Panel #1: New Media
LILY BICKERS (LEIDEN UNIVERSITY) HOMER AND HOMESTUCK: EPIC IN THE DIGITAL AGE
This paper will suggest ways in which contemporary forms of media can provide new methodologies for understanding ancient literature. Specifically, it provides a reading of the Iliad through the lens of Andrew Hussie’s 2009-2016 online comic, Homestuck. Newer forms of media and storytelling such as comics, video games, and fanfiction remain peripheral to the ‘canon’, their literary value and complexity under-acknowledged by ‘central’ and established academic fields, including Classics.
Lynn Kozac’s Experiencing Hektor, which uses the critical tools of television studies to analyse the Iliad, provided me with a methodological touchstone. Homestuck, however, is almost unique in its form and has little to no existing scholarship, so my approach is more direct, turning the comic’s own ideas about narrative into methodological tools. I will introduce Homestuck as a relevant text to Iliadic scholarship due to its semi-formulaic and improvised nature and its mechanic of narrative predetermination. I will then offer two case studies: the first explores the relationship between fated narrative and heroic personality, and the second examines conflict between author-analogous figures in relation to the process of composition within a fixed traditional narrative. I aim to explore the possibilities of receptive methodologies, and the relationship between the contemporary media we consume and our perceptions of ancient literature.
LEAH BÓRQUEZ (UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY), “TRAJAN’S GIANT DEATH ROBOT: 4X GAMES, HISTORIANS, AND DECOLONIZING THE DISCIPLINE”
Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate. 4X games have been incredibly popular since the 1980s, and draw extensively from Ancient Mediterranean histories with games like Rome: Total War, Age of Empires, and perhaps most famously, Sid Meier’s Civilization series. In these games you play as the chosen leader from a civilization and aim to defeat your opponents, usually through militaristic domination although some games offer scientific, cultural, or religious win conditions. The historical content of these games tends to draw in historians and classicists because of the inclusion of the material that we study. However, despite classical and historical disciplines turning inwards and taking on missions of decolonizing the classics and incorporating postcolonial and anticolonial theory, these games remain popular among professionals in these disciplines. This paper will use a survey of classicists and historians who enjoy playing 4X games to evaluate what draws people whose scholarly work is directly opposed to the 4X’s of these games and think critically about whether 4X games could be used to further decolonial projects in the classics. Furthermore, it will ask how central colonial narratives are to the reproduction of ancient history and how impactful these narratives could be on those less entrenched in the academy.
STEPHEN FODROCZI (CORNELL UNIVERSITY), “WATER, VIRTUE, AND HOMECOMING: ODYSSEAN RECURRENCES IN HAYAO MIYAZAKI’S SPIRITED AWAY”
While Hayao Miyazaki’s 1984 film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and its allusion to the Phaeacian princess showcases clear Homeric inspirations, less explored are the Odyssean intertexts in Miyazaki’s 2001 Academy Award-winning film Spirited Away. In what is widely considered his magnum opus, Chihiro’s journey home from the spirit world showcases many of the same narrative features and thematic musings of a nature that parallels the Odyssey: katabasis, tests of virtue, recognition scenes, transformative magics, and the narrative frames of both a homecoming and a bildungsroman are all central foci to the development of the film. From the work’s intricate utilization of water as barrier and signifier of isolation, to the measuring of the protagonist’s heroic virtue against arduous trials and mythical entities, Miyazaki’s cinematic overlap with the content of Homeric epic is extensive and noteworthy. This paper will examine these features in tandem with secondary scholarship on Homeric reception, cinema studies, and Japanese mythology in order to comment on the impact of the film within the medium and its staying power as a work which has been imbued with Homeric echoes of antiquity.
Panel #2: Pushing the Limits of Texts
JUAN CARLOS GARZON MANTILLA (COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY), “MAYAN TRACES OF ULYSSES: ANCIENT GREEK HISTORY AS CREATED FROM EARLY MODERN YUCATÁN”
In 1572, the Spanish cosmographer Sarmiento de Gamboa, was commissioned by the Viceroy of Perú, to write a history of the ancient past of the Andes. This work, entitled Historia Indica, was intended to describe the tyrannic unlawfulness of the Incas of Cuzco. But as any narrative of the past created in the context of the Early Modern Americas, Historia Indica had to deal not only with its political polemics but also with other challenging historical and cosmographical questions: What was the true shape of the world? and how was this continent populated after the Universal Flood? Such questions were answered with novel hypotheses that explained when and how the world was one fully integrated entity in time and space.
For Samiento de Gamboa, the northern part of the Americas was populated by Ancient Greeks: the Maya of Yucatán were the descendants of Ulysses, who reached Yucatán sailing westward into the Ocean Sea after the fall of Troy. In this paper, I explore how Post-Trojan Maya hypothesis let us rethink the relationship between the so-called Ancients and New Worlds beyond the paradigms of transmission and imposition, centers and peripheries. I study the Early Modern reception of the Ancient World when seen from new places of interpretation, like Yucatán, in front of different epistemological questions, and when thought alongside Indigenous objects and narratives.
ALICIA MATZ (BOSTON UNIVERSITY), “BRINGING THE CANON TO THE PERIPHERY: USING FAN FICTION TO TEACH LATIN”
The typical Latin class is simple: translate a canonical text. However, student retention is difficult when these canonical texts do not offer them the same breadth as translation courses in other languages might. In this paper, I will discuss how using the lens of fan fiction and reception theory in the Latin classroom can not only bolster student engagement but also provide a means of teaching canonical texts in a way that focus on peripheral ancient identities. This talk will be based on my own experience of teaching an intermediate Latin course on Dido, in which two authors, Vergil and Ovid, were read. Despite using two canonical texts, I tried to ‘break’ the canon in two ways: by focusing on a ‘side character,’ and using the idea of fan fiction to frame class discussions. Students felt they got a different view of the ancient world by focusing on the peripheral, ‘side character’ perspective, while the focus on fan fiction allowed them to explore ways in which these peripheral characters speak to modern audiences. This perspective also allowed for students to create a personal connection with the text, which is difficult when so many canonical texts privilege the elite male perspective.
