Fantasy Island: Greece and Rome in Two Eighteenth Century Irish Authors

Two Irish authors from the ‘long eighteenth-century’ are examples of how Ireland, an island remote from the centre, absorbs and reforms Greco-Roman culture. In the west of Ireland, in Galway, when Roderic O’Flaherty (1629-1718) wanted a title for his history of Ireland published in Latin 1685 he chose Ogygia, Or a Chronological Account of Irish events /Ogygia seu Rerum Hibernicarum Chronlogica. Psyche: or The Legend of Love by Mary Tighe (1772-1810) draws on the central section of a second-century AD novel Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, the story of Cupid and Psyche (M. 4.28- 6.24). Two Irish authors remake what they have chosen from the classics of Greece and Rome into two totally different contributions to creation of a ‘fantasy’ Ireland