C. Michael Sampson

Contemporary classicists often find themselves advocating for the value and relevance of Greco-Roman literature and culture, whether in the classroom, or social media, or newsprint and magazines. In this collection, twelve top scholars apply major critical approaches from other academic fields to open new channels for dialogue between ancient texts and the contemporary world.

This volume considers perennial favorites of classical literature—the Iliad and Odyssey, Greek tragedy, Roman comedy, the Argonautica, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses—and their influence on popular entertainment from Shakespeare’s plays to Hollywood’s toga films. It also engages with unusual and intriguing texts across the centuries, including a curious group of epigrams by Artemidorus found on the island sanctuary of Thera, mysterious fragments of two Aeschylean tragedies, and modern-day North African novels. These essays engage an array of theoretical approaches from other fields—narratology, cognitive literary theory, feminist theory, New Historicist approaches to gender and sexuality, and politeness theory—without forsaking more traditional philological methods. A new look at hospitality in the Argonautica shows its roots in the changed historical circumstances of the Hellenistic world. The doubleness of Helen and her phantom in Euripides’ Helen is even more complex than previously noted. Particularly illuminating is the recurrent application of reception studies, yielding new takes on the ancient reception of Homer by Apollonius and of Aeschylus by Macrobius, the reception of Plautus by Shakespeare, and more contemporary examples from the worlds of cinema and literature.

Students and scholars of classics will find much in these new interpretations and approaches to familiar texts that will expand their intellectual horizons. Specialists in other fields, particularly English, comparative literature, film studies, and gender and sexuality studies, will also find these essays directly relevant to their work.

This article considers the form(s) in which moral advice is expressed in lyric and the context(s) in which it is performed, with an eye to addressing the complications that invariably result. Advice in archaic lyric, it argues, is crafted to defy a straightforward interpretation: whether a poet proceeds directly or indirectly, triangulation of some sort is inevitable. Moralizing strategies complicate the poet–audience binary by introducing additional, mediating material or perspectives whose relationship to the advice at stake is inherently ambiguous. Advice presented indirectly via comparanda or mythological exempla, for example, adds to the point being made, while a more direct form of address gestures toward both universal maxim and particular addressee(s). A hermeneutics of reception must therefore acknowledge the interpretive work that is left to a poem’s audience(s) and account for the poetic tendency simultaneously to compare and to complicate. The paradox is that however much these strategies project their transparency, the content (i.e., advice) is nonetheless obfuscated.

This paper considers how Aeschylus dramatizes the memory of his Persian characters, and argues that the contradictory recollection of Marathon in Persae reflects an imperial ideology with which failure is incompatible: the dramatis personae frame Xerxes’ defeat at Salamis as unprecedented even as they summon Darius as a semi-divine benefactor. With recourse to what historians and anthropologists term “social” or “collective” memory, the paper then considers how such a portrayal of Persian memory would have resonated before an Athenian audience in 472 engaged in democratic debate over the nature of the burgeoning Delian League.

Edition of P.Princ. inv. AM 14601 A, a small scrap from the Princeton collection containing fragmentary epic hexameters, ascribed to the cyclic Aethiopis of Arctinus or the Little Iliad on the basis of its contents, which most plausibly involve the death of Achilles (with possible echoes of that of Penthesilea)