Cosmopolitan Classicism

Author(s):  
Stefano Evangelista

Oscar Wilde associated ancient Greece and modern France as the homelands of artistic autonomy and personal freedom. France and the French language were crucial in his adoption of a cosmopolitan identity in which his close emotional and intellectual engagement with the ancient world also played a key role. His practices of classical reception therefore have roots in the French as well as English traditions. Wilde’s attitude towards ancient Greece initially shows the influence of French Parnassian poetry. As time goes on, however, he starts to engage with the new images of the ancient world promoted by Decadence and Symbolism, which sidelined the Greek classicism idealized by the Parnassians in favour of Hellenistic and Latin antiquity. Particularly important to Wilde were his exchanges with French Symbolist authors Marcel Schwob and Pierre Louÿs, whose writings on Hellenistic Greece are in dialogue with Wilde’s works, notably ‘The Critic as Artist’ and Salomé.

2018 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-282
Author(s):  
Emma Bridges ◽  
Joanna Paul

The cinematic and televisual reception of the ancient world remains one of the most active strands of classical reception study, so a new addition to the Wiley-Blackwell Companions series focusing on Ancient Greece and Rome on Screen is sure to be of use to students and scholars alike (especially given how often ‘Classics and Film’ courses are offered as a reception component of an undergraduate Classical Studies programme). The editor, Arthur Pomeroy, himself a respected and prolific ‘early adopter’ of this branch of scholarship, has assembled many of the leading names in cinematic reception studies (including Maria Wyke, Pantelis Michelakis, Alastair Blanshard, and Monica Cyrino), alongside a good number of more junior colleagues, resulting in a varied and rewarding compendium that will provide a useful accompaniment to more detailed explorations of this field. (Some, though not all, chapters offer further reading suggestions, and most are pitched at an accessible level.) The twenty-three contributions span the ‘canonical’ and already widely treated aspects of screen reception, from 1950s Hollywood epics to adaptations of Greek tragedy, as well as ranging across material which has only more recently began to attract the attention it deserves, such as TV documentary, or adaptations for younger audiences. The volume is not as easily navigable as it might be, with the four-part division of the chapters sometimes seeming a little arbitrary. (So, for example, a chapter which discusses ‘The Return of the Genre’ in films like Gladiator appears under the heading ‘Comedy, Drama, and Adaptation’, when it might have been better placed in the first section, on ‘The Development of the Depiction of Ancient Greece and Rome on Screen’.) But rich discussions are not hard to find, especially in those chapters which show how cinematic receptions are indicators of more widely felt concerns relating to our reception of the past, as in Blanshard's assessment of ‘High Art and Low Art Expectations: Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture’. Michelakis’ chapter on the early days of cinema is also a valuable distillation of some of his recent work on silent film, crisply and concisely setting out the plurality of approaches that must inform our understanding of the cinematic medium (for example, spectatorship, colour, and relationships to other media). More broadly, the collection makes a solid and welcome attempt to put this pluralism into practice, with Pomeroy stressing ‘the complexity of understanding film’ early in his introduction (3). Chapters focusing on music, and costumes, for example, allow us to see productions ‘in the round’, a panoptical perspective which is still too readily avoided by much classical reception scholarship. (It is also good to see at least one chapter which ranges beyond screen media in the West.) Other vital areas of film and TV studies could arguably have received more attention. Some contributors touch on the importance of assessing audience receptions of these films, or the impact of marketing and other industrial considerations (such as screening practices), but more chapters dedicated to these approaches might have been a more sustained reminder to readers of just how widely screen scholarship can (and often needs to) range. To that end, a particularly significant chapter in the book – one of only 3 by non-Classicists – is Harriet Margolis’ account of how film historians might evaluate ancient world film. Newcomers to this field should pay particular attention to this, and to Pomeroy's introductory comments on how we should regard film as much more than a quasi-literary medium.


