Journal Article Editor's Note: Redeeming the Text — twenty years on Get access Lorna Hardwick Lorna Hardwick Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Classical Receptions Journal, Volume 5, Issue 2, June 2013, Pages 167–168, https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clt013 Published: 13 May 2013

The year Redeeming the Text was published was my first year of undergraduate studies in Classics in Cambridge. By the time I was doing and finishing graduate work, incidentally not in Classics but in Modern Languages, the steady rise of Reception Studies in the UK was in some sense already becoming a fact, and hence a historical phenomenon. The programmatic call for Reception in and as Classics was certainly slow to be heeded (and slower in some places than in others), but it nonetheless had become part of the disciplinary conventions I was acquiring and, simultaneously, trying to understand in their own context. Trans-national and trans-disciplinary elements have shaped my own academic life since (Germany, UK, Greece, USA; Classics, German, Modern Greek, Comparative Literature, History, in changing constellations and repetitions) and have sensitized me to a notion of reception as a movement not only in terms of a vertical, temporal relationship, but also from one context to another on a horizontal, spatial plane. Before I comment on the challenge of how lateral dialogue affects reception, I want to engage first of all with one particular element in Martindale's thinking, in Redeeming the Text as much as in his most recent piece on New Humanism, that leaves me a little uneasy: namely the strong exclusionary opposition between a historicism that insists on a foreign, unfamiliar context on the one hand and an aesthetic appreciation of ancient materials that intimates ‘fugitive communalities’ on the other. What expectations, I wonder, are raised by this rethinking of trans-historicism and what value does it give to distance, especially in a field where we are by definition dealing with materials that are incomplete or limited in their contextualization? Since reception, too, is a form of desiring completion, of filling in a frame, how much distance can and should we be able to stand and withstand in the practice of Reception Studies, as much as in Classics more broadly?

‘The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.’ James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ‘Time present and time past/are both perhaps present in time future,/and time future contained in time past. […] Time past and time future/what might have been and what has been/point to one end, which is always present.’ T.S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’ ‘There is no first or last discourse, and dialogical context knows no limits … At every moment of the dialogue, there are immense and unlimited masses of forgotten meaning, but … as the dialogue moves forward, they will return to memory and live in renewed form. […] Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will celebrate its rebirth.’ Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogical Principle One of Homer’s epithets for Odysseus, polytropos (literally ‘of many turnings’), can be applied to Zachary Mason’s debut novel The Lost Books of the Odyssey, an audacious compendium of forty-six (first edition, 2007) or forty-four (second edition, 2010) stories, which won its author the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and was hailed by Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times as ‘an ingeniously Borgesian novel that’s witty, playful, moving and tirelessly inventive’ (Kakutani 2010). To date, this is the latest entry of a novel into the equally ‘polytropic’ Nachleben of the Odyssey, which includes such disparate works as James Joyce’s Ulysses, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, and the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? The stories of The Lost Books range in size between one and fifteen pages and offer ‘a fragmented, smoky, shimmering version of the Odyssey’ (Goldhill 2010). That the whole they comprise is a novel and not a miscellany, as the plural ‘Books’ of the title might suggest, is mostly to do with its disclosure of perspectives on various Homeric characters, especially Odysseus.1 The stories are first- and third-person narratives and form a kind of anti-Odyssey, an alternative version of the epic that explores its elisions and exploits its imaginative leaps. As Mason avers, his aim is ‘less to advance a plot than to take one image or theme and, paring away all that is inessential, present it with the greatest possible concision and clarity’ (2007: xiii). In some respects, this is an odd piece of fiction that flaunts its oddity: not only have two ‘Books’ vanished from the second edition — another ‘loss’ and a playful allusion to the title’s ‘Lost Books’ — but also the novel in both editions has a strikingly academic flair: the first edition contains a long mock-scholarly introduction, an appendix, and several footnotes, and the second edition features a one-page introduction, no appendix, and fewer footnotes. In both editions, Mason assumes the roles of author and reader, creator and commentator of his work.