CHARLES PLETCHER (COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY), “HIPPOLYTUS THREE WAYS: THE LIMITS OF SIGHT AND SOUND IN A FATAL CRASH”
Towards the end of the 14th century, a Catalan translation of Seneca’s tragedies began to circulate. These translations — the work of at least two or three anonymous translators — borrow liberally from the commentary of Nicholas Trevet, who sought to “domesticate” (facere domesticum) Seneca at the behest of the Italian cardinal Nicolò Albertini. The translators continue Trevet’s domesticating project, at times even interpolating the Trevetian commentary directly into the Senecan text: rather than the usual practice of presenting the commentary as a series of marginal glosses, the translators of certain of these plays appear not to distinguish between commentary and source text at all. This phenomenon appears in the reception of Euripides’ Hippolytus through Seneca’s Phaedra and the later translation thereof, with particular clarity in the messenger’s speech. In their competing descriptions of the sea monster and Hippolytus’ death, Euripides, Seneca, and the Valencian translators (alongside Trevet) reveal the descriptive boundaries of dramatic narrative. In this talk, I explore how commentary and translation circumscribe and even permeate the limits of a text. I demonstrate how the manipulation of these limits trains us as readers and viewers to notice certain details and overlook others — in other words, how the distinction between a text and its periphery breaks down because of what we expect a messenger to see and to say.
Panel #3: (Re)Claiming Space
JESSICA LAWRENCE (UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE), “MADELINE MILLER: MAKING SPACE IN HOMER”
Madeline Miller has written two popular novels that attempt to show how fluid the centre of Classical reception is (The Song of Achilles and Circe). A problem that persists in the public, contemporary view of the Classics and Classical myth is that it provides a narrow space to depict how a man can and should display his masculinity and almost no space at all to how women can exist within their femininity. I explore how Miller has layered texts, such as Statius’ Achilleid and the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, behind the well-known banner of Homeric myth to allow for a wide range of gender experiences to find representation in the Classical narrative timeline. Miller uses the universal theme of romantic love as a force that necessitates, whilst it also validates, a shorter life for her protagonist(s). This validation allows for the focus on personal glory to be shifted from a Homeric focus on the intertwined states of violence and fame to a narrative of compromise and sacrifice for a private outcome of lasting love. In my paper I show how Miller makes space in the tradition for quieter conceptions of what a heroic and powerful life can mean to contemporary readers of the Classics struggling to see their experiences represented.
ALEX SILVERMAN (APGRD/THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD), “IN SEARCH OF THE UNIVERSAL: THE CLASSICAL TRADITION AND PERIPHERAL VOICES SYNTHESISED IN ELIZABETH SWADOS' MUSIC FOR TROJAN WOMEN (1974)”
This paper examines the collision of ancient, modern, Greek, and global texts in Swados' composition for LaMaMa E.T.C., and proposes that her music embodies complex attitudes to Classical culture in late 20th Century New York avant-garde theatre and beyond. Swados' approach is both conservative and radical: she privileges Euripides' text, which is preserved in its original form at the centre of her work; she also disrupts it, interspersing phrases from Nahuatl, Latin, and Navajo, alongside non-verbal elements - 'the actual sounds of emotions themselves' - as she strives to express universal human experience. I will trace the fragments of Euripides’ verse in Swados’ music, to demonstrate this technique of interpolation and interruption. I will analyse my findings in terms of translation theory, and assess signs of foreignization and domestication in Swados' composition as a means of reevaluating the interaction of modern composer and ancient text. I will argue that the piece's evolving legacy in LaMaMa's Trojan Women Project, which uses this same material to empower marginalised communities, deviates further from its Classical source, but better achieves its aim of celebrating common humanity. Finally, I will reflect on what Swados' work has taught me about my own privileged relationship with the Classical tradition, and the implications for my research and musical practice.
RAFFAELLA SERO (UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE), “THE WOMEN’S ROME: DISRUPTION AS APPROPRIATION IN 20TH CENTURY FEMALE APPROACHES TO THE CLASSICS”
For a very long time, with very few exceptions, women had no place in the pristine, white centres of culture, where Classics was invented and shaped as a discipline. Although the tide began to turn between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, with the progressive admission of women to universities, one must question the extent to which - in those bastions of a knowledge intrinsically male - they were made welcome to leave their mark upon the subject, rather than to respectfully tiptoe around it.
I wish to explore a particular response to male domination of the classics in some anglophone female authors of the 20th century, namely the practice of dismantling classical models in order to reclaim them. Works like Dorothy Parker’s “From a Letter From Lesbia” and Muriel Spark’s The Takeover, for example, use irony to extrapolate new meanings from a classical canon still cocooned in centuries of male fetishisation.
Touching on authors such as Parker and Spark, Audre Lorde and Margaret Atwood, my paper will illustrate how 20th century female writers sought to remould the centre by shooting, from their peripheral stands, at the still, white-washed, marble heart of Classics.
