Classical Past Research Articles

Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the Classical Past. Edited by Jenifer Neils and John H. Oakley (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2003) 333 pp. $65.00 cloth $40.00 paper

<i>Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the Classical Past</i>. Edited by Jenifer Neils and John H. Oakley (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2003) 333 pp. $65.00 cloth $40.00 paper

Isaac Newton and Augustan Anglo-Latin poetry

Although many historians of science acknowledge the extent to which Greek and Roman ideals framed eighteenth-century thought, many classical references in the texts they study remain obscure. Poems played an important role not only in spreading ideas about natural philosophy, but also in changing people’s perceptions of its value; they contributed to Newton’s swelling reputation as an English hero. By writing about Latin poetry, we focus on the intersection of two literary genres that were significant for eighteenth-century natural philosophy, but seem alien to modern science. We classify Augustan Latinate scientific poetry by considering the audiences for whom the poems were intended. We distinguish three broad categories. One type of poetry was circulated amongst gentlemanly scholars (we look particularly at Tripos verses, and laments for Queen Caroline). A second group comprised poetry written specifically to promote or criticise Newton and his books, particularly the Principia (we look at versions of Pope’s epitaph, and Halley’s Lucretian poem). After Newton’s death, a third type of poetry became increasingly significant, included in collections of poems rather than in texts of natural philosophy. Overall, we show how the classical past was vital for creating the scientific future.

Jean Sorabella. Review of "Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the Classical Past" by Jenifer Neils and John H. Oakley.

Jean Sorabella. Review of "Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the Classical Past" by Jenifer Neils and John H. Oakley.

Coming of age in Ancient Greece: images of childhood from the classical past

What was childhood like in ancient Greece? What activities and games did Greek children embrace? How were they schooled and what religious and ceremonial rites of passage were key to their development? These fascinating questions and many more are answered in this groundbreaking book-the first English-language study to feature and discuss imagery and artifacts relating to childhood in ancient Greece.Coming of Age in Ancient Greece shows that the Greeks were the first culture to represent children and their activities naturalistically in their art. Here we learn about depictions of children in myth as well as life, from infancy to adolescence. This beautifully illustrated book features such archaeological artifacts as toys and gaming pieces alongside images of them in use by children on ancient vases, coins, terracotta figurines, bronze and stone sculpture, and marble grave monuments. Essays by eminent scholars in the fields of Greek social history, literature, archaeology, anthropology, and art history discuss a wide range of topics, including the burgeoning role of childhood studies in interdisciplinary studies; the status of children in Greek culture; the evolution of attitudes toward children from the Bronze Age to the Hellenistic period as documented by literature and art; the relationships of fathers and sons and mothers and daughters; and the roles of cult practice and death in a child's existence.This delightful book illuminates what is most universal and specific about childhood in ancient Greece and examines childhood's effects on Greek life and culture, the foundation on which Western civilization has been based.

National symbols and ordinary people's response: London and Athens, 1850–19141

This article explores the appeal of national symbols in London and Athens over the second half of the nineteenth century. It attempts to show that nationalism and its paraphernalia were a section of a wider middle‐class ideological‐political framework which slightly, if at all, touched the ‘masses’. In London, nationalism and national symbols were inherently linked with respectability, thus barely reflected the social conditions of the poor and illiterate bulk of the population. In Athens, nationalists' emphasis on neoclassicism resulted in the construction of symbols promoting the classical Greek past: a terrain of ‘zero knowledge’ for ordinary people.

Farewell to the Classical: Excavations in Modernism

By saving and restoring the past, archaeology renders ruins "unancient" and modern. But does this rob ruins of their mystique, as some commentators have claimed? Can modernized ruins still mesmerize? Do we have a meaningful relationship to ancient sites fenced off from their urban and natural setting, trampled by tourists, and littered with Kodak boxes? A look at Greek modernism shows that Greek poets returned to the classical past despite its glorification for two centuries. Rather than seeing in ruins sites for rapture, as is true for Western travelers, they problematized them, coming to terms with their existence and the weight of their meaning.

