On 30 January 1943, Adolf Hitler's close associate Hermann 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. It could be assumed that those involved recognized the allusions and that the classical material provided a site for claims and counter-claims.

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.

This chapter broadens the basis of the discussion in three respects. First, it will include examples which show how the history of the 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 receptions, it is necessary to consider the routes along which the ancient text or idea itself has travelled and the way in which subsequent cultural assumptions filter representations. Secondly, I have deliberately chosen examples which engage with the claim that the ancient world provides models, in the sense either of examples of how human beings might behave or, more subtly, of 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 (one example is Page duBois) that those looking to the ancient world as a source of insight, whether artistic, moral, or political, are necessarily conservatives.1 Thirdly, examination of those aspects helps in the critique of easy generalizations about how it is possible to characterize Greek and Roman material and its reception, or about limitations in the range 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 the relationship between reception and staging, which includes opera, dance, and physical theatre. It takes its main focus from the concept of the ‘performative turn’ outlined in Chapter 1 above, but also resonates closely with the ‘turns’ characterized as ‘translation’ and ‘cultural’. Chapter 6 will include comment on the relationship between performance and more recently theorized ‘turns’ (decolonizing, global, and existential). Although in this chapter the main emphasis will be on staged performance and its analysis, the wider implications of ‘performative’ (namely the actions, perspectives, and responses created by and through performance) also underly the discussion and follow on from the emphasis in Chapter 3 on the ways in which stereotypical associations can be challenged and changed. Performance, sometimes on a monumental scale and including processions and re-enactments, has played an important part in public propaganda in the modern period. Important recent scholarship in that field includes Erika Fischer-Lichte's 2017 monograph Tragedy's Endurance. Performance of Greek Tragedies and Cultural Identity in Germany since 1800, which included exploration of the deployment of Greek material to subvert, and its use to influence the public through exploitation of the psychology of the crowd; and Gonda Van Steen's 2014 study States of Emergency. Theatre and Public Performance under the Greek Military Dictatorship of 1967–1974, which examined the use of ancient Greek material to authenticate a modern Greek political regime, and the concomitant attempt to influence the public psyche through large-scale performance events.

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. 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. Film is now an established area in reception research and has developed critical approaches and methods rigorously tailored to the medium. Classical reception and film studies also reveal in a particularly acute way the tensions between ‘traditional’ approaches and more radical forms of analysis.

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 (for example, 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 scrutiny. Scrutiny identifies both commonalities and differences between the source text and the refigured text, subjecting both to contextual analysis, to investigation of the silences and marginalia embedded within them, and to judgements about the mediations between ancient and subsequent receptions (including not only artistic conduits and adaptations but also the nature of the media involved).

Reception studies make use of dual perspectives which analyse not only the source text and the shifts of emphasis in its receptions but also the situation of the reception within the non-classical traditions which have helped to generate it. Thus the demands for interdisciplinary analysis are potentially very great. In the text of this Survey, bibliographical references were confined to works which directly addressed the texts and issues under discussion. This appendix outlines some possibilities for wider reading and suggests material which will augment the first essential – the texts of the sources and receptions themselves.