Panel #4: Knowledge at Borders
GIULIO LEGHISSA (UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO), “THE GULF OF SYRTES AND THE DIS-CONNECTED NORTH AFRICA: ANCIENT MEDITERRANEAN AS A SPACE OF COLONIAL DIFFERENCE”
In 2003 D. Shaw Brent argued that the isolation of the Maghrib from the rest of the Mediterranean depended on geological factors. The long-term action of the plate tectonics determined the formation of a “geological frontier” between the southern and northern borders of the Mediterranean, with the consequent separation of North Africa from Europe and the comparatively slower historical development of the former; furthermore, the same tectonic forces pushed the Mediterranean waters well into the Saharan desert and created the Gulf of Syrtes, a natural barrier between a western (from Morocco to ancient Tripolitania) and an easter ‘island’ (Cyrenaica). The mutual isolation of these two areas is reflected in their different development: westwards of the Syrtes, a Punic area with economic relations in the western Mediterranean; eastwards, the creation of a Greek cultural area engaging in commercial relations with the eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean.
After 2003, however, archaeological discoveries began to change this view and provided evidence for crossings not only between the western and eastern Mediterranean but also between western and eastern North Africa. Relying on this evidence, I aim to demonstrate that the division between a western and eastern North Africa around the Gulf of Syrtes merely perpetuates the colonial discourse of Africa as the space of ‘absolute Otherness’ in Mediterranean studies. The environmental isolation and the disrupted connectivity affecting North Africa is countered by the overall unity and permeability of the northern border: the Middle Sea appears, thus, a space of colonial difference.
GIACOMO LOI (JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY), “IN THE MIRROR OF THE CLASSICAL OTHER: READING CENTER AND MARGIN IN ISRAELI CULTURE”
Beyond the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an intra-ethnical rift has torn Israel since its foundation: Ashkenazi Jews of European origins located themselves at the political, cultural, and geographical center; instead, Sephardic Jews from Islamic countries were confined to the periphery and forced to assimilate into Ashkenazi Western culture. However, the decades between 1980 and 2010 saw a clear repositioning of Sephardic culture to the center of the Hebrew literary scene. This repositioning can be discerned in A.B. Yehoshua’s ‘Sephardic tetralogy’ (Five Seasons, Mr Mani, Journey to The End of the Millennium, The Retrospective, publ. 1987-2011), which embodied the ongoing culture war and envisaged different ways forward. In my paper, I argue that the use of classical myth is central to these novels as it becomes a symbol of European culture in the conflict between Ashkenazi and Sephardic culture, center and periphery, East and West, and Jewish and un-Jewish. In the tetralogy, Classical myth shifts from a clear-cut identification with Ashkenazi European culture to a more problematic ‘othering mirror’, in which both Ashkenazi and Sephardic culture recognize their ultimate foreignness to Western culture as well as the need for reciprocal integration into a common Israeli culture. In turn, traditionally exclusivist classical culture is re-appropriated as a key to throw into relief the margin and revendicate its original cultural contribution.
NEBO TODOROVIC (YALE UNIVERSITY), “BETWEEN BACCHAE AND BACCHANALIA. BORDER THINKING AS A MODE OF CLASSICAL RECEPTION”
Two conceptual territories bracket Europe’s imaginary geography: Greco-Roman Antiquity and the modern Balkans. According to Leontis, an “abstract principle of territorial identification” ties the political and cultural life of both modern Hellas and Western Europe to ancient Greek civilization. In comparison, the space of the Balkans seems peripheral to the project of European identity, especially if considering the poor understanding by the “U.S.-led West” of the violent breakup of the Yugoslavia (1992-2003).
In an attempt to theorize the complementary ways in which the Balkans and Greek Antiquity are intertwined in the European Imaginary, this paper sets a dialogue between Goran Stefanovski’s Bacchanalia, a 1996 Macedonian unpublished adaptation of Euripides’ Bacchae, and the Euripides’ play. Analyzing the internal thematization of borderland spaces both these plays offer in relation to the perceived centers of cultural production, the goal is twofold: the deterritorialized, imaginary and unlocatable borderlines are theorized as the imago of the fourth wall of dramaturgical convention separating Balkans and Western Europe, Antiquity and Modernity; in turn, regarding these very borders as sites of knowledge-production allows border-thinking to emerge as a mode of classical reception.
Panel #5: Against Classicism
MALINA BUTUROVIC (PRINCETON UNIVERSITY), “BODIES, KIN AND CLASSICISM: REREADING MARSHALL SAHLINS’ WHAT KINSHIP IS—AND IS NOT”
A work of “critical classical reception,” this paper tracks the uses of classical antiquity in Marshall Sahlins’ What Kinship Is—And Is Not, which famously insisted on a cultural definition of kinship as “mutuality of being.” Sahlins’ many references to antiquity are clustered in the first chapter (“What Kinship Is,” culture) not his latter chapter (“What It Is Not,” biology). This one-sided use of the classical tradition gives Sahlins what he needs; ancient philosophy is useful to Sahlins inasmuch as he considers it distant from any biological, or embodied accounts of family relation, and disentangled from any interest in reproduction or birth.
Although this use of classical texts may help Sahlins to decenter “biology,” it also reveals the dependency of family as a “cultural universal” on classicism—a dependency with historical roots in 19th century anthropology. Introduced alongside anthropological examples of family ritual, Aristotle and Plato do not feature in WKI simply as examples of a culture’s discursive expressions of kinship; instead, along with Kant, they are used in subtle ways to ventriloquize the prediscursive reality of kinship. This use of classical texts reflects not so much the texts themselves, which are in fact profoundly entangled with medical and natural historical perspectives on family, but rather the operations of classicism: its systematic exclusion of medical and natural historical works from analysis alongside “philosophy,” and its styling of classical texts as disembodied and purely theoretical.
