Two Books on the Victorian Interest in Hellenism

In the 1980s there appeared two books about the Victorian attitude towards the ancient Greeks, or about how the Victorians felt about incorporated the ancient Greek culture. The two books are Richard Jenkyn, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1980) and Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). Although they deal with the same subject, their approaches toward the subject are quite different from each other. In this paper, I will pick up two themes from each book-- "Greek Gods and Mythology" and "Plato and his Philosophy" --and see the difference in their approaches.