On 30th January 1943, Adolf Hitler’s close associate Goering made a radio broadcast to the beleaguered Sixth Army at Stalingrad on the eastern front. He compared the German army to the Spartan soldiers at Thermopylae in 480 BCE when they stood, fought and died to prevent the advance of the Persians (‘the barbarians’) into Greece. Goering’s broadcast was not well received. The dispirited and starving listeners described it as ‘our own Funeral Speech’ and some officers joked ironically that ‘the suicide of the Jews’, besieged by the Roman army on the top of Masada in 73 or 74 CE was a more apt comparison. This episode raises a host of questions about the reception of classical texts and ideas in later cultures. In this instance, not only was the classical allusion used as a model to sanction expectations of behaviour but further allusions were used as a counter-text to challenge the rhetoric of the high command.

This chapter is in three sections. The first sets out the proposition that movements in ancient oral, written and material culture themselves involved reception and refiguration of material from inside and outside the Hellenic and Roman world. The second section looks at some aspects of these receptions and at the scholarly and critical tools which were developed in association with them and which have often set the parameters for subsequent investigation and evaluation. The third section identifies some important examples of how different aspects of reception within antiquity have contributed to the patterns of reception with which scholars and practitioners have engaged in subsequent periods. Overall, the model used is one which will be taken forward in later chapters of the book. It consists of an axis between reception as activity, as ‘doing’, ‘making’, ‘responding’ and ‘creating’ and reception as selecting, analysing and evaluating. The points of intersection are many but the more divergent areas of the model are also significant and may also contribute to dialogue between ancient and modern. Many critical terms and categories set out in the ancient world have fed into modern systems and in turn many aspects of modern practice, of reception ‘activity’, have prompted further analysis of cultural practices in the ancient world.

This chapter broadens the basis of the discussion in three respects. Firstly, the discussion will include examples which show how the history of reception of ancient texts and ideas is intermingled with and to some extent shaped by the artistic forms and cultural politics of receiving traditions. This means that in looking at examples of modern reception it is necessary to consider the routes through which the ancient text or idea itself has passed and the way in which subsequent cultural assumptions filter modern representations. Secondly, I have deliberately chosen examples which engage with the claim that the ancient world provides models, either in the sense of examples of how human beings might behave or, more subtly, ways in which Greek or Roman history or culture has been presented as a base from which subsequent generations might analyse and critique not just the ancient world, but also their own. In this aspect of the discussion I shall challenge the notion, put forward by a number of critics and most recently fostered by Page du Bois, that those looking to the ancient world as a source of insight, whether artistic, moral or political, are necessarily conservatives. Thirdly, in pursuing this argument I shall also begin to scrutinize and revise any easy assumptions that may linger concerning underlying differences in the ways in which it is possible to characterize Greek and Roman material and its reception or about restrictions in the variety and potential of either. The focus here will be on Roman ideas and texts. The next chapter will concentrate on Greek examples.

The focus of this chapter is on reception and staging, including opera, dance and physical theatre. There are two aspects of staging which raise crucial issues for reception studies. The first is that staging implies a live performance, a live audience. Each live performance is different and it is impossible to recapture it to allow the kind of analysis and debate about an established ‘text’ that is possible when discussing a poem or a painting. In fact, the task of the theatre historian in trying to reconstruct past performances has been compared with that of an art historian trying to study paintings solely on the basis of descriptions: One only needs to imagine what a history of painting would look like where the author had at his disposal neither originals nor copies of pictures but only any number of good descriptions! The historian of the theatre finds himself provisionally in just such a situation as soon as he leaves the realm of his own perception’. In the 1920s when this distinction was drawn it was a radical one since it added to a historiographical approach, which was already shared with cognate areas of study, a new approach based on personal observation. This provided a counterweight to the transitory character of theatrical performance.

The growth of film criticism in modern reception studies presents in a particularly acute form many of the issues of method with which other areas of reception are also grappling. In addition, it brings together under the umbrella of one art form the sometimes uneasy relationship between ‘high’ cultures and popular forms of entertainment. ‘Spectacle’ has to be analysed alongside that of the most nuanced ‘avant-garde’ production techniques. Film has been closely related to drama in terms of analytic approaches, not just because of its links with the subject matter of ancient texts but because it is, like theatre, a performative medium – although unlike a staged performance the conditions in which it is created both assume and facilitate its preservation. Yet some aspects of film also move close to poetry. Furthermore, film poems based on ancient texts and paradigms have encouraged a more self-referential approach, reflecting on the relationship between words and images in both public and private contexts of reception. It will become clear from the discussion which follows that film receptions have some significant overlaps with those in drama and poetry.

There has been a paradox at the centre of much of the discussion in this book. On the one hand much of the material analysed and the issues raised have been shown to be central to public, artistic, political and cultural processes. In some cases (e.g. chapter 3) there has been direct tension between appropriation of classical referents for political or social purposes and the demands of the independence and integrity of scholarship. Related tensions may also arise when appropriation has commercial rationales. Educational appropriation, too, is selective and may have a strongly instrumental focus. On the other hand, I have urged caution in the face of the idea that the arts have a decisive function as shapers or transformers of consciousness although they are a constituent part of broader social and cultural fabrics. Accordingly, I have suggested that there are necessary distinctions to be made between the heightening of sensitivity or awareness on the part of individuals or groups who ‘receive’ and the translations of this awareness into considered action (whether personal, social or political). I have tried to show that any kind of appropriation for instrumental effect is necessarily two-edged and needs to be subject to the kind of scrutiny which identifies both commonalities and differences between the source text and the refigured text and which subjects both to contextual analysis and to investigation of the silences and marginalia embedded within them.