Having explored Sahlins’ reliance on classicism, this paper briefly demonstrates that the passage in Nicomachean Ethics Sahlins quotes at length is more entangled with reproductive biology than he would like. Drawing on this example alongside feminist critiques, it suggests the recursive dangers of applying Sahlins’ “cultural” analyses of family back to the ancient world, notwithstanding their importance and originality.
SOPHIA ELZIE (INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR), “‘NO MORE FOR HIM THE STREAMS OF SORROW POUR’: TEACHING MOURNING, CRITIQUING CLASSICS, AND ALTERNATIVE EPISTEMOLOGY IN PHILLIS WHEATLEY’S ELEGIES”
Phillis Wheatley, the first published African-American poet (Brooks, Moore, and Wigginton 2012 146), has been a popular subject of study since the 1970s (Toscano 2020). Despite this, her elegiac poems, which comprise roughly a third of her only published volume Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (Wheatley 2001, ed. Carretta), have received little scholarly attention. In this paper, I will read Wheatley’s elegies alongside her poem ‘Niobe in Distress for her Children slain by Apollo, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book VI and from a view of the Painting of Mr. Richard Wilson’ as a critique of the Classical tradition Wheatley frequently employed in her poems, following the line of inquiry proposed by Barnard (2017). The elegies focus on community, spirituality, and emotion while providing instructions for how the bereaved ought to behave. By employing a didactic mode in her elegies, Wheatley engages with ancient texts while also highlighting one of her classical models’ perceived failures: the lack of emotional support they provide. Composed by a poet already in the ‘periphery,’ Wheatley’s elegies remain on the margins because rather than engage with overtly political or classical topics, her radical empathy exemplifies an epistemological approach identifiable as Black Feminist Epistemology (Collins 2000). Rather than continuing to overlook an important component of Wheatley’s engagement with Classical texts and her overall poetic oeuvre, Wheatley’s elegies should be read alongside her other poems, classical, political, or otherwise.
ALWIN FRANKE (REED COLLEGE), “THE COLOR OF CLASSICISM: RACE AND NARRATIVE IN MARTIN BERNAL’S BLACK ATHENA”
In light of recent controversies on the role of classics in the context of the racial politics in 21st century America, my paper revisits Martin Bernal’s controversial Black Athena series (1987-2006) through the lens of classical reception in the German intellectual tradition. The controversy following Bernal’s project of unearthing the “Afro-Asiatic roots of Classical Civilization” focused overwhelmingly on his contested claims about the historical influence of Egyptian and Phoenician cultures on ancient Greece. My paper, by contrast, revisits his largely unexamined account of the modern re-narrativization of the history of classical Greece in the context of the emerging modern theories of race around 1800. How can Bernal’s work on the modern construction of classical culture and its entanglement with racial imaginaries from Winckelmann to Humboldt inform current debates on the pedagogical value and racial politics of classical reception? And how can we, as members of an academic culture shaped by these values, engage with this legacy in the 21st century? Informed by my experience of teaching Literature Humanities in Columbia’s Core Curriculum and discussing Bernal with first-year students, my paper reflects on the historical entanglement of scholarly and pedagogical debates in classical reception, offering a pre-history to current controversies on classics and its role in liberal arts education.
Panel #6: Women, Academia, and the Classics
TEDDY DELWICHE (YALE UNIVERSITY), “RECONSIDERING WOMEN’S CLASSICAL EDUCATION IN EARLY AMERICA”
In recent years, classical reception studies of early America have increasingly focused on looking beyond the “founding fathers” and considering what the classics meant in early America for men and women alike. We might do well, however, to reconsider one of the long-standing premises of this new strand of reception research: that women interacted with the classical past largely outside of Latin and Greek texts and wrote little in the ancient languages. Early American women were not supposed to learn the classics, or so we at least believe. Both opponents and proponents of women’s education in early national America agreed on this: the study of the classics had been the traditionally distinguishing factor of men’s education. But this paper will present for the first time a number of overlooked instances of young, eighteenth-century American women, who, while regulated to the periphery of university life based on their gender, pursued classical education as a means to advocate for entry into the early American college. Beyond simply serving as a means to uphold traditional, gendered instruction, the classics could also serve to challenge institutional practices.
ARON OUWERKERK (UTRECHT UNIVERSITY), “WOMEN’S NEO-LATIN TEXTS: POTENTIALS & CHALLENGES OUTSIDE THE CANON”
Although far from homogeneous, Classical Latin literature nevertheless confronts us with significant challenges and shortcomings due to its canonicity. Authorial voices of women, for one, are particularly underrepresented in our textual sources. This paucity will remain unchanged, as there are likely no more Sulpicia’s whose texts are yet to be uncovered.
Broadening our view beyond the chronological borders of canonical antiquity, however, the situation becomes markedly different. In this paper, I will address the potentials offered by the vast Neo-Latin corpus of women’s Latin texts for the field of Classics. ‘Potentials’ will be the key word, since both academically and pedagogically, work remains to be done in order to allow for these voices to be heard. The oeuvres of two women Latin poets from the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, Elisabeth Hoofman-Koolaart and Margareta van Godewijck, will illustrate how archival research, textual editing, and curriculum design can – and should – operate together. This synergy between research and teaching not only betters our understanding of neglected women’s Neo-Latin texts, but also challenges long taken-for-granted assumptions about which Latin authors can be easily incorporated into high school curricula. It is high time to recenter early modern women Latin authors from the periphery of scholarship and our educational programs.
FRANCES MYATT (LMU, MUNICH), “PLACETNE MAGISTRA? MAKING SPACE FOR WOMEN IN ACADEMIA IN DOROTHY L. SAYERS’ GAUDY NIGHT”
In terms of both genre and gender, Gaudy Night is on the periphery of classical reception studies.
