Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T22:12:39.714Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

II. Reception within Antiquity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2016

Get access

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 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.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Surveys in the Classics , Volume 33: Reception Studies , 2003 , pp. 12 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Lichtheim, M., Ancient Egyptian Literature volume II: The New Kingdom (Los Angeles and London, 1976), 39–43.Google Scholar

2 See further Hardwick, L., ‘Classical distances’ in Sewart, D. (ed.), One World Many Voices vol. 1 (Milton Keynes, 1995), 283-6Google Scholar; Morris, S.P., Daidalos and the Origins of Greek Arts (Princeton, 1992)Google Scholar; Burkert, W., The Orientalising Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture – the early Archaic Age (Cambridge, Mass, and London, 1992)Google Scholar; West, M.L., The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (Oxford, 1997)Google Scholar; Davies, J.K., ‘Greek History: a discipline in transformation’ in Wiseman, T.P. (ed.), Classics in Progress: Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome (Oxford, 2002), 225–46 Google Scholar. 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.

3 For discussion of Aeschylus’ relation to other ancient sources, see March, J., The Creative Poet, ICS Bulletin Supplement 49 (London, 1987), 79–118 Google Scholar.

4 For translation and commentary see Russell, D.A. and Winterbottom, M. (edd.), Classical Literary Criticism (Oxford, 1989), 188–91, 241Google Scholar.

5 Woolf, G. D., ‘Becoming Roman, staying Greek: culture, identity and the civilizing process in the Roman East’ PCPhS 40 (1994), 116–43, quote at 120Google Scholar.

6 For a summary of recent work in this area see Whitmarsh, T., Greek Literature and the Roman Empire (Cambridge, 2001), 1–5 Google Scholar and Goldhill, S. (ed.), Being Greek Under Rome (Cambridge, 2001), esp. 1–25 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Of course culture was ‘spread’, adapted and exchanged in the literal sense through material activities such as travel, seafaring, trade and warfare.

8 Kanon 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, P.E., ‘From repertoire to canon’ in Easterling, P.E. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 1997), 211–27, esp. 211, 224–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 See Easterling, P.E. and Knox, B.M.W. (edd.), The Cambridge History of Classical Literature, vol. 1 ‘Greek Literature’, ch. 1 (Cambridge, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Text, translation and discussion in Roueché, C., Performers and Partisans at Aphrodisias in the Roman and Late Roman Periods, JRS Monograph 6 (London, 1993), 223-7Google Scholar.

12 See further Bolgar, R.R., ‘The Greek Legacy’ in Finley, M.I. (ed.), The Legacy of Greece (Oxford, 1981), 429–72, esp. 447–9 ‘Arab culture in the Middle Ages’Google Scholar; Rouse, R.H., ‘The Transmission of the Texts’ in Jenkyns, R. (ed.), The Legacy of Rome, a New Appraisal (Oxford, 1992), 37–59 Google Scholar and Reynolds, L.D. and Wilson, N.G., Scribes and Scholars: a Guide to the Transmissions of Greek and Latin Literature (Oxford, 2nd edition 1974)Google Scholar.

13 On ancient criteria and the importance of lists and excerpts, see Easterling, P., ‘A taste for the classics’ in Wiseman, T. P. (ed.) (2002), 21–37 Google Scholar.

14 Cicero, , De optimo genere oratorum 14, tr. Hutbell, H.M. (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1949)Google Scholar.

15 Jerome, St., Epistolae 57.5 tr. Carroll, P., in Robinson, D. (ed.), Western Translation Theory from Herodotus to Nietzsche (Manchester, 1997)Google Scholar.

16 For further discussion, see Baker, M. (ed.), The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Translation Studies (London and New York, 1997), 320-1Google Scholar.

17 See further Parker, J., Dialogic Education and the Problematics of Translation in Homer and Greek Tragedy (Lampeter, Ontario and New York, 2000), esp. ch. 1Google Scholar.

18 See below ch. 4, p. 63 with n. 28.

19 See further Fitzpatrick, D., Hardwick, L., Ireland, S. and Montserrat, D. (edd.), Old Wine, New Bottles: Texts for Classics in a Changed Learning Environment at University (Milton Keynes, 2002)Google Scholar.

20 Livy, Preface 9–10, translated and discussed by Braund, Susanna Morton, Latin Literature (London and New York 2002), 21.Google Scholar

21 See further, Braund (2002), 25–36.

22 See further Donaldson, Ian, The Rape of Lucretia: a Myth and its Transformation (Oxford 1982)Google Scholar.

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 (Diodorus Siculus 24.12.).

24 See Hardie, P., Virgil, New Surveys in the Classics No. 28 (Oxford, 1998), 53-7Google Scholar.

25 See Virgil Aeneid 4. 522–32 and discussion in Braund (2002), 248–50.

26 For further discussion, see Braund (2002), 254–7, and Hardie (1998), 5–10.

27 For discussion of the politics of imitation and its relationship to paideia, with extensive references and bibliography, see Whitmarsh (2001), especially Part One, and Goldhill (2001), esp. 8–17.

28 For discussion of this aspect with examples see Murray, P., introduction to P. Murray and T.S. Dorsch (edd.), Classical Literary Criticism (London, 2000)Google Scholar. Translated extracts from Plato, Aristotle, Horace and Longinus are included in Murray, 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, D.A. and Winterbottom, M. (edd.), Classical Literary Criticism (Oxford, 1998)Google Scholar.

29 For discussion, see Murray (2000), xxiii-ix.

30 See Murray (2000), xxxii for discussion.

31 See further Halliwell, S., ‘Aristotle’s Poetics’ in Kennedy, G.A. (ed.), The Cambridge History of Classical Literary Criticism, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1989), 149–83 Google Scholar.

32 FHG 246.1 Andron = Athen.Deipn. 184b. For further discussion and bibliography, see Whitmarsh (2001), 7–9.

33 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.

34 For further discussion see Swain, S., Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism and Power in the Greek World AD50-250 (Oxford, 1996) and Whitmarsh (2001), 12–20.Google Scholar

35 Goldhill (2001), 8.