Results by title

After fending off Persia in the fifth century BCE, Athens assumed a leadership position in the Aegean world. Initially it led the Delian League, a military alliance against the Persians, but eventually the league evolved into an empire with Athens in control and exacting tribute from its former allies. Athenians justified this subjection of their allies by emphasizing their fairness and benevolence towards them, which gave Athens the moral right to lead. But Athenians also believed that the strong rule over the weak and that dominating others allowed them to maintain their own freedom. These conflicting views about Athens’ imperial rule found expression in the theater, and this book probes how the three major playwrights dramatized Athenian imperial ideology.

Through close readings of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, Euripides’ Children of Heracles, and Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, as well as other suppliant dramas, Angeliki Tzanetou argues that Athenian tragedy performed an important ideological function by representing Athens as a benevolent and moral ruler that treated foreign suppliants compassionately. She shows how memorable and disenfranchised figures of tragedy, such as Orestes and Oedipus, or the homeless and tyrant-pursued children of Heracles were generously incorporated into the public body of Athens, thus reinforcing Athenians’ sense of their civic magnanimity. This fresh reading of the Athenian suppliant plays deepens our understanding of how Athenians understood their political hegemony and reveals how core Athenian values such as justice, freedom, piety, and respect for the laws intersected with imperial ideology.

Troubled by the discipline’s historical relationship to white supremacy, classical scholars have begun to reexamine their fundamental assumptions about the relevance of ancient Greece and Rome to the modern world. After decades in which classical reception was relegated to the periphery of the discipline, a consensus has developed that the study of modern interactions with antiquity is inherently valuable. One of the newest branches of classical reception focuses on the cultural productions and political realities of Asian Americans. Contending that the Asian American authors discussed herein understand the ancient world as fundamentally unstable, Classical Reception in Asian American Literature interrogates this instability as manifested in fragmentation, violence, mythology, allusion, performance, and memory. 

The study explores the written works of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Ocean Vuong, Quan Barry, Chang-rae Lee, David Lau, Sally Wen Mao, Johanna Hedva, Hoa Nguyen, and Vi Khi Nao. Via their written works, Christopher Waldo explores the bond between Demeter and Persephone, Telemachus’ identity as a fatherless son, the relationship between diasporic authors and Sappho, reinventions of mythology surrounding the Trojan War, and more. In Classical Reception in Asian American Literature, the literary traditions of the East and West collide to illuminate the threads of connection between the ancient and modern worlds. 

History is written and constructed by many, not just those few who proclaim themselves “the victors.” Classical Receptions in the Struggle for Justice examines how activists, artists, and writers of the past have found studying ancient Greece and Rome to be hopeful avenues for justice or personal liberation. These individuals, while sometimes critiquing the classical tradition, also saw in it ways to intervene in their contemporary reality for their struggle for justice. 

Each contribution to this volume contains original research that highlights how ancient Greece or Rome informed and inspired an individual or movement between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries, such as the struggles against structural racism, sexism, and homophobia. These engagements included visual arts, poetry, political activism, rhetoric, philosophy, environmentalism, and fiction. Individuals profiled in this volume include Mary Shelley, Henry David Thoreau, and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as figures whose work remains underrepresented in the study of classical reception. Classical Receptions in the Struggle for Justice speaks to the enduring power of the humanities and the ancient world in difficult times.

The story of Roman Hellenism—defined as the imitation or adoption of something Greek by those subject to or operating under Roman power—begins not with Roman incursions into the Greek mainland, but in Italy, where our most plentiful and spectacular surviving evidence is concentrated. Think of the architecture of the Roman capital, the Campanian towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum buried by Vesuvius, and the Hellenic culture of the Etruscans. Perhaps “everybody knows” that Rome adapted Greek culture in a steadily more “sophisticated” way as its prosperity and might increased. This volume, however, argues that the assumption of smooth continuity, let alone steady “improvement,” in any aspect of Roman Hellenism can blind us to important aspects of what Roman Hellenism really is and how it functions in a given context.

Classical scholarship has traditionally neglected the prominence of the body in antiquity. Constructions of the Classical Body theorizes that the study of antiquity is necessarily a study of the body, and that attention to this fact can lead to a much-needed shift in the way in which classical studies are approached today. This volume aims to reestablish the relevance of the problem of the body at the perimeters of several different kinds of inquiry, and, in this way, to help open up a field of possibilities for future study. The range covered by the essays in this volume is sweeping: from Corinthian vaseware to Athenian and Roman politics, poetry from Homer to Ovid, medical writers from the Hippocratic corpus to the diary of Aelius Aristides (second century c.e.), philosophy (Seneca, Porphyry), the Greek novel, Christian apocrypha, Ovid's medieval reception, and twentieth century film. This range is a consequence of the multidisciplinarity that any study of the body requires, and it attests to the particular richness of the body in classical antiquity and as an object for study today. The volume illustrates that body is located between traditional borders, not within them; the body dissolves traditional objects of study and joins areas usually kept apart. Retracing the fate of the body is thus a way of rendering antiquity truly strange again -- it allows us to see the past afresh, with open eyes. This volume includes essays by Carlin A. Barton, Anne Carson, Eric Downing, Catherine Edwards, Maud W. Gleason, John Henderson, Ralph Hexter, S. C. Humphreys, Helen King, Leslie Kurke, Robert Lamberton, David S. Potter, Amy Richlin, Giulia Sissa, Maria Wyke, and Froma I. Zeitlin, along with an introduction by James I. Porter. ". . . a superb collection, one that I know will be most welcome not only in the field of classical studies, but in the libraries of all those interested in the history and historicity of the body." --Page duBois, University of California, San Diego

As any reader of the Symposium knows, the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates conversed over lavish banquets, kept watch on who was eating too much fish, and imbibed liberally without ever getting drunk. In other words, James Davidson writes, he reflected the culture of ancient Greece in which he lived, a culture of passions and pleasures, of food, drink, and sex before—and in concert with—politics and principles. Athenians, the richest and most powerful of the Greeks, were as skilled at consuming as their playwrights were at devising tragedies. Weaving together Greek texts, critical theory, and witty anecdotes, this compelling and accessible study teaches the reader a great deal, not only about the banquets and temptations of ancient Athens, but also about how to read Greek comedy and history.