Classical Past Research Articles

Pozzuoli of the heart: overlapping fragments of the classical past in the poetry of Jamie McKendrick

Pozzuoli of the heart: overlapping fragments of the classical past in the poetry of Jamie McKendrick

Via Illyria to Europe

Archaeology in Serbia was shaped as a discipline by the end of the 19th century. Its founders, mainly educated at the universities in the German-speaking lands, in the spirit of Altertumswissenschaft, have brought with them the corresponding attitude towards the Classical antiquity. In the process of transfer of the concepts a certain blurring occurred, but not absolute abandonment of the previous narratives about the ancient past, for example the one developed in the framework of proto-Illyrism.
 From its inception in the humanistic histories of the 16th century, the proto-Illyrian idea was the framework of political action, the pivotal point of identity construction, but as well the grounds for territorial aspirations. In these tendencies a major role was played by the Classical past. Through the usage of Classical ethnonyms and toponymes, political concepts and historical narratives, the advocates of proto-Illyrism took part in the positioning of the Balkans in the temporal and spatial domain of the modern Europe. 
 The paper points to the role of the proto-Illyrian idea in the affirmation and/or legitimizing of various interests (individual, group), as well as in constructing various identities in the Western Balkans.

Repositioning the Role of Written Sources in Archaeological Research

Contrary to the general attitude that the role of written sources in archaeological research marks the separation between two distinct fields of research – prehistorical and historical archaeology, the critical research into the history of the discipline points that the development of archaeology has not followed this pattern. Rather, the dominant role of the written sources in the study of classical past has been transferred onto the practices of praehistorical archaeology. Discussing the role of ancient sources in the research of the so-called “Illyrian question”, this paper addresses the consequences of this dominant role of written sources in the archaeological study of the past and points to the ways in which the interpretation of the classical texts influenced the theoretical-methodological framework of research of the late prehistory of the Balkans.

‘And All is Real.’ Historical Spaces and Special F/X in HBO's Rome

This essay explores the use of special effects in HBO's Rome. Looking at depictions of the classical past, it argues that special effects were traditionally used in the cinema to heighten verisimilitude by a sense of spectacle, whose cost put them out of reach of early historical television. With the increase in budgets and the greater affordability of special effects, however, this paper suggests that Rome signals a new kind of classical world on television, wherein special effects not only enhance verisimilitude by a kind of spectacle but also serve a narrative function.

Study, Copy, and Conquer

Schumann's 1842 chamber music exemplifies a common theme in his critical writings, that to sustain a notable inherited tradition composers must not merely imitate the past but reinvent it anew. Yet Schumann's innovative practices have not been sufficiently acknowledged, partly because his instrumental repertory seemed conservative to critics of Schumann's day and beyond, especially when compared to his earlier experimental piano works and songs. This essay offers a revisionist perspective by exploring three chamber movements that recast sonata procedure in one of two complementary ways: either the tonic key monopolizes the exposition (as in the first movement of the Piano Quartet in E♭ major, op. 47), or a modulating main theme undercuts a definitive presence of the tonic key at the outset (as in the first movement of the String Quartet in A major, op. 41, no. 3, and the finale of the String Quartet in A minor, op. 41, no. 1). Viewed against conventional sonata practice, these chamber movements appear puzzling, perhaps even incoherent or awkward, since they thwart the tonal contrast of keys so characteristic of the form. Yet these unusual openings, and the compelling if surprising ramifications that they prompt, signal not compositional weakness but rather an effort to reinterpret the form as a way of strengthening its expressive power. My analyses also draw on other perspectives to illuminate these sonata forms. All three movements adopt a striking thematic idea or formal ploy that evokes a specific Beethovenian precedent; yet each movement also highlights Schumann’s creative distance from his predecessor by departing in notable ways from the conjured model. Aspects of Schumann’s sketches, especially those concerning changes made during the compositional process, also illuminate relevant analytical points. Finally, in the analysis of the finale of the A-minor quartet, I consider how Schumann’s evocation of Hungarian Gypsy music may be not merely incidental to but supportive of his reimagined sonata form. Ultimately, the perspectives offered here easily accommodate—even celebrate—Schumann’s idiosyncratic approach to sonata form. They also demonstrate that Schumann’s earlier experimental tendencies did not contradict his efforts in the early 1840s to further advance his inherited classical past.