As a detective novel written by a woman, it has never been seen as part of the 20th century ‘classical tradition’, and many critics have unthinkingly condemned Sayers’ “habit of quotations” as “sheer intellectual snobbery”.1 This paper seeks to show that Sayer’s use of Latin quotations in Gaudy Night was no pretentious habit, but a serious intellectual and literary engagement with the status of ‘the Classics’ as an educational tradition. Throughout the novel, Sayers manipulates both Latin quotations and the physical geography of Oxford University to make literal and figurative space for women within academia, at a time when women were still fighting to receive the same educational opportunities and recognition as men. From Virgil to John Donne, Latin is shown to be a double-edged sword – for centuries it has been a vehicle of misogyny, yet knowledge of the Classics could also grant women entrance into the male academic establishment. Most daringly, Sayers uses Latin quotations to characterise the romantic relationship developing between her two main characters, as she asks, “could there ever be any alliance between intellect and the flesh?”2 Sayers thus forces Oxford University to make space not only for female intellect, but also for female sexuality, in a radical rebellion against the academic conventions of the 1930s.
Panel #7: Pedagogy and Classics
ROBIN DIVER (UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM), “RAPISTS OF PRIVILEGE VS. UNDERDOG RAPISTS: HOW POST-1980S CHILDREN’S LITERATURE USES LIMINALITY TO DEPICT RAPE AS JUSTIFIABLE”
A survey of children’s myth anthologies from 1850 to the present would at first glance seem to present a picture in which sexual violence is increasingly condemned as we approach the modern day. This can be seen, for example, in portrayals of Apollo and Zeus, whose rapes and attempted rapes were excused and obscured in earlier myth anthologies, but are now usually portrayed negatively (e.g., in the work of Rick Riordan and Lucy Coats). However, this is not the full picture. Myths about sexual violence are often portrayed as unproblematic or even happy when the sexually violent character can be seen to be an underdog or a liminal character. This is particularly evident in myths about Hades’ and Pan’s sexual violence, where children’s myth anthologies depict the god’s unattractive physical appearance, alternative lifestyle that isolates him from the ruling Olympians or poor interpersonal skills as some degree of excuse for his sexual violence.
My paper discusses this trend, with a focus on the case study of the myth of Pan and Syrinx as it appears in children’s anthologies of Greek myth. I particularly consider the anthologies of Horowitz (1985) and Turnbull (2010) to argue that Pan’s animal nature and alienation from the ruling class of gods is shown to make his attempted rape of Syrinx and others acceptable.
AMANDA KUBIC (UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN), “CLASSICAL RECEPTION PEDAGOGY AND THE FIRST-YEAR WRITING COURSE: A CASE STUDY OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 122, WRITING WORLD LITERATURES: BODY POLITICS/BODY POETICS”
For a course in Comparative Literature—a field defined by its own peripherality to disciplines like English, Romance Languages, and Classics—teaching the “peripheral” topic of classical reception becomes an exercise in rethinking centers and margins. Whose voices do we center from the past and present? What languages are prioritized in our translation and writing practices, and which get relegated to footnotes or left out entirely? Why use texts long held up as central to white, Western culture to think through issues that impact the most marginalized in our world today, like police brutality and anti-Black violence, trans rights and representation, and disability culture and aesthetics? In my talk, I will think through these questions using as a case study a first-year writing course at UMich that I taught and designed in 2020-2021: “Comparative Literature 122, Writing World Literatures: Body Politics/Body Poetics.” By focusing on our units that brought ancient Greco-Roman texts into conversation with their more modern receptions, such as Sophocles’ Antigone and the Theater of War’s Antigone in Ferguson and Carrie Mae Weems’ Past Tense, or Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Jayy Dodd’s “narcissus (unplugged)” and Kinetic Light’s Descent, I’ll explore how classical reception can be a pedagogical tool that allows students and instructors to think through complex questions of identity, authorship, spectatorship, and representation, as well as our own ingrained practices of writing and translation.
Panel #8: Queer Receptions
MARIOS ANASTASIADIS (UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH), “AN UNNAMED SLAVE BOY AND HIS POWER IN 4TH CENTURY B.C. ATHENS”
In Hypereides’ Against Athenogenes a citizen called Epikrates falls in love with an unnamed slave boy and wishes to purchase him for the sake of manumitting him and developing a relationship with him. Traditional analyses have relegated the boy to an “object of lust” or merely a passive “sexual plaything”, while describing the citizen in terms of his superiority and dominance. Yet, in our case, the boy acts as an agent and successfully uses his leverage and achieves the manumission of his brother and father too, while the presumed ‘dominant’ citizen-lover refuses to impose his power. Rather, he is visibly interested in having a willing partner, which gets him characterized by his peers as “giving trouble to himself”: while he could have bought the boy directly from his imminently interested owner, the citizen first sought the boy’s consent. Considerations of status have often informed scholars’ reconstruction of homosexual relationships at Athens, usually described as between an aggressive active male and his woman-like eromenos, which hardly agrees with the speech and other such examples. This clearly political decision masked by intellectualisms has sought to undermine the existence of homosexuality as a natural sexual orientation and often gone unnoticed, while its proponents have argued that homosexuality is a preventable cultural phenomenon (D.J. West); a quasi-sexual cultural phenomenon limited to pederasty (J.K. Dover); or a psychopathology altogether (Deveraux). In the backdrop of the complexities of the Against Athenogenes, this paper will deal with the reception of homosexuality, including modern scholars’ censorship, distortion, and denial of it as a reality in antiquity and beyond.
