Somewhere in the middle of my very long list of ‘things it might be fun to do if I can ever find the time’ is the idea of writing an article, or at least do some thorough research, on the subject of ancient sausage-making (both cooked and fermented), if not curing and brining more generally. I can’t decide if it’s a character flaw, or just a predictable habit, that I generally feel an urge to ‘academise’ my hobbies; my bee-keeping phase led to what’s still one of my favourite publications, I have a half-finished piece on reading Roman agriculture through the principles of organic growing… It’s a fairly predictable but effective move: compare what we know of ancient practices with modern scientific understanding and/or principles, as a way of opening up questions – not least, on occasion, wondering about how on earth the Romans could have kept bees for centuries and still believed that one could gather a new swarm from a dead ox… (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘reception’
Mingle in the Mincing Machine
Posted in Musings, tagged reception, sausages, urbanisation on December 6, 2018| 5 Comments »
Well, Obviously the Roads…
Posted in Musings, tagged Ethics and Empire, imperialism, reception on January 5, 2018| 4 Comments »
In the recent debates about the Ethics and Empire project at Oxford and its apparently apologetic agenda – see the Oxford open letter, the letter from non-Oxford scholars of empire and colonialism, James McDougall in the Grauniad – ancient historians have kept relatively quiet; Jo Quinn was one of the signatories of the Oxford open letter, and was denounced in the Daily Mail for her pains, but the second letter seems entirely modern in its focus. This is understandable, not from any sort of cowardice or secret imperialist sympathies on the part of ancient historians, but because in the first instance this does appear to be a debate focused on the particular dynamics and problematic history of the British Empire, with the modern postcolonial experience in other regions as the second-ranked concern.
However, as I tend to argue at the drop of a hat, it’s difficult if not impossible to escape the spectre of the Roman Empire when discussing modern imperialism. (more…)
Assorted Alliterative Ancients’ Aphorisms
Posted in Musings, tagged China, politics, reception, Tacitus, Tacitus trap, Thucydides trap on September 4, 2017| 2 Comments »
As I’ve remarked on here before, I really wish I had some grasp of Mandarin, in order to be able to get a proper sense of how Thucydides is being discussed in China: do they simply follow the conventional US international relations reading, and especially Allison’s Thucydides’s Trap theory, on the basis that this will help them understand American foreign policy thinking, or are they engaging with this and other classical texts (including Chinese ones) more creatively? A recent report from the Asia News International website (original link from @rogueclassicist) suggests the latter may be more likely, as it reports on an article from the official news agency Xinhua that speaks not of Thucydides but of the hitherto-unremarked Tacitus Trap. (more…)
The Joy of Anachronism
Posted in Musings, tagged fiction, historiography, Jo Walton, reception, science fiction, time on January 27, 2016| 2 Comments »
Crooked Timber is running an online book seminar about Jo Walton’s ‘Thessaly’ novels, The Just City and The Philosopher Kings, and the main aim of this post is to point you in that direction forthwith. My contribution reflects on the books as meditations on different aspects of the classical tradition, and I would hope that most visitors to this blog with an interest in classical reception will need little persuasion to take a look at them. However, I had far more things to say than would fit comfortably into a more or less coherent blog post, and so I’m going to take this opportunity to try to persuade sceptical historians, ancient or otherwise, that they should be just as interested in a fictional exploration of Platonic political philosophy, its limits and its implications. (more…)
Poetry Corner 2
Posted in Musings, tagged Peter Handke, poetry, reception, Sherod Santos, The Mountain Goats, Thucydides on August 12, 2015| 1 Comment »
I assume there must be a body of literary theory out there about titles, especially of short, ambiguous pieces and poems; the way they promise to be a key to interpretation, and certainly shape the reader’s expectations and influence her reading – but as a result clearly also have the potential to manipulate, deceive, draw her into position above the trap-door and so forth. This is certainly an issue when it comes to the (admittedly very small) number of extant literary pieces that mention Thucydides in their title and then deal with something that appears to be completely unrelated. Peter Handke’s ‘Noch einmal für Thukydides’ (1997), for example, which I’ve written about elsewhere, describes a series of trivial events on a March morning: a yellow leaf on the wall suddenly reveals itself as a butterfly and flies off, the snow begins to melt, and a crocus flowers; on the basis of the title, and Handke’s known interests, I’ve argued that this piece is engaging with different ideas of ‘realism’ as a style, closely associated with Thucydides – but maybe the whole point is that this is the absolute opposite of the things that Thucydides thought were important, battles and speeches rather than butterflies and the everyday. Maybe the title is simply intended as a provocation, or a joke. And one of these days I must have another go at working out what on earth The Mountain Goats‘ ‘Thucydides II.58’ has to do with anything, let alone Thucydides 2.58 (“Bed face at noon/ Strip naked, we can’t get free/ And doubling over in the street/ dozens just like me/ Spreading like a rumor/ spreading like a rumor.”)*
This edition of Poetry Corner offers another example: Sherod Santos’ ‘A Woman Named Thucydides’ (2010), which I found on the internet through a simple search for “Thucydides + poem”. (more…)
Poetry Corner
Posted in Musings, tagged Gershon Hepner, poetry, reception, Thucydides on July 2, 2015| 2 Comments »
The Internet is a wonderful thing, and one can discover all sorts of strange treasures in its wilder reaches – probably guarded by flying snakes and gold-digging ants… I can now add another item to the (admittedly very short) list of poetic engagement with Thucydides, which hitherto amounted to the poem by G.P. Grundy in the introduction to the second volume of his Thucydides and the History of his Age (1948), which I discuss in the preface to Thucydides and the Idea of History, and of course the second stanza of Auden’s September 1 1939. Gershon Hepner’s ‘Be the Rider, Not the Horse’ lacks the deep scholarly knowledge of the former and the contemporary immediacy of the latter (it was, Hepner notes, written in response not to any dramatic global events but to a review of Donald Kagan’s Thucydides: the reinvention of history), but I’m not going to turn down the chance to expand this section of my database of sources by 50%: (more…)
Who Are You?