The Fragrance of the Classical Past: The Memory of the Lao King and the Reconstruction of the Lost Rituals of Bun That Luang

The Fragrance of the Classical Past: The Memory of the Lao King and the Reconstruction of the Lost Rituals of Bun That Luang

Urban Legends: Civic Identity and the Classical Past in Northern Italy, 1250–1350, by Carrie E. Beneš

Urban Legends: Civic Identity and the Classical Past in Northern Italy, 1250–1350, by Carrie E. Beneš

Art and Archaeology

The front cover of John Bintliff's Complete Archaeology of Greece is interesting. There is the Parthenon: as most of its sculptures have gone, the aspect is post-Elgin. But it stands amid an assortment of post-classical buildings: one can see a small mosque within the cella, a large barrack-like building between the temple and the Erechtheum, and in the foreground an assortment of stone-built houses – so this probably pre-dates Greek independence and certainly pre-dates the nineteenth-century ‘cleansing’ of all Byzantine, Frankish, and Ottoman remains from the Athenian Akropolis (in fact the view, from Dodwell, is dated 1820). For the author, it is a poignant image. He is, overtly (or ‘passionately’ in today's parlance), a philhellene, but his Greece is not chauvinistically selective. He mourns the current neglect of an eighteenth-century Islamic school by the Tower of the Winds; and he gives two of his colour plates over to illustrations of Byzantine and Byzantine-Frankish ceramics. Anyone familiar with Bintliff's Boeotia project will recognize here an ideological commitment to the ‘Annales school’ of history, and a certain (rather wistful) respect for a subsistence economy that unites the inhabitants of Greece across many centuries. ‘Beyond the Akropolis’ was the war-cry of the landscape archaeologists whose investigations of long-term patterns of settlement and land use reclaimed ‘the people without history’ – and who sought to reform our fetish for the obvious glories of the classical past. This book is not so militant: there is due consideration of the meaning of the Parthenon Frieze, of the contents of the shaft graves at Mycenae, and suchlike. Its tone verges on the conversational (an attractive feature of the layout is the recurrent sub-heading ‘A Personal View’); nonetheless, it carries the authority and clarity of a textbook – a considerable achievement.

Reviving the Past: Cinematic History and Popular Memory in The 300 Spartans (1962)

The paper investigates the artistic, economic, and sociopolitical context of The 300 Spartans (1962), from its conception as an Italian peplum to its realization as a Hollywood epic filmed in Greece. I argue that the classical past is recreated on screen in ways that violate the historical record and becomes a vehicle whereby gender hierarchies are reproduced and morality is preached to the viewers. I conclude by showing how the revival of ancient Sparta on film is informed by important events in post-Civil War Greek history and is deployed to propagate notions of national identity, memory, and pride.

Ingres's Shadows

By the 1850s, the morbid associations of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's art were given voice by supporters and detractors alike. The examination of Ingres's depictions of ancient sculpture for the publication the Musée français (1803–12), however, unfixes the seductive connections between an ingriste sculptural metaphor and the specter of a deadening classical past. The distinctive forms of Ingres's drawings are here understood in relation to philosophical considerations of sensory experience and to evaluations of the special aesthetic experience of sculpture. This vantage point reveals the possibilities ancient sculpture held out for Ingres and emphasizes the distinctly modern terms of its allure.