CAT LAMBERT (COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY), “PLUTARCH'S ALEXANDER AND HIS BEDTIME READING: ARCHIVING A QUEER MOMENT IN THE BOOKS”
When we turn to the past in search of queerness, how do we know where to look? How do we know, and how do we prove, that we’ve found what we’re looking for? In “Ephemera as Evidence,” José Esteban Muñoz seeks to interrupt the institutionalized “regime of rigor” that deprives “evidentiary authority” to the often makeshift and random archives of queerness. “Queerness,” Muñoz explains, “is often transmitted covertly...Instead of being clearly available as visible evidence, queerness has existed as innuendo, gossip, fleeting moments, and performances that are meant to be interacted with by those within its epistemological sphere–while evaporating at the touch of those who would eliminate queer possibility” (2008: 6-7).
This paper explores a methodology through which to archive one such “fleeting moment” of queerness (periphery), at the same time as it registers how the Classicist’s traditional hermeneutic pose (center) has stamped out this moment’s queer potential. In Plutarch’s Life of Alexander, we learn that Alexander keeps a copy of the Iliad–one corrected by his teacher Aristotle–under his pillow (7.2). Alexander (crucially) is not shown reading this book: rather, this nocturnal tableau covertly registers knowledge and traces of affect, desire, and intimacy. For more than a century, however, Classicists have agonized over how Alexander could possibly fit the Iliad in scroll-form (either eight papyrus rolls, each equivalent to a can of beer, or three enormous rolls, each the size of a two-liter Coke) under a standard, ancient pillow (Birt 1907, Johnson 2004). Rigorous analysis rules out the materiality of the pillow and book as significant parties here, and we are left with “Homer” as symbol of paideia and Alexander as a “literate scholar” and “cultural connoisseur” (Brunelle 2017: 265).
Since these hermeneutic methods forbid access to the queer epistemological sphere of this scene, I turn to C. P. Cavafy, a writer who understood well the difficulties and dangers of expressing queer desire in plain terms, who believed that future readers would come to know him more by the things he denied and hid than by the things he said and did (Papanikolaou 2013). In “Kaisarion,” the poet performs a historicizing, rigorously exacting (ἐξακριβώσω) scholarly pose in his browsing of a volume of Ptolemaic inscriptions, until an obscure mention of the dreamy, weary Kaisarion provokes him to (covertly) engage in nocturnal self-pleasure. This poem encourages us to peer behind Alexander’s paideutic façade (or the façade projected onto him) and see how his pillow-book archives a complex web of erotic relations and queer desire.
GIOVANNI LOVISETTO (COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY), “NULLIFICATION OR CENTRALITY OF THE PENIS? REPRESENTING THE TIED PHALLUS FROM GREEK KYNODESME TO CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY”
This paper analyzes the esthetic, moral, and sexual implications related to the practice of tiding up the male phallus, using as case studies images on ancient Greek vases, and contemporary pho tography. The same practice is evaluated in its interaction with the esthetic, social, and sexual values of two “phallocentric” societies, namely ancient Greece and the American/European cul tural milieu of the 1960s and 1970s. First, based on a detailed analysis of visual and literary sources, I argue that the Greek practice of the so-called kynodesme had aesthetic and sexual im plications conforming to communal, shared societal norms (centrality), in opposition to the big, erected or circumcised phalli associated with barbaric, foreign, and animalistic elements (periph ery): images of young athletes, homosexual and heterosexual encounters, adult men participating in revels, and depictions of satyrs, foreigners, misbehaved citizens, respectively, support the ar gument. In the second part of the paper, photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and Alvin Baltrop with restrained and tied phalli portray the marginalized gay and BDSM culture of the 1970s. In these images, the tied phallus on the one hand symbolizes the sexual restrain imposed by the predominant heterosexual (and religious) norms, on the other expresses a strong, de-centered identity (periphery) in opposition to the widespread moral norms (center). Methodologically juxtaposing analogous phenomena without a derivative or evolutionists perspective, this paper investigates the meaning-making and the socio-visual impact of the practice and representation of tied phalli in largely phallocentric societies, showing that contemporary examples help us finding productive ways to look at the ancient ones and vice versa.
Panel #9: Representing the Feminine
PATRICIA EUNJI KIM (NEW YORK UNIVERSITY), “CENTERING BLACK FEMININITY: AUGUSTA SAVAGE AND SCULPTING AMAZONS IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY”
In 1929, African American artist Augusta Savage traveled from New York to Paris to continue her studies in sculpture. Of her time there, she wrote in 1936, “One of the greatest benefits I received from studying in Europe on this fellowship was a first-hand encounter with the sources of art (the opportunity to visit the galleries where world-famous works of art are on view).” Over the course of two years, Savage completed between eighteen and twenty sculptures, most of which are lost. Savage created at least three clay sculptures of Amazons, which are documented by progress photographs she brought back to the United States.
Amazons are warrior women from Asia, cast as monstrous enemies of heroic Greek men like Heracles and Theseus in ancient myth. Moreover, ancient art typically represented Amazons in the throes of battle, bleeding, or dead. Yet, in her sculptural practice, Savage reimagines the Amazon into an innovative portrait of Black femininity. My paper examines how Savage, whose work was informed by the “sources of art,” both adapted and resisted the canon of Classical art and culture. In particular, I argue that the sculptor invented a new ‘heroic nude,’ embodied by Black women, to confront the aesthetics and politics of whiteness in Western art.