Genealogy and the Limits of Panegyric: Turks and Huns in Fifteenth-Century Epithalamia

Fifteenth-century Italian humanists constructed elaborate genealogies of brides and grooms in Latin wedding orations. These family histories not only demonstrate the creative ways in which humanists praised elites by referring to classical and mythic pasts, but also the surprising extent to which humanists integrated and emphasized pagan and barbaric origins. This article focuses on two orations. In one, the Ferrarese orator Ludovico Carbone fabricates an Ottoman Turkish genealogy in which he asserts the Trojan origins of the Turks and praises the infamous sacker of Constantinople, Mehmed II. In the other, the Milanese orator Giovanni Marliani praises the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate and Attila the Hun as Christian-persecuting ancestors of the groom. These extraordinary genealogies are compared to those of their brides' families, the Sforza and the Strozzi.This praise of enemies both displayed the orators'rhetorical skill and the value that Renaissance audiences placed on antiquity of origins.

Close Encounters of the Common Kind: The Theoretical and Practical Implications of Popular Culture for Modern Greek Studies

Since the mid-1980s Modern Greek Studies has struggled to adapt to a rapidly evolving academic environment that emphasizes postmodernism, poststructuralism, and multiculturalism. The difficulties the field has faced can be traced to a variety of institutional factors: its marginality within the academy, its traditional proximity to both the Greek state and the Greek nation, and the ongoing interrogation of the academy's Eurocentric roots, which has devalued traditional representations of Modern Greece as the contemporary embodiment of the classical past. These institutional problems have been exacerbated by an entrenched critical bias. The field has been unwilling to fully examine popular culture as a site where Greek identity is formed and articulated. Supplementing Modern Greek Studies' current research agenda with a focus on popular culture offers the field the opportunity to renew and revitalize its critical mission by ensconcing the field more fully with the contemporary critical and political moment.

‘A Conjugal Lesson’: Robert Brough's Medea and the Discourses of Mid-Victorian Britain

The Athenian Captive (1838) was to constitute the last significant use of Greek tragedy on the professional stage in Britain for a radical political purpose until Gilbert Murray's stagings of Euripides in the Edwardian era.Edith HallI believe in the Revolution.Robert Brough, 1855The fiercest political debates in 1850s Britain were inextricably bound up with the Classical past. Traditionalists and eulogists, priests and pamphleteers, doctors and revolutionaries all set their arguments and their ideals within a Classical framework. Amongst those who sought to use the ancient for decidedly contemporary purposes, Robert Brough was one of the most passionate. He was a revolutionary, a playwright, and a Classicist—though up until the performance of his burlesque Medea (on July 14th 1856), he had never been all three at once. This article will explore how, at the time, the myth of Medea was the perfect vehicle for radical politics—and how Brough exploited its potential to the full. It will frame his play within some of the most controversial debates of the period. It will explore Brough's (on the face of it, startling) claim that his burlesque would give the audience more to think about than any play they had seen before, that it would be ‘a conjugal lesson, surpassing in intensity anything ever before presented’. Brough wrote his Medea believing in ‘the Revolution’. And, as I hope to show, he wanted his audiences to leave the theatre believing in it too.

Grafting Helen: the abduction of the classical past

Classicism = cultural embezziement? History is a love story: a tale of desire and jealousy, abandonment and fidelity, abduction and theft, rupture and reconciliation. This contention is central is central to Grafting Helen, Matthew Gumpert's original and dazzling meditation on Helen of Troy as a crucial emblem for much of Western thought and literature. Grafting Helen looks at classicism - the privileged thetorical language for describing cultural origins in the West - as a protracted form of cultural embezzlement. No coin of the realm has been more valuable, more circulated, more coveted, or more counterfeited than the one that bears the face of Helen of Troy. Gumpert uncovers Helen as the emblem for the past as something to be stolen, appropriated, imitated, extorted, and coverted once again. Tracing the figure of Helen from its classical origins through the Middle Ages, the French Renaissance, and the modern era, Gumpert suggests that the relation of current Western culture to the past is not like the act of coveting; it is the act of coveting, he argues, for it relies on the same strategies, the same defenses, the same denials, and the same delusions.