Reading Memory in Early Modern Literature by Andrew Hiscock

Reviewed by: Reading Memory in Early Modern Literature by Andrew Hiscock Amy K. Hermanson (bio) Keywords memory, reading, Bacon Andrew Hiscock. Reading Memory in Early Modern Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 332 pages. $99. In his introduction to Reading Memory in Early Modern Literature, Andrew Hiscock recalls the work that classicists and medievalists have done recently to demonstrate the supreme importance of memory in those periods. Hiscock situates his volume as an extension of their work, an elaboration of the ways in which this preoccupation with memory continues into the early modern period. Hiscock undertakes an examination of memory in early modern literature in eight carefully researched chapters, plus an introduction. With the exception of chapter 4, which focuses on the Elizabethan fiction of three figures—Thomas Nashe, Thomas Deloney, and George Gasciogne—each chapter is organized around a discussion of an early modern English author: Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey; Katherine Parr; John Foxe; Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke; John Donne; Ben Jonson; and Francis Bacon. Hiscock develops a thorough understanding of the ways important early modern writers theorized and engaged memory to diverse ends: to (re)shape history, to facilitate imitation, to place moral learning in the service of moral actions, and to craft future memories of themselves, to name a few examples. Hiscock argues that early modern contemplations of memory were pervasive and regularly entered into considerations of the meaning of life, the definition of a people, goals for education, and more. Memorial discourse in the early modern world is therefore appropriately examined against the backdrop of religious schism, [End Page 171] shifting conceptions of authority, and scientific innovation. Hiscock’s study is at once broad in scope and detailed in its treatment of specific examples. The close relationship between memorial and historical constructs is a theme often revisited in Reading Memory. At the opening of the chapter focused on Surrey, Hiscock highlights Agnes Heller’s assertion that “the Renaissance was the first era which chose for itself a past” (40). Indeed, the humanist poet’s dubious position in Henrician England provides a motive for his poetic interest in recovering and engaging with the classical past. For example, Hiscock examines a passage in “Th’ Assyryans king” where Surrey recalls a situation from the classical past in which the “expectations of royal government and self-government are irrevocably violated” (42). Here, memory is employed as a method of cultural critique. Through his discussion of Surrey’s poetry, Hiscock demonstrates that Surrey is both interested in how the past can be used to reflect on the present and fascinated with the ways that access to the past can be controlled. In other chapters, Hiscock examines the ways that religious figures such as Parr, Foxe, and Sidney selected histories in order to legitimate their place in a shifting political and religious landscape. In the case of Parr, Hiscock highlights the ways translating, echoing, and imitating religious material from earlier ages was used by many reformers to legitimate their own beliefs and allegiances (66–68). Hiscock opens the chapter with a careful examination of Parr’s context and associations, setting the stage for his insightful reading of her Prayers or medytacions and other writings. Her position in Henry VIII’s court is at times precarious, and her spiritual associations and influences are varied. Hiscock notes that her deployment of scripture in Prayers or medytacions leads the reader to imagine the spiritual journey of the soul in terms of biblical narratives (76). Parr returns repeatedly to those things the Christian must remember in order to be saved: “O what thankes ought I to geve unto the, whiche haste suffered the grevouse deathe of the Crosse, to delyver me from my synnes, and to obteyne everlastyng life for me?” (qtd in Hiscock 77). Hiscock observes of Parr’s work that she not only encourages believers to remember their sins, but also solicits God to “remembre thy mercyes” (qtd in Hiscock 77). The chapter on Donne explores the ways he, too, conceives of memory as a spiritual tool. Hiscock highlights Donne’s Augustinian emphasis on remembering one’s personal history as a sinner as a method for turning one’s gaze to the...

Anxieties of Legitimacy: The Origins and Influence of the “Classicist Stance” in American Rhetoric Studies

ABSTRACTThis article describes an origin of the “classicist stance,” Nan Johnson's term for the emphasis on the classical past in American rhetoric historiography. It argues that adherence to the classical past arises from an anxiety about conducting research evident in the field in the early twentieth century, an anxiety that develops into fears about institutional legitimacy later in the century. The article closes by urging scholars of rhetoric in the modern era to embrace print modernity as their researh framework, rather than classicism.

Anxieties of Legitimacy: The Origins and Influence of the “Classicist Stance” in American Rhetoric Studies

This article describes an origin of the “classicist stance,” Nan Johnson's term for the emphasis on the classical past in American rhetoric historiography. It argues that adherence to the classical past arises from an anxiety about conducting research evident in the field in the early twentieth century, an anxiety that develops into fears about institutional legitimacy later in the century. The article closes by urging scholars of rhetoric in the modern era to embrace print modernity as their researh framework, rather than classicism.