Adamantios Koraes (1748–1833) was a humanist scholar of the modern Greek Enlightenment, regarded by many as the reformer of the Hellenic nation of his time. In his attempt to cultivate the proper sort of education (paideia) and at the same time uplift the national pride of contemporary Greeks, Koraes turned to the revival of the ancient legacy by editing and often translating a wide range of classical texts. Among the various ancient Greek authors that he read, it is clear that Plutarch (c. ad 46–120) influenced him deeply. In this article, I examine two aspects of that influence. In the first section, I argue that while instructing his compatriots on ethical issues, Koraes aligns himself with Plutarch, whom he considers as his ancient role model. This is seen from the fact that in his biographical portrait of Plutarch Koraes is careful in drawing comparisons and links, sometimes explicit and in other instances more opaque, between himself and his precursor. In the second section, I suggest that Koraes is informed by Plutarch’s political outlook as well, and more particularly by his central notion of ϕιλοτιμία, which warns against excessive ambition and self-interest in statesmanship. This notion Koraes adjusts to his own political agenda in the form of ϕιλαρχία, which functions in modern times similarly to Plutarch’s ϕιλοτιμία in ancient times.

This article explores Friedrich Nietzsche’s reception of the ancient Greek mythical figure Prometheus as a window onto the philosopher’s changing notions regarding antiquity. In the first instance it will examine the sources of the myth, both ancient and modern, in order to assess how Nietzsche’s appropriation fits into the broader history of Promethean receptions. It will then turn to two of Nietzsche’s main philosophical works, The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and The Gay Science (1882). By closely analysing the texture of Nietzsche’s Prometheus in these works this article will demonstrate that Nietzsche initially used the Titan as a marker of the relationship between ancient Greece and modern Germany and of the potential for a shared identity that might link them. In addition to this it becomes clear that Nietzsche’s conception of the Titan changed dramatically between the two works as well as afterwards, and this article will argue that these changes are key to understanding Nietzsche’s evolving attitude to the relationship between antiquity and modernity.

Journal Article Proems, codas, and formalism in Homeric reception Get access Simon Perris Simon Perris * *Correspondence to Simon Perris, Classics Programme, Victoria University of Wellington, Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand. simon.perris@vuw.ac.nz Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Classical Receptions Journal, Volume 3, Issue 2, November 2011, Pages 189–212, https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clr004 Published: 21 October 2011

This article re-assesses Charles Le Brun's Entrance of Alexander as a visual explication of the rhetorical topos of ekphrasis. The Entrance provides a meta-theory of painting that I will call ‘epic painting’. In short, Le Brun's canvas becomes a realized ‘Shield of Achilles’. Extra-academic attempts to establish the yet undefined relationship between Poussin and ‘the literary’ provide the context in which to understand Le Brun's painterly intervention. The Entrance provides both an example and a template for the continuation of the classical literary tradition through the means available to the medium of paint. Analysing the theory of painting implicit in the strategic use of artistic antecedents, alongside the more explicit theory of painting found in Le Brun's lecture on Poussin's Israelites Gathering the Manna, this article argues that Le Brun understood the painted canvas to be a coherent, ordered, and autonomous space. Thus, Le Brun's painting makes several counter-intuitive claims: that Louis XIV's ‘imperial’ ambitions are the precondition for painting's continued production and ambitions; that painting could pictorialize what the ancients only imagined and described verbally; and that the forms of the classical past, as interpreted by Poussin, could provide the tools necessary for a new and vital artistic practice.

Journal Article Hyperion's symposium: an erotics of reception Get access Joshua Billings Joshua Billings * *Correspondence to Joshua Billings, Merton College, Oxford University, Oxford OX1 4JD, UK. jhbillings@gmail.com I am grateful for the perceptive comments of Constanze Güthenke and the editors of CRJ. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Classical Receptions Journal, Volume 2, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 4–24, https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clq003 Published: 10 May 2010

Drawing upon the writings of English, Scottish and Irish authors, this article explores the conceptual spaces created through the medium of the two Roman Walls of Britain. Late seventeenth- to early twentieth-century texts are addressed to explore how the location of Hadrian’s Wall has sometimes led to its use as a motif for what might be and what is not English. Significantly, the meanings attributed to this Wall are far more complex than any simple idea of inclusion in or exclusion from English national space. Interpretations are often bound up with a broader geographical focus drawing upon the remains of a second and less substantial Roman frontier, the Antonine Wall. The location of this more northerly monument, cutting across Lowland Scotland, complicated any simple territorial identification of England with the former geographical extent of Roman civilization. It is argued that the authors’ ideas of identity were influenced by where they were born in relation to the Walls, but these concepts were also challenged by physical or conceptual movement. Mobility turned Hadrian’s Wall into a spatial referent for a transformative and ill-defined concept of Englishness which, in the writings of some authors, drew upon a nuanced conception of identities within, between, and/or beyond.