Cervantes, Raphael and the Classics

Cervantes, Raphael and Classics. By Frederick A. De Armas. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. xiii+241 pages. De Armas' Cervantes, Raphael and Classics is an absorbing meditation on intertextual of Cervantes' La Numancia (c. 1583), arguably most important tragedy of Golden Spain. Ws reflexes allow great insight and make patent need for comparative approach to text that can seem atypical of rest of work. By unveiling degree to which early play is rooted in classics, D. forces us to reconsider dynamics of late Renaissance literature. In process his control of criticism is exemplary, his passion for his subject contagious, and his adventurous spirit refreshing in field that has only recently overcome idea that its object of study is philological treasure house of Christian humanist sententiae. D's preface lays out premise of CRC: journey to Rome in 1569 exposed him to Raphael's and Romano's masterpieces, indoctrinating him into neo-Platonic cult of classical past. In chapter one D. disputes view put forward by critics like Alban Forcione and Vicente Gaos that C. was biased against classical literature: C.'s anticlassical bias is red herring, deceptive veering away from ancients (2). Ws argument is that although LN may owe its immediate inspiration to Morales's Coronica general, it is in important respects reworking of classical sources. The remainder of CRC moves through series of comparisons, first between LN and paintings by Raphael and Romano for Vatican palace (chapters 2-4), and then Aeschylus's The Persians, Homer's Iliad, Virgil's Aeneid and Fourth Georgic, and Lucan's Pharsalia (chapters v-viii). D. concludes with two chapters that ponder veritable catalogue of possibilities (160), reinforcing CRC's overarching theme of contaminatio-the blending of ancient sources. In first section, D. bases his ekphrastic reading of LN on Frances Yates's understanding of that strain of neo-Platonism which combined poetry and painting as kind of mental visualization (The Art of Memory [Chicago, 1966]). He catalogues mystical, historical, and political symbols of Raphael's and Romano's frescoes and connects them to similar structures in play, arguing that LN reconstructs a Vatican of mind (16-76). D.'s most interesting concept here is what he calls aesthetic of double present, whereby Renaissance artist cultivates heuristic tensions between past and contemporary events. The example of Raphael's painting of encounter between Leo I and Attila, which makes direct reference to battle of Ravenna, allows D. to propose similar strategy at work in LN, which relates ancient siege of Celtiberian city by Roman general Scipio Younger to sixteenth-century enmity between Hapsburgs and Papacy. D. makes convincing case for knowledge of Raphael and Romano, reader is left wondering whether comparison between Roman and Hapsburg politics might have more immediate or multiple sources (Garcilaso de la Vega, for example). The second part of CRC begins with chapter five's comparison between LN and Aeschylus' The Persians. Aeschylus' decentering approach to tragedy, in which Persian enemy Xerxes is paradoxically made hero of drama about Greek victory, might be one of principal models for play. This requires that we read LN, not as tragedy of Numantia, but rather as tragedy of Scipio. Ws first step is to position himself in debate over nature of Cervantine tragicomedy. His intuition about importance of LN, which he calls the single great Aristotelian tragedy of Spanish Golden Age (79), and subsequent polemic he takes up with Paul Lewis-Smith, Joaquin Casalduero, Gustavo Correa, and Arnold Reichenberger over degree of tragic pattern all serves to point up need for generic precision: Although I agree that C. …

Monuments and nationalism in modern Mexico

A key feature in the cultural repertoire of Mexican nationalism has been the excavation and reconstruction of the archaeological sites and monuments of the pre‐Hispanic past. They afford tangible witness to the foundations of Mexican history and the putative existence of the Mexican people in the civilisations of Mesoamerica. Although in the colonial period creole patriots identified the Aztec empire as their classical past, it was not until the Mexican Revolution that archaeological sites and monuments were integrated into the nationalism that accompanied and characterised that movement. The chief author of this cultural turn was Manuel Gamio, a professional archaeologist and liberal nationalist, whose extensive writings thus demand attention. But although he emphasised the grandeur of the pre‐Hispanic civilisation, he advocated the complete incorporation of the contemporary Indian peasantry into the Mexican nation.