Greek Tragedy for the new millenium: public testimony and restorative justice in yael farber´s molora

This paper examines Molora, an adaptation of the Orestes story by South African playwright Yael Farber set in the context of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It considers the play’s engagement with restorative justice in relation to the exploration of different forms of justice by Aeschylus in his Oresteia. It also examines Farber’s play in light of the ideas of the influential Brazilian theatre director Augusto Boal, noting how the relationship with the classical past has changed in the three decades between the publication of Boal’s Teatro del oprimido y otras poeticas politicas in 1974 and the premiere of Farber’s Molora in 2003.

CARRIE E. BENE . Urban Legends: Civic Identity and the Classical Past in Northern Italy, 1250-1350.

CARRIE E. BENE . Urban Legends: Civic Identity and the Classical Past in Northern Italy, 1250-1350.

Plato's Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance (review)

Reviewed by: Plato's Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance Matthew J. Dillon Cathy Gutierrez . Plato's Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. 218. By turns fantastical and farcical, miraculous and morbid, the nineteenth-century phenomenon of spiritualism has led numerous historians on the quest to pin down its phantoms. Many have followed the reigning fashion in studies of spiritualism, choosing to focus on a single theme or geographic territory within this frustratingly amorphous movement and research it exhaustively. Cathy Gutierrez's recent contribution to the literature offers up a bolder, expansive vision that utilizes a history of ideas approach to chart the development [End Page 222] and transformation of several themes—memory, machines, marriage, medicine, and mind—as reimaginings of Platonic and Hermetic ideas within the religious history of spiritualism. Structured around these five interrelated, thematic essays, and graced by her erudite yet playfully accessible prose, Gutierrez's book is an essential rereading of the spiritualist phenomenon as "the religious articulation of the American Renaissance." In her introduction, Gutierrez unpacks how spiritualism is best understood as the "religious articulation of the American Renaissance" in the sense that both are "enraptured" by the classical past, "seeking therein for advice about the present" (3). Yet this "double helix of time" is complicated by being enmeshed within contemporary concerns for progress and futurity. As a reaction to the exclusive and sharply dualistic salvation theologies of Calvinism, spiritualism absorbed and appropriated esoteric models of heavenly ascent and divine nature that helped to form and legitimate these notions of progress. "Plato's ghost" thus hovers as a Weberian "elective affinity" that characterizes spiritualist views on the nature of the soul, the cosmos, and even education. Spiritualism thus stands between postmillenialism and esotericism, attempting to answer a cultural ambivalence about time with religious answers. In her first thematically oriented chapter, on "Memory," Gutierrez illustrates how two contrasting constructions of time—a progressive postmillenialism and a Victorian, death-centric preservation of the past—are illuminated in notions of memory and the afterlife, and argues that the preservation of the past ultimately disrupts notions of progress. Opening with a depiction of how the shift to an industrial economy and the aftershocks of the Second Great Awakening dually facilitated a more individualistic and feminine brand of religiosity along with increasingly intimate relations between mothers and kin, Gutierrez charts how the distancing of death from the home—into funeral homes and community cemeteries—leads to the rise of Victorian mourning practices and memorabilia. As these progressive forces remove the dead from the home, mourning culture itself elevates the practice of remembrance and suggests a general cultural anxiety about the past. Gutierrez then examines the notion of memory in relationship to the judgment of the soul upon death and the necessity of forgetting in the ascension through the heavens, and shows how both of these are in tension with a reimagined notion of embodied Platonic anamnesis that was circulating in the culture around the same time. In her third essay, Gutierrez depicts how "Machines" were used to establish the objectivity of spiritualist claims of connection to the spirit world and how these objects creatively participated in the discourse surrounding the [End Page 223] cutting-edge science of the time: magnetism, electricity, and photography. As she describes it, "[animal] magnetism, like its Siamese-twin force electricity, was poised at the cutting edge of the future but was understood through the traditional constructs of the past"—specifically, a Hermetic cosmology imbued with the divine (52). After investigating the development of machine discourse from the notion of "medium as machine" to the development of machines designed by spirits or designed to objectivize them, Gutierrez sets off the real fireworks of this section: spirit photography. Adorned by the antispirit photographs of Edouard Buguet, the fraudulent spirit photographer who, once caught, distributed photos with vaporous devils strumming violins above the living, this section elucidates how the shift to photography entailed a shift in validity from sound to sight. As Gutierrez argues, objectivity became a property of the images, not the memories of the bereaved. Even more astutely, she recognizes that the dead jumping into photos exhibited a reversal of...

