This chapter considers how English dictionaries made sense of sexuality beyond modern English society. It begins with the early modern assumption that a nation’s character was commensurate with its language, and that the moderate nature of England’s language and culture entailed that any ‘excess’ found in either must be the result of foreign influence. The chapter examines how sodomy and buggery, along with the semantic field of pederasty, were positioned by etymological, general, and hard-word dictionaries as ethically and ethnically remote, vices practised in the Mediterranean by ancient heathens or modern heretics. These xenophobic associations remained in dictionaries into the nineteenth century. Conversely, lexicographers’ retellings of classical myths of same-sex love—male and female—reveal sites of tension between the moderns’ veneration of Greek and Roman literature and their rejection of its pagan sensuality. The life of Sappho in particular provoked sharp disagreements over what her moral character had been, and what could or should be said about it, in a range of dictionary genres: hard-word, general, classical, and biographical.

Moving between an analysis of the canon as a critical mechanism and a focus on the physical limits and definition of Latin literature, the chapter reviews the very discourse of the canon and its impact on the field. The ‘canonised’ nature of Classics determines not just a hierarchy of texts and methodologies worthier of being taught and researched but also informs the very approach to non-canonical or ‘para-canonical’ texts. Any canon, in other words, is not just about what we study, it is also about how we study it. Opening up the canon is a dynamic and self-reinforcing process and one which involves both readers who embody difference (social, racial, gender etc.) accessing and studying an expanded and evolving canon, and texts that embody difference (peripheral, post-classical, marginal etc.) being ‘read into’ the canon by an increasingly diverse readership. Interrogating our canon of Latin literature, this chapter argues, implies a fundamental repositioning of one’s scholarly stance not just towards non-canonical texts but also towards canonical authors.

This chapter introduces the human as a question. It revolves around the figure of the Theban Sphinx and her interaction with Oedipus and traces her presence from the ancient world into the works of Sigmund Freud. The chapter invokes the Sphinx as a presence that both prompts and challenges the way we think the human. Oedipus’ troubled humanity stands at the intersection between his success in solving the Sphinx’s riddle and his apparent failure to understand how her words apply to his own existence. As such, the Sphinx’ intervention at Thebes exposes a deep-seated vulnerability at the core of the human condition – a vulnerability springing from the fact that while the riddle can be solved with the powers of reasoning, the human as a riddle remains enigmatic and beyond the application of logos.

This introduction begins by setting up the core question of this book: why is it that disability is still frequently used as a metaphor, despite awareness that this is harmful – and what can we as readers and receivers of classical texts do about it? The role played by spectators, by models of reception, and by ways of understanding vision in this problem are underlined. The chapter introduces the concept of assemblage theory, seeing it as something that arises out of the focus on the reader evident in reception theory’s beginnings. It draws out some of the benefits of an assemblage-thinking model, weighing them against other ways of understanding reception and relation. It closes with some examination of the various activisms and limitations evident throughout the book.

By no means has it always been the case that European readers have always believed, as did Voltaire, that the main purpose of Herodotus’ Histories was to tell the story of the clash of eastern and western ‘civilizations’.Indeed, from at least the later seventeenth century through the mid-nineteenth century, the first four books of the Histories were widely used by Christian scholars to verify sacred history with profane data.For this very large scholarly faction, Herodotus offered the earliest, and most checkable, ‘oriental’ facts, useful in combatting rationalist and pyrrhonist arguments about the untrustworthiness of ancient histories that could not be otherwise verified.Only in the later nineteenth century, when decipherments and excavations began to provide more direct and concrete testimony of the probable historical accuracy of the Hebrew Bible did Herodotus begin to lose his function as, in the words of one eighteenth-century Jesuit advocate, ‘historian of the Hebrew people, without knowing it’.

Chapter 5 investigates the political uses of antiquity during wartime. It argues that the War of the Morea was a turning point in the reception of classical tradition that enacted the imperial topos of translatio imperii et studii. The mastery of Greek territories was also a mastery of archaeological sites and artifacts that renewed the culture of antiquity in Venice. The chapter shows that patrician collecting and the public display of antiquities as war trophies were inseparable from an aggressive military antiquarianism that supported the Republic’s new imperial regime with intellectual and cultural power from ancient Greece. Specifically, the occupation of Athens, with its famous history and symbolic potency, inspired strong associations between Venetian maritime supremacy and the fifth-century Athenian empire. But it also launched a new phase in the European rediscovery of Greek art and architecture through one of the darkest episodes of Venetian history: the bombardment and despoliation of the Parthenon.