:Antiquity and Its Interpreters

Introduction Part I. Inhabiting History: 1. Historical self-definition 1.1 Imitation James Ackerman 1.2 P. Petrarch and the broken city David Galbraith 1.3 Acquiring a classical past: historical appropriation in Renaissance Venice Patricia Fortini Brown 1.4 Ordering history and style: Georgio Vasari on the art of history Philip Sohm 2. Historical continuities 2.1 Renaissance and real estate: the medieval afterlife of the Temple of Diana in Nimes Sheila Bonde 2.2 Imaginary architecture and antiquity: the fountain of Venus in Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili Martine Furno II 2.3 Antiquity consumed: transformations at San Marco, Venice Marina Belozerskaya and Kenneth Lapatin Part II. Cultural Pursued: 3. The heritage of Zeuxis: painting, rhetoric and history Leonard Barkan 3.1 Mind's passion: conjugating rationality and sensuality in neo-platonic interpretations of Italian Renaissance art Julia Branna Perlman 3.2 The transformation of ancient landscape through the ideology of Christian reform Nicola Courtright 4. The (re)emergence of the aesthetic 4.1 Ut poesis architectura: Gherardo Spini and Italian archietectural criticism circa 1570 Alina Payne 4.2 Viewing the art of Michelangelo: visual metaphor in the art critical tradition of the Renaissance Rebekah Smick 4.3 The body and antiquity in Alberti's art theoretical writings Gerhard Wolf 4.4 Patterns of transumption in Renaissance architectural theory Christof Thoenes Part III. Culture Produced: 5. Textual exegesis 5.1 Pliny's laocoon? Michael Koortbojian 5.2 Symmetry and eurythmy: classical theory in architecture from Vitruvius to Bernini to the present day Tod Marder 6. Appropriation contexts: decor, Furor Bacchicus, Convivium Phyllis Pray Bober 6.1 Si come dice Vetruvio: images of antiquity in early Renaissance theory of architecture Richard Betts Part IV. Coda: 7. Antiquity and the Renaissance from the outside 7.1 Remaking antiquity in eighteenth-century Seville Catherine Wilkinson Zerner 7.2 Winckelmann and Warburg: contrasting attitutudes toward the instrumental authority of ancient art Richard Brilliant 7.3 Figural speculations Michael Ann Holly 7.4 Writing history, viewing art: the question of the humanist's eye Carl Goldstein.

Cold War Illuminations of the Classical Past: ‘The Sound and Light Show‘ on the Athenian Acropolis

Drawing upon the text of ‘The Sound and Light Show’ and French and Greek newspaper coverage of the show’s premier in 1959, this article uses the metaphor of the museum to consider the ways in which the show limits and controls the history that the Acropolis monuments are allowed to represent. I argue that the show’s premise of a causal link between the defeat of tyrannical Eastern enemies and the flourishing of democracy and the arts is a product of the Cold War. This ideological backdrop can be traced through the dramatic events surrounding the show’s star‐studded, international premier and the richly nuanced political controversies that it reflected and in turn provoked.

Poeta arte christianus: Pomponius's Cento Versus ad Gratiam Domini as an Early Example of Christian Bucolic

Critics have amply considered how Christian authors in late antiquity adapted the forms, language, and themes of classical poetry to create an ecclesiastical poetic tradition. Studies related to this topic have largely focused upon biblical epic and the carmina of well-known poets like Prudentius and Paulinus of Nola. In this paper, I wish to proceed into the less trodden area of Christian bucolic poetry, and specifically to one of the first examples of the form, Pornponius's Versus ad Gratiam Domini. This text, dating to the late fourth or early fifth century, is a 132-line Virgilian cento (with a concluding lacuna), or a work created out of unconnected verse units of varying length taken from the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid that an author pieces together to compose a new narrative. These units can be up to three lines long, but usually consist of a segment of a hexameter line. Sixteen centos ranging in date from ca. 200–ca. 530 survive from antiquity, with four handling Christian topics. Because the ecclesiastical centonists reuse Virgilian verses directly, their texts serve as extreme examples of how Christian authors created poems by reworking the classical past. It is this transformative gesture that will concern me in this paper. I will investigate how Pomponius redeploys Virgil's language to compose his Christian Versus ad Gratiam Domini and, in the process, endows his text with specific features manifesting the continuity with and change of classical bucolic that is so fundamental to the development of the Christian pastoral form.