Relata refero. Perception of the Ancient Greek Past in the Contemporary Education

From the end of the 18th century, along with the modern educational system, the reception of the ancient Greek culture arrived to Serbia. This image of the classical past was heavily influenced by the wider social and political circumstances of the time. Along with the organizational and pedagogical principles, the pioneers of education and the founders of academic disciplines among the Serbs took over the Western narrative on Classical Greece, unintentionally including its ideological foundation. After this so-called „phase of institutionalization“, continuous reproduction of this narrative took place through the educational system. The consequence is that in the contemporary Serbian education the examples of the 19th century theoretical concepts are almost perfectly preserved.

African Athena: new agendas

The appearance of Martin Bernal's Black Athena: The Afro-Asian Roots of Classical Civilization in 1987 sparked intense debate and controversy in Africa, Europe, and North America. His detailed genealogy of the 'fabrication of Greece' and his claims for the influence of ancient African and Near Eastern cultures on the making of classical Greece, questioned many intellectuals' assumptions about the nature of ancient history. The transportation of enslaved African persons into Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean, brought African and diasporic African people into contact in significant numbers with the Greek and Latin classics for the first time in modern history. In African Athena, the contributors explore the impact of the modern African disapora from the sixteenth century onwards on Western notions of history and culture, examining the role Bernal's claim has played in European and American understandings of history, and in classical, European, American and Caribbean literary production. African Athena examines the history of intellectuals and literary writers who contested the white, dominant Euro-American constructions of the classical past and its influence on the present. Martin Bernal has written an Afterword to this collection.

The Golden Age of the Classics in America: Greece, Rome, and the Antebellum United States (review)