Posted in Events, Musings, tagged historical theory, P.J. Rhodes, reception, Thucydides on April 13, 2015| Leave a Comment »
I confess: I am @CAConf2015. And yes, I’m afraid I am already married.
As anyone who follows me on Twitter will know, I’ve spent the last few days at the UK Classical Association conference, which we were hosting in Bristol; not just introducing speakers and chairing a few sessions, but also running the official conference Twitter feed. This has been a rather strange experience (though not completely new, as I did something similar for the Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition last year for the Blackwell-Bristol lectures, and will probably be doing it again at the end of this month). The thinking is presumably that I know the system and style and so can be left to get on with it, but actually I wonder if giving the job to someone new to the whole thing might not be better – it doesn’t need or want someone with experience and confidence, and someone new to the whole thing and hence nervously feeling their way might find it easier to hit the right note, rather than someone like me having to un-learn some habits. Yes, I use Twitter in a relatively formal, work-related capacity, and so what I say there is pretty edited and filtered compared with many, but compared with what’s expected of the official voice of an institution or event, it feels like Hunter S. Thompson-esque stream of consciousness. (more…)
Criticism as Conspiracy Theory
Posted in Musings, Research Seminar, tagged hermeneutics of suspicion, Liz Irwin, Pericles, reception, rhetoric, Thucydides on March 11, 2015| 6 Comments »
Plutarch wrote a work On the Malignity of Herodotus, explaining all the ways in which Herodotus did down the noble Greeks and was unacceptably positive about barbarians. To judge from a fascinating seminar paper in Bristol yesterday, Liz Irwin of Columbia University is planning to write On the Malignity of Thucydides, explaining all the ways in which this brilliantly manipulative writer persuades us to accept dubious ideas, not least the idea of his own absolute trustworthiness. She began with Thucydides’ emphasis on the hard work involved in gaining a true knowledge of the past, which most people don’t bother with; this also applies to Thucydides’ own work, which most people take largely at face value as he’s done all the hard work, whereas in fact we need to work incredibly hard to see the reality that lies behind his misleading presentation – otherwise we’re just like hoi polloi (and perhaps specifically hoi polloi of Athens) who’ll accept any old story, now including Thucydides’. She went on to develop a reading of the first two books or so of the work, showing the gaps between Thucydides’ presentation of events and the reality of what really happened – or at least the alternative interpretations that we can derive from other sources or from what seem to be significant absences or tendential claims in Thucydides. (more…)
Wir Rezeptionsgelehrten
Posted in Research in Progress, tagged classical reception, classics, Deep Classics, Marx, Nietzsche, reception on November 21, 2014| Leave a Comment »
We’re now 25% of the way through Bristol’s Deep Classics conference (which I’m also erratically live-tweeting), and some key over-arching themes and questions are already becoming clear. One is of course focused on the cultural connotations and possible subliminal messages of the name itself: is this intentionally or unintentionally referencing Deep History, or the Watergate mole, or a 1970s porn film, or the Bee Gees? Another focuses on the nature of the project and its possible hidden agenda: is Deep Classics effectively Queer Classics, as Sebastian Matzner seemed to suggest in his paper this morning? Or is it Anti-Classics, as implied by Helen Morales in her passing discussion of the conference in a review in the TLS earlier this year? Anti-Historicism, Post-Historicism or the New New Historicism?
A third theme, inevitably suggested by Deep Classics’ emphasis on the fragmentary nature of our knowledge of the classical past and “the very pose by which the human present turns its attention to the distant human past” (Shane Butler’s now much-quoted phrase), is that of its relation to Reception Studies – is this an alternative, or a development, or even a repudiation? (more…)
Sphinx 