Where Does History Meet Theory? Classical Heritage, Past and Present

In an extremely rich and informed essay, Bernbeck offers sophisticated insights into the problems confronting museology today. Using the Pergamon Museum as a case study, he draws out specific issues facing the museum into broader theoretical questions, and thus reaches conclusions of much wider relevance. Finally, he brings these wider theoretical views back to the particular situation in order to comment on future plans for the Pergamon Museum. As if offering a virtual tour, Bernbeck takes the reader through the museum offering a variety of perspectives – historical outline, colonialist and post-modern visitor's viewpoints, current debates and conflicting theories in museology, critical theory of museum culture consumption, planning for changes in the Pergamon Museum. But he is also well aware of the politics of such a ‘reading tour’, and his essay, quite self-consciously, offers a series of possibilities for engaging in discussion and further dialogue.

Thevet Revisits Guanabara

Thevet Revisits Guanabara

The intellectual life of the early Renaissance artist

At the beginning of the fifteenth century, painters and sculptors were seldom regarded as more than artisans and craftsmen, but within little more than a hundred years they had risen to the status of artist. This book explores how early Renaissance artists gained recognition for the intellectual foundations of their activities and achieved artistic autonomy from enlightened patrons. A leading authority on Renaissance art, Francis Ames-Lewis traces the ways in which the social and intellectual concerns of painters and sculptors brought about the acceptance of their work as a liberal art, alongside other arts like poetry. He charts the development of the idea of the artist as a creative genius with a distinct identity and individuality. Ames-Lewis examines the various ways that Renaissance artists like Mantegna, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and D|rer, as well as many other less well-known painters and sculptors, pressed for intellectual independence. By writing treatises, biographies, poetry, and other literary works, by seeking contacts with humanists and literary men, and by investigating the arts of the classical past, Renaissance artists honed their social graces and broadened their intellectual horizons. They also experienced a growing creative confidence and self-awareness that was expressed in novel self-portraits, works created solely to demonstrate pictorial skills, and monuments to commemorate themselves after death. This book brings together a wide range of textual and visual evidence to illuminate the changing attitudes toward artists and their work, and it provides many stimulating insights into Renaissance culture and art history.

Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity: The Limits of Political Realism

Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War is the earliest surviving realist text in the European tradition. As an account of the Peloponnesian War, it is famous both as an analysis of power politics and as a classic of political realism. From the opening speeches, Thucydides' Athenians emerge as a new and frightening source of power, motivated by self-interest and oblivious to the rules and shared values under which the Greeks had operated for centuries. Gregory Crane demonstrates how Thucydides' history brilliantly analyzes both the power and the dramatic weaknesses of realist thought. The tragedy of Thucydides' history emerges from the ultimate failure of the Athenian project. The new morality of the imperialists proved as conflicted as the old; history shows that their values were unstable and self-destructive. Thucydides' history ends with the recounting of an intellectual stalemate that, a century later, motivated Plato's greatest work. Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity includes a thought-provoking discussion questioning currently held ideas of political realism and its limits. Crane's sophisticated claim for the continuing usefulness of the political examples of the classical past will appeal to anyone interested in the conflict between the exercise of political power and the preservation of human freedom and dignity.

The Legacy of Boadicea: Gender and Nation in Early Modern England

The Legacy of Boadicea explores the construction of personal and national identities in early modern England. It highlights the problems and anxieties of national identity in a nation with no native classical past. Written in an accessible style, The Legacy of Boadicea: * offers powerful new readings of the ancient British past in Shakespeare's King Lear and Cymbeline * persuasively illuminates a 'Boadicean' heritage in royal iconography, drama, and the social symptoms of religious dissent * articulates parallels between the eventual domestication of Britain's warrior queen in Restoration drama, and the social, political and legal decline in the status of women.