The deployment of Greco-Roman Imagery on Peace Day Souvenirs in Britain

This paper focusses on the deployment of Ancient Greek and Roman imagery on civic cultural artefacts during and after the Great War.

Specifically, I explore the purpose of such imagery and the reactions of Britons to them in order to determine the function of Classicism during the Great War and in its post-war commemoration in Britain.

In this paper, I will address the role of Greco-Roman imagery on the souvenirs distributed to children on Peace Day in 1919 to celebrate the Armistice at the end of the conflict. On the material culture of a 20th Century conflict, Greco-Roman imagery appears to be an anachronistic visual medium belonging to a distant age. However, I argue that, far from being out of place, classicism was a democratic visual form had valuable roles to play in the early post-war period.

Classicism sanitized the Great War and heroized British soldiers, sailors and airmen who served in the conflict, making their injuries and deaths and the horrors of the battlefield easier to bear. Also, it united the British people together amid the social and economic difficulties of 1919, as British people were only just beginning to come to terms with the Great War and its consequences.