LEIRE OLABARRIA (UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM) AND JEREMY SWIST (BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY), “MORBID TALES: HEAVY METAL MUSIC AND THE GLOBAL RECEPTION OF EGYPTIAN QUEENS”
In recent years, scholars have begun examining the vast collection of references to cultures of the ancient Mediterranean in heavy metal music. In terms of gender analysis, such studies have focused almost exclusively on the reception of Greek and Roman men such as Achilles, Alexander, and Aeneas as icons of strength, masculinity, and heritage that appeal to a metal subculture that is still disproportionately male and white (e.g., Djurslev 2015 and Fletcher 2020). In this paper, we aim to fill the gaps in scholarship on metal’s reception of both ancient women and ancient Egypt, with special attention to how bands from across the globe perpetuate, nuance, and reinterpret orientalist tropes of Egyptian women. In keeping with the usually sexist representation of women in metal, Egyptian queens are often presented as heavily sexualized (e.g., Nefertiti), manipulative and scheming (e.g., Nitocris), or both (e.g. Cleopatra VII). Using these three queens as case studies, we show how these archetypes often fit into an orientalizing framework that reproduces an otherization of Egypt already present in the work of Classical authors such as Herodotus. Egyptian women in metal music are illuminating examples of how peripheral topics can offer an opportunity to critically reassess traditional academic discourses in Classics.
LIEN VAN GEEL (COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY), “SOROR AUGUSTI, NON UXOR ERO: SHIFTING CENTRE AND PERIPHERY IN THE PSEUDO-SENECAN OCTAVIA”
Using the Octavia, I aim to demonstrate how this spurious play negotiates shifting centre and periphery on multiple levels. First, I will show how the Octavia itself exists meta-theatrically in a liminal position because of its being classified as “Seneca-ish, but not quite”: the play exists between the centre and periphery as it functions as a reception of the true Senecan corpus.
Secondly, I will show how Claudia Octavia’s exclamation soror Augusti, non uxor ero (l. 658) encapsulates her plight as Nero’s eventual divorcée. The emperor, too, equates their collapsing marriage to a change of Octavia’s identity and position within the empire. Whereas, as the beginning of the play, he refers to his wife as coniunx et soror (l. 828), he eventually relegates her to soror (l. 861) alone when he chooses Poppaea over her. The gradual disintegration of the marriage and Octavia’s status as royal wife results in her transforming from a dual identity of soror et coniunx to expulsa soror.
Finally, we see poignant echoes of Octavia Minor, Augustus’ sister, looming near the surface, which influence Claudia Octavia’s character in the play. In short, the beginning and the end of this paper will focus on the reception of Seneca in the Pseudo-Senecan play and on the reception of Octavia’s previous literary representations.
Panel #10: Subversive Monuments
PAULA GAITHER (STANFORD UNIVERSITY), “RECONSTRUCTION AS REMEDIATION: THE ARA PACIS AUGUSTAE”
Remediation, which looks at the representation and re-representation of experiences and imagery, has been applied to mythological representations across media, the experience of the divine between an object and a worshipper, and the iconography of funerary monuments, here I apply remediation to the act of reconstruction. How does the reconstruction of an ancient object in a later period inform our understanding of that object in its ancient context? I will explore the idea of reconstruction as remediation through the case study of the Ara Pacis Augustae. The full excavation and reconstruction of the altar was the work of Italian archaeologists as part of the preparations for Mussolini’s celebration of the bimillennial celebration of Augustus’ birth. The Ara Pacis Augustae is a monument fundamentally connected to empire and the violent subjugation of others. Its initial construction was predicated upon the subjugation of peoples in Hispania and Gaul, likewise its reconstruction was predicated upon the imperial ambitions of Mussolini and the fascist Italian government. Through this analysis this paper seeks to understand the reconstruction of ancient objects as acts of remediation and to consider the resources which allow for scholars today to investigate our questions about ancient Rome.
GIORGIO MOTISI (SCUOLA NORMALE SUPERIORE), “OUTSIDE THE FASCIST CANON OF ANCIENT ART: THE CASE OF EDOARDO PERSICO AND ARTE ROMANA (1935)”
In the night of January 10, 1936, the Fascist secret police killed the Italian art critic Edoardo Persico in his house in Milan. The event, still not entirely clear, deeply shocked the art scene of the city. Persico, indeed, represented an important reference point for several artists, and his death came as something completely unexpected. Just a month before Persico had edited his last work, Arte Romana (1935): a volume on ancient Roman sculpture consisting of an illuminating critical essay and a long sequence of striking photographs. The book represented something completely new for Italy in the 1930s, both from a visual and thematic point of view. Differently from most critics of the time, Persico avoided any form of magniloquent celebration of antiquity. Conversely, he proposed an interpretation of the artworks according to a purely formal and stylistic approach. Furthermore, he stated a strong ideal connection between ancient sculptures and works of modern European art, with an emphasis on French Impressionism and the avant-garde movements of the early-20th century. On the basis of these considerations, Roman sculpture unexpectedly became an incentive to rethink in depth contemporary art and society from an international perspective: the distance from the ideals of Fascist regime could not be more evident.
Numerous studies have already analyzed the Fascist exploitation of ancient art for celebratory and propagandistic purposes. Nevertheless, several episodes of alternative and peripheral approaches towards antiquity have never been the subject of a thorough analysis. Was it possible for Italian artists and critics to conceive Roman art in anti-classical terms at the time? Could this approach represent an instrument of political opposition against the regime? What were the critical and visual tools at the basis of such an operation? Starting from these questions, my paper proposes a study of Arte Romana (1935), as well as of the resonance the volume had on Italian artists’ work during the following years.
EMMANUELA SCHOINOPLOKAKI (UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA), “βέβηλη πτήση, βασίλησ γκουρογιάννησ. THE PARTHENON: A SITE OF REFLECTION?”
