Antiquity Now: The Classical World in the Contemporary American Imagination by Thomas E. Jenkins

Abstract

250 BOOK REVIEWS miscellaneous (e.g. military; child’s nurse); journeys; literacy and education; religion; epistolary types (e.g. “urgent!”, “just greetings and good wishes”; “double letters on a sheet”). The format for each letter provides its standard papyrological abbreviation; identifies the letter’s author and correspondent if possible; lists the location where it was written and the location of the addressee and its find spot; identifies the language (Greek or Coptic); translates the letter and comments, for example, on the analysis of the handwriting, style of language, level of grammar; summarizes the content; and provides a current location of the physical letter and its bibliography. For a number of the letters, the editors comment on the writer’s skill in forming letters and slowness or rhythmic style of writing in order to judge to a certain extent the educational level of the writer. One of the strengths of this book are the photographs of thirty-two letters, which, ranging in size from half the page to almost full page enable the reader to see the orthographical details noted by the editors. Closing the volume are an index of topics and people, an index of letters and the bibliographical update. How Eudaimonis handled her labor unrest, we will never know; these letters tease and tantalize with their brief glances into the lives of ordinary women, their problems and their joys. JUDITH L.SEBESTA University of South Dakota, jsebesta@usd.edu * * * * * Antiquity Now: The Classical World in the Contemporary American Imagination. By THOMAS E. JENKINS. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. viii + 256. Hardcover, $99.99. ISBN 978-0-521-19626-0. Spike Lee’s film Chi-Raq (December 2015) places Aristophanes’ Lysistrata in gangland Chicago, where the women go on a sex strike to force their men to make peace. The strike spreads around the world. Via cinematic satire Lee uses rap and hip-hop, gospel music and preaching, production numbers and newscasts (includingcoverageofAthenianwomenonHadrianStreetabovethePanathenaic BOOK REVIEWS 251 Way!) to make his point: not only must the gangs stop killing each other and innocent children, but the city must address the underlying poverty, racism and availability of guns that leave these young men with no future outside the county hospital, prison or morgue. When Lysistrata, the gang members and the mayor of Chicago make peace, Lee has them agree on concrete measures: good jobs from Fortune 500 companies, new health centers from the US government and a new trauma center on Chicago’s South Side. At the end Samuel L. Jackson, in his chorus-likerole,rapsintothecamera:“Let’salltogethermakeChi-Raq/backinto Chicago … Wake up! / This is an emergency.” Thomas Jenkins’ Antiquity Now provides us a model for how to think about and understand works of popular culture that draw on the form and content of ancient models in order to comment on modern social and political issues and to promote corresponding change. Although he includes a few academic treatments (George Devereux’s perennially adolescent Greeks, Robert Eisner’s queered Apollo, Martin Bernal’s Black Athena), nearly all the works Jenkins studies come from popular culture and many of them serve as examples of the arts as social activism. A few of the usual suspects appear (Zach Snyder’s 300, Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia and—in Jenkins’ striking cold open—the episode “Restless” from Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which gave millions of viewers a Greek lesson) but this book’s special value lies in its range and its treatment of less wellknown works. I especially appreciated Jenkins’ careful descriptions as well as analyses of theatrical productions, ephemera those of us not in attendance can otherwise access only through reviews and still photographs, perhaps a script. After he gets his audience’s attention via the Buffy episode with its Sapphic poem in Greek and Robert Mezey’s poem “To the Americans,” which appropriates Horace’s Roman Ode 3.6, Jenkins explains his take on classical reception. He first distinguishes it from the classical tradition so as to move from the timeless, changeless glory of the original texts to the accretions of meaning those texts acquire as their form and content appear in new settings for purposes unintended by...