This introductory chapter is a headland to the larger field of the history of English georgic writing. It is set aside for a general survey of English georgic viewed through the contexts of agrarian history in the British Isles and of non-literary agricultural writing published over the last five centuries. The aim is to draw out some historical patterns and to fill in some of the literary gaps between chapters. It begins with three contemporary snapshots of British writers demonstrating some of the formal resources the georgic tradition can afford today. Six further sections survey about a century of georgic writing each.

Chapter 2 turns its attention to the cultural foundations on which medieval ideas of kingship built. It falls into two parts. The first summarises key episodes from the Old Testament; outlines concepts of just and legitimate power as defined by Cicero in his De Officiis and in Seneca’s De Clementia, which were among the mostly widely read classical texts in the central Middle Ages; and draws attention to important patristic and early medieval writers like Gregory the Great, St Augustine and Pseudo-Cyprianus. A recurring theme in all these is the relationship between the divine and worldly power, in each case reimagined so as to fit the specific circumstances and traditions of an author’s community. Kingship meant something different to semi-nomadic desert tribes in Syria, educated Roman elites and theologians coming to terms with the collapse of the Roman Empire. The second part highlights key themes in the medieval reception of these foundational texts, and in a range of more abstract engagements with worldly power. Especially important prove to be questions of justice, humility, the role of virtue, the subservience of the ruler to the divine and the need for oversight and admonition. These themes were pervasive across Latin Europe.

This chapter is an overview of the ways in which Seamus Heaney engages with Greek and Latin mythologies and literatures in his work, from Death of a Naturalist (1966) to Aeneid VI (2016), and from allusions to more sustained forms of intertexuality, including versions. First discussing classical presences in his early poetry, the chapter shows how Heaney became increasingly interested in Greek and Latin literatures after the late 1980s, at a time of personal and political crises in Northern Ireland. It explains that, in those years, classical texts helped him address family deaths as well as contemporary violence in the North. Finally, it argues that in his rewritings of Sophocles, and in his classical poetry, mostly inspired by Virgil, Heaney ultimately revisits Ireland as a classical and secular space, reflecting social and cultural changes on the island, in the context of the Northern Irish peace process, as well as of globalisation.

This chapter focuses on the reception of ancient Greek tragedy by African writers. It starts with a definition of the term post-colonial and related aspects such as the use of language in post-colonial writing. It attempts to trace the path this reception followed from Europe to post-colonial Africa, then to Carribean and Afro-American cultures as part of the first diaspora, and then back to Europe as part of the second diaspora. Selected examples will be analysed in order to illustrate how African writers have used the ancient Greek plays in order to 'write back' to the (former) colonial centre as part of post-colonial discourse.

In 2015, Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre staged a highly controversial adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone. The critical reception could not have been more polarised and was seemingly entirely split down gendered lines. This chapter, written by the author of (and an actor in) that adaptation, provides both a personal account and academic theorisation of the production. Analysing the context of the Malthouse Antigone, the chapter explores issues of cultural appropriation, national identity, gender performativity, and creative pragmatism that underpinned the creation of the show and contributed to the controversy surrounding it. The chapter also proposes a pragmatic twist to the tendency of classical reception studies to attribute intentionality to production decisions. Whereas analysis of the finished production can give a false sense of a secure directorial intention, analysis of the process demonstrates that the journey from page to stage is constantly at the mercy of contingencies, collaborations, and compromises.

This chapter explores the ways in which stage adaptation, as a form by definition open, volatile, and thus susceptible to both the marvels and the injuries of interpretation, is forever attached to the unresolved debate pertaining to directors’ so-called ‘respect’ and ‘loyalty’ towards the original text. Whether adaptation is seen as an invitation to deepen and expand the source material or (at the opposite extreme) as a gratuitous statement of ultimately uninspired defiance, one needs to address and perhaps attempt to settle the issue of directorial freedom and/or mediation in a process that is inevitably indebted to an inceptive core. Focusing on auteur directors’ adaptations of Greek tragedy, this chapter interrogates such controversial notions as authority and deference to the received primary agent of creativity, namely, the writer of the original text – a text which qua material for adaptation bears the brunt of change, be that appropriation, growth, abuse, or subversion. The problem of directorial freedom is especially pronounced in the case of ‘canonical’ texts, which are customarily regarded as agents of authority and may generate a range of audience expectations and directorial responses, from absolute reverence to the text’s accepted meaning to a radical reinterpretation of the source text.