1998 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Richmond

This paper is written to give some account of the part played by secret agents against foreign states. Only in the most incidental way will it mention secret agents who tried to detect internal dissent and conspiracy. Plato thought that all Greek states were in a permanent state of war, declared or undeclared. Even in modern times no two independent states have totally identical interests, and when negotiating about clashes of interests, in peacetime just as in war, any government will seek a position in which it can keep its own secrets and discern those of the opposing side. We know very little of Greek spying in time of peace. When diplomacy failed, Greek states could have recourse to war to attain their objectives. War requires some strategic plan of intended operations. In modern conditions many experts must have a hand in devising the plan, and it must be prepared well in advance. In the ancient world things were simpler. One wonders how many Carthaginians knew, or had to know, that Hannibal intended to march round the Mediterranean and attack Italy. Certainly he took the Romans by surprise. The execution of the plan is best entrusted so far as possible to a single commander, even in modern times. We know next to nothing about how military policy was determined in peacetime, but we have a little more information about conditions in times of war.


1962 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Kraus

In ancient Greece the priests of Apollo asserted that freedom of movement was one of the essentials of human freedom. Many hundreds of years later, toward the end of the eighteenth century, people in the Atlantic world again talked of emigration as one of man's natural rights. It was in northern and western Europe that easier mobility was first achieved within the various states. The next step was to use that mobility to leap local boundaries to reach the lands across the western sea. From the “unsettlement of Europe” (Lewis Mumford's phrase) came the settlement of America.Americans and those who wished to become Americans felt at home in the geographical realm conceived by Oscar Wilde. “A map of the world that does not include Utopia,” he said, “is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. Progress is the realization of Utopias.” It was the belief that Utopias were being realized in America that caused millions to leave Europe for homes overseas.IA Scottish observer, Alexander Irvine, inquiring into the causes and effects of emigration from his native land (1802), remarked that there were “few emigrations from despotic countries,” as “their inhabitants bore their chains in tranquility”; “despotism has made them afraid to think.” Nevertheless, though proud of the freedom his countrymen enjoyed, Irvine was critical of their irrational expectations in setting forth to America. There were few individuals or none in the Highlands, he said, “who have not some expectation of being some time great or affluent.


2014 ◽  
Vol 110 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-249
Author(s):  
CARRIE L. SULOSKY WEAVER
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Dan-el Padilla Peralta

This chapter reconstructs the reception and appropriation of ancient Greece and Rome in the Dominican Republic, tracing the long arc of classical reception from the foundation of the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo to the politics of the twenty-first-century nation-state. Two interlocking appropriations of classical Greece are documented and scrutinized: the glorification of colonial Santo Domingo by postcolonial Dominican elites as the “Athens of the New World,” and the celebration of the modern nation-state as the “Sparta of the New World” during the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1930–61). Both modes of scripting hispanophone Hispaniola as classically Greek turn out upon closer examination to derive their impetus from a racialized—and racist—cultural and nationalistic program whose imprint on Dominican debates about statehood and race remains visible to this day.


2014 ◽  
Vol 108 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-146
Author(s):  
Niall W. Slater
Keyword(s):  

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 1142-1143
Author(s):  
Arlene W. Saxonhouse

Ancient Greece has long exercised a powerful hold on the imagination of modern political science. But until fairly recently, this influence has largely been philosophical, related to the origins of many theoretical concepts—including the concept of politics itself—in the ancient world. In The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece, Josiah Ober offers a synoptic and ambitious social theoretical account of the ancient Greek world, the sources of its power, the causes of its decline, and the lessons that can be drawn from this story for contemporary social and political science. We have thus invited a range of political scientists to comment on Ober’s account of classical Greece and its relevance to contemporary political inquiry.


Author(s):  
Hans van Wees

This article examines genocide in the ancient world, by examining European literature and comparing the atrocities committed during the events of the Trojan War. The massacre of all Troy's male inhabitants and the enslavement of its women and children were fictional, but it had many counterparts in ancient history. It was almost the normative form of genocide in ancient Greece and some other parts of the ancient world, although mass enslavements and mass executions which made no distinctions of gender or age are also widely attested. The Greeks' reasons for treating the Trojans so brutally were typical of the motivations for genocide in antiquity: it was usually an act of ‘conspicuous destruction’, a display of force designed to assert the power and status of the perpetrator in the face of a perceived challenge. Ancient genocide sometimes had a religious dimension.


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