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II. Reception within Antiquity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2025
Extract
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, 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; in turn, many aspects of modern practice, of reception ‘activity’, have prompted further analysis of cultural practices in the ancient world.
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References
1 Lichtheim 1976: 39–43.
2 See further Burkert 1992; Morris 1992; Hardwick 1995; West 1997; Davies 2002. Davies discusses ‘a more realistic discourse which treats Greek and Eastern Mediterranean history as a continuum and thereby begins to dissolve the intrinsically racist distinction between “Greek” and “oriental”‘ (235–6). Haubold 2013 sets out a dialogic model.
3 For discussion of Aeschylus’ relation to other ancient sources, see March 1987.
4 For translation and commentary, see Russell and Winterbottom 1989: 188–91, 241.
5 Woolf 1994: 120.
6 For a summary of key scholarship in this area, see Goldhill 2001: 1–25; Whitmarsh 2001: 1–5.
7 Culture was ‘spread’, adapted, and exchanged in the literal sense through material activities such as travel, seafaring, trade, and warfare.
8 Kanôn in Greek meant a measuring rod, standard, or model. From the fourth century it was applied to New Testament books accepted as authoritative by the Christian church. Only later was it used to describe the most highly valued works in a particular cultural tradition.
9 Easterling 1997b, esp. 211, 224–7.
10 See Easterling and Knox 1985: ch. 1.
11 Text, translation, and discussion in Roueché 1993: 223–7.
12 See further Reynolds and Wilson 1974; Bolgar 1981 (esp. 447–9, ‘Arab Culture in the Middle Ages’); Rouse 1992.
13 On ancient criteria and the importance of lists and excerpts, see Easterling 2002.
14 Translation from Hubbell 1949.
15 Translated by P. Carroll in D. Robinson 2002.
16 For further discussion, see Baker and Saldanha 2009: 328–37.
17 See further Parker 2000 (esp. ch. 1).
18 See below ch. 4, pp 68–9; Dunlop 2000.
19 See further Fitzpatrick et al. 2002.
20 Translated and discussed in Braund 2002: 21.
21 See further Braund 2002: 25–36.
22 See further Donaldson 1982.
23 Polybius does not refer to the episode, and the story may have been invented to excuse the killing of prisoners from Carthage in Rome after Regulus’ death (Diod. Sic. 24.12.).
24 Translation from Rudd 1979.
25 See Hardie 1998: 53–7.
26 See Virg. Aen. 4.522–32, and discussion in Braund 2002: 248–50.
27 Translation from Day Lewis 1977: 18.
28 For further discussion see Hardie 1998: 5–10; Braund 2002: 254–7.
29 For discussion of the politics of imitation and its relationship to paideia, with extensive references and bibliography, see Goldhill 2001: 8–17; Whitmarsh 2001: 3–17.
30 For discussion of this aspect, with examples, see Murray and Dorsch 2000. Translated extracts from Plato, Aristotle, Horace, and Longinus are included, together with specialist bibliography and chronological tables of authors and events. There is a slightly wider selection, with explanatory notes (also including Horace's A Letter to Augustus, Tacitus’ Dialogue on Orators, Dio of Prusa's Philoctetes in the Tragedians, and Plutarch's On the Study of Poetry) in Russell and Winterbottom 1998.
31 Translations from Freeman 1962: 22.
32 For discussion, see Murray and Dorsch 2000: xxiii–xxix.
33 For discussion, see Murray and Dorsch 2000: xxxii.
34 See further Halliwell 1989.
35 FHG 246.1 Andron = Athenaeus Deipnosophistae 184b. For further discussion and bibliography, see Whitmarsh 2001: 7–9.
36 For the variety of forms taken by these stereotypes, see the precepts of the Elder Cato, the rejection of Greek philosophy in the second century bce, and, in Imperial literature, Juvenal's Satires, especially Satire 3.
37 For further discussion, see Swain 1996; Whitmarsh 2001: 12–20.
38 Goldhill 2001: 8.