The paper concerns the complex relationship between the oppressive classical legacy of the 'central' monument of the Parthenon and the 'peripheral' aspects of the heterogeneous modern Greek society as illustrated in the modern Greek novel Sacrilegious Flight by the author Vasilis Gouroyannis. It aims to examine how the edifice of the novel's Parthenon does not simply represent destruction due to an intentional low flight over the Acropolis of Athens – on July 20th around the 2020s – but instead constitutes a site of contestation and reflection. Consequently, this allows an 'unbuilding' of Parthenon and modern Greece and a 'rebuilding' of the history and society in a narrative form. On these grounds, the novel touches upon Greece's historical context and the mostly neglected issues of modern Greek identi-ty/-fication, racial(ized) politics, and crypto-colonial structures. The attempt to make us think about different answers to “what is and could be the Parthenon?” and “what is and could be Greek?” is the book’s primary aim. The reader becomes the witness of the satirically depicted struggle of all Greek citizens to be considered ancient Greek as dictated by the western hegemonic ideology and its calcified classicism. Interesting to note is that my own experience (at the crossroads of modern Greek and classics) as the author of the paper matches and further informs the reflective character of the research object.
Panel #11: Classics Without Class(ism)
ABIGAIL BREUKER (COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY), “CENTERING MERCY: WHAT SENECA’S DE CLEMENTIA MEANS FOR INSTITUTIONAL JUSTICE”
In his De Clementia, Seneca addresses the emperor Nero on the subject of mercy and how to exercise power. While De Clementia is addressed to an individual, I will argue that the text advocates for not only individual mercy but also institutional mercy. One of Seneca’s primary contentions is that it is only through mercy that a society’s most just condition can be reached. (2.7.3) From this contention it follows that any system claiming to aim at justice, such as contemporary criminal justice systems, must hold mercy as a primary value. In a 1998 paper on legal philosophy, Andrew Brien uses De Clementia as a source in arguing that mercy is both possible and necessary for individual actors within the criminal justice system. While I agree with much of Brien’s analysis, Brien focuses on the individual exercise of mercy rather than on what it might mean for an institution to be merciful. Using De Clementia as a guide, I will address why institutional mercy is both intrinsically (1.2-3) and instrumentally (1.17, 22-23) valuable for contemporary society. Rather than treating mercy as a value only sometimes displayed in the peripheries of the justice system by individual actors, Seneca’s argument suggests that we must make mercy central to our institutions. I will conclude with suggestions of what kinds of changes must be made to the criminal justice system if we, like Seneca, view mercy as necessary for justice.
ANA SANTORI RORDRÍGUEZ (UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN), “CANTA, DIOSA, LA CÓLERA DEL PUEBLO. CLASSICS IN PUERTO RICO DURING THE SUMMER OF 2019”
In the summer of 2019, Ricardo Roselló became the first governor of Puerto Rico to resign his post — ousted by a popular uprising that I dare say might have made Cleisthenes proud. I certainly was. Surprised, too, not by my people’s outrage in the face of criminal neglect and cruel mockery, but by the classical references they deployed (and I do mean deployed) to manifest their pain, their fury, their grief. There is no Classics in Puerto Rico — no Ancient Greek, no Latin. To the best of my knowledge there never has been, unlike in other colonies. Yet there they were, fighting the good fight: blue-eyed Medusas, uncompromising Lysistratas, surnamed Antigones, motorcycle-riding Achilleses, fierce Athenas. There were vandals whose Rome is Old San Juan; there were and still are bárbaros acclaimed for their enduring strength. And I mean this literally. I have the photos to prove it: a collection of these receptions spanning the eleven days it took for us to make history in the name of our dead, a remarkable archive waiting for an opportunity just like this. Thus, I am proposing to explore the deployment (and I do mean deployment) of these classical references during this recent historic moment in Puerto Rican history as framed within the conference’s theme. For what is Puerto Rico — the smallest of the Greater Antilles and the greatest of the Lesser — if not peripheral to the United States? And how did classical narratives, entrenched as they are in the heart of power, end up in the streets? “Here there be monsters,” they famously said, but wherever
there are monsters, there are soon heroes. And as the poem goes, it all begins with fury.
SOPHIE WARDLE (UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE), “’CONNOISSEURS’ IN CONSTRUCTION TRENCHES: VICTORIAN WORKING-CLASS RESPONSES TO LONDON’S ROMAN PAST”
In the nineteenth century, vast civic construction projects transformed London into a city of the future—but they also revealed its Roman past. As workers dug deep foundations for underground railways, new bridges, and sewers, they accidentally unearthed the remains of Londinium. These discoveries ranged from worn-out leather shoes to exquisite silver figurines and produced an equally diverse set of contemporary responses. Some of these interactions have been captured in recent histories of archaeology, museums, and ‘heritage’, but the responses of one socio-economic group have been notably neglected. The working-class Londoners— ‘navvies’, ‘shore-rakers’, and ‘ballast-heavers’—who actually discovered and excavated Londinium have been pushed to the periphery of much modern scholarship. This paper puts those individuals front and centre. It investigates how they used their role as accidental archaeologists to assert their place in a shifting modern city. We will meet a ‘bone-grubber’ with a classical collection, construction workers who became ‘connoisseurs’, and mudlarks who forged local ‘Roman’ discoveries—(re)creating the history of the British capital for a modern market. We will also uncover the central role of these Londoners in defining the archaeological discipline and in interpreting and preserving Londinium. By adopting an underutilised methodological approach—one focussing on responses to provincial material remains—this paper challenges claims that members of the socio-economic ‘elite’ held (and still hold) the keys to the classical past.