Reviewed by: The Golden Age of the Classics in America: Greece, Rome, and the Antebellum United States Cam Grey (bio) Keywords Ancient Greece, Roman Empire, Classics, Classical studies The Golden Age of the Classics in America: Greece, Rome, and the Antebellum United States. By Carl J. Richard. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Pp. 272. Cloth, $45.00.) In this well-written and anecdotally rich book, Richard marshals a wide array of documentary, literary, and material evidence to demonstrate the enduring influence of Greek and Roman morals, mores, and models on [End Page 312] the intellectual, artistic, and political cultures of antebellum America. Even more importantly, he reveals the emergence of an increasing contradiction in the minds and manners of contemporaries between asserting the enduring relevance of the classical past and embracing the new and different challenges of living in their contemporary society. While Richard's title signals his explicit intention to argue that this period, not that of the Founders, was the "Golden Age" of the classics in America, it is this contradiction, and its awful outcome in the form of the American Civil War, that underpins and drives the narrative of the book. Richard tells a story of challenge and backlash as classical models and morals were alternately attacked and defended during the period. He begins in his "Preface" with a strong argument for the democratization of classics, supporting this argument in his first chapter ("Classical Conditioning: School, Home, and Society"), where he traces the multitude of ways in which the influence of the classics on American society can be discerned outside the ranks of its wealthiest members. He emphasizes a subtle shift in the focus of attention, too, from the figures of the late Roman Republic whose writings and ideas had dominated the attention of America's founding generation, to the writers and thinkers of (pre-dominantly) fifth-century Athens, who were increasingly taken as exemplars for contemporary American public and political figures. Richard picks up this theme in his second chapter ("Democracy"), exploring the ways in which classical models and rhetoric were implicated in the extension of male suffrage in the period. Most particularly, politicians needed to develop strategies for emphasizing their plain origins and shared experience with the less educated and aristocratic members of their audience, while simultaneously using their mastery of the classics as a marker of their wisdom and virtue among their peers. In this context, the attractiveness of Athens as a quarry for examples is clear: As "popular" opinion and the "popular" vote became increasingly important, the specter of populist demagogues of the late Roman Republic like Julius Caesar loomed large and threatening. The new American democracy was increasingly, and self-consciously, a plutocracy, conferring status according to wealth. As a consequence, economic utilitarianism became a fraught cultural debate in the period, and Richard turns to the ways in which classical models were implicated in this debate in his third chapter ("Pastoralism and Utilitarianism"). In particular, the period witnessed strong calls to embrace the sciences and contemporary languages at the expense of languages and philosophies [End Page 313] deemed to be outdated. Ultimately, however, these calls were unsuccessful, principally because the classics remained so deeply embedded in intellectual practices and cultural expectations. Indeed, as Richard demonstrates in his fourth chapter ("Nationalism"), it is possible to argue that the series of attacks upon the exemplars of antiquity, as against American figures deemed more worthy of reverence and imitation, is clear proof of the strong hold that the classics continued to have over writers, thinkers, and cultural commentators in the period. As Richard's fifth chapter ("Romanticism") reveals, the tension between Greece and Rome as the most suitable model for the new American state was particularly fraught in the field of literature, where American Romantic authors sought to refute the European dogma that it was impossible for a democracy to produce a national literature. As in debates over architectural forms and representations in pictorial and statuary form, particular attention focused upon the merits of imitation of classical forms, with both supporters and detractors of Romanticism propounding the value of the "classical spirit" while acknowledging the value of departing from the rigid canon of classical...

SYRITHE PUGH, Herrick, Fanshawe and the Politics of Intertextuality: Classical Literature and Seventeenth-Century Royalism.

THE Cavalier Poets are a subject long overdue for revived scholarly interest. This welcome study from Syrithe Pugh focuses on Robert Herrick (1591–1674) and Richard Fanshawe (1608–66), providing invaluable close readings of their poetry. In her introduction, Pugh sets up a comparative reading that promises to elicit significant nuances of difference in the two poet’s engagement with royalist polemic in their verse, in each case made evident through their respective uses of classical allusion. Pugh argues that Herrick’s work upholds the idea of Charles I as a divinely appointed and unquestionable monarch, whereas Fanshawe voices the concerns of a moderate group within the Royalist camp that, whilst upholding the rights of the monarchy, sought to encourage the king to listen to and engage with the concerns of his subjects. Pugh’s study is structured in two parts, with each serving as a case study on each poet. The first section comprises three chapters that focus on Herrick’s repeated allusions to Ovid’s life and works. Pugh prioritizes Ovid as the key classical influence on Herrick’s writing, suggesting that Herrick found in the exiled classical writer a model for his own life, poetic style, and political ideals. Pugh articulates innumerable examples of clear allusion to Ovid in Herrick’s work, and convincingly shows how together these allusions function as part of a complex authorial agenda that seeks to attain far more than a simple association with the classical past. Rather, Herrick makes Ovid a part of the present, finding in his poetry not only a model for a life of otium in withdrawal and retirement (the latter being the long-advocated reading of Herrick’s verse), but also attention to cyclic, metamorphic, forces which hold the promise of continuation and survival in exile until the natural order of court and society is restored again. Pugh emphasizes Herrick’s repeated sense of a greater poetical schema, a transcendental ‘symposium’ of great poets which stretch back to the classical writers with whom he engages in his own work: this schema cannot be touched by contemporary political events, and Herrick’s own place within it is ensured. Thus, Pugh argues, whilst Herrick’s verse cannot escape an engagement with the political realities of his own age, he simultaneously seeks to cut across time and space in his poetry by participating in a forum of living and dead ‘Greats’.