Reception Studies and Cultural Reinvention in Aristophanes and Tawfiq Al-Hakim

Abstract

We look on the totality of the past as dreams, certainly interesting ones, and regard only the latest state of science as true, and that only provisionally so. This is culture.Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?Reception studies in classics live a complicated scholarly life. On one hand, a healthy collection of new monographs appears on the market every year that shows the strength of this subfield, including such recent additions as Gonda Van Steen's Theatre of the Condemned: Classical Tragedy on Greek Prison Islands and Simon Goldhil's work on the Victorian reception of classics called Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction and the Proclamation of Modernity. Collections of essays that contribute to the field are also copiously produced. Thus two scholars could lately declare that ‘[n]o sub-field in the discipline of Classics has experienced such growth, in both quantitative and qualitative terms, over the past fifteen years or so as the study of reception of classical material’. Charles Martindale, credited with throwing down the receptive gauntlet some twenty years ago, recently wrote an essay on the flourishing state of this subfield within classics, reporting that reception studies have proven classics to be not ‘something fixed, whose boundaries can be shown.’ He adds the following:Many classicists (though by no means the majority) are in consequence reasonably happy, if only to keep the discipline alive in some form, to work with an enlarged sense of what classics might be, no longer confined to the study of classical antiquity ‘in itself’—so that classics can include writing about Paradise Lost, or the mythological poesie of Titian, or the film Gladiator, or the iconography of fascism.