The second is the tendency to see the classical as inextricably related to terms of aesthetic judgement like the sublime and the pictureseque. The second half of this chapter then tracks in more detail Dodwell’s distinctive use of those two phenomena, with a special focus on his account of travelling in the mountains of the Peloponnese.