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CLASSICS IN THE MODERN WORLD - A DEMOCRATIC TURN?
An International Collaborative Research Conference
Milton Keynes 18–20 June 2010
ABSTRACTS
OPENING PANEL – KEY ISSUES
We are all democrats today
Katherine Harloe, University of Reading, UK
This paper extends some of the reflections given in my response to the first round of e-seminar
discussions, in which I raised questions concerning the implicit force of the term ‘democratic’ in
the conference theme, the different meanings it has been given by various participants, and the
possibility that its use may close off avenues of critical discussion rather than open them up.
The extension of the scope of classical reception studies (CRS) - or even of ‘classics’ as a
discipline – towards a wider variety of responses to ancient ideas, texts and other cultural forms
is surely laudable, and those committed to this direction for humanistic study should surely
celebrate their commitment. Yet I wonder why so many of us working in CRS wish to
appropriate the term ‘democratic’ in order to characterise our work, or our subjects, or
ourselves. How does this relate to democracy’s status as the hegemonic state form in the
modern west and the consequent impossibility, for most of us, of imagining viable alternatives?
Does this make it a promising term to transfer to classical reception studies, or may it confuse
and disguise more than it clarifies?
I shall also raise some brief doubts about the developmental narrative that seems to be
presupposed by the phrase ‘democratic turn’. Is this to be seen as a recent development and if
so, what does the metaphor imply about the practice of classical reception studies – or of
classics – prior to this? Several of the conference contributions have the potential to complicate
an view of classicism as, historically and essentially, an elitist discourse. Celebration of present
trends towards inclusivity and plurality should not blind us to past critical elements in what is
sometimes still (to my mind, misleadingly) called ‘the classical tradition’.
Finally, I shall revisit the question, voiced already by many contributors to the conference and eseminars, for CRS to re-engage with theory of various kinds. Notions of a ‘democratic turn’,
however imperfect, are helpful in drawing attention to the opportunities and challenges that face
those working in this cross-disciplinary field.
Against the Democratic Turn': Counter-texts; Counter-contexts; Counter arguments
Lorna Hardwick (The Open University)
This paper aims to raise some awkward issues and to provoke debate by looking critically at
some of the assumptions underlying claims that there has been a ‘Democratic Turn’. I start by
reviewing some of the main counter-arguments (drawing on contexts of transmission,
interpretation and artistic production and consumption). I then focus on the formal properties of
some key texts from epic and drama and discuss their problematic implications. I argue that
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claims about a ‘Democratic Turn’ may be largely aspirational, even masking complacency about
democracies and their institutions and deflecting attention from the potential of classical texts to
function as intellectual gadflies. The paper concludes by suggesting how ‘democratic’
aspirations might be realised in ways that do justice both to the densities and ambivalences of
the texts and to their potential in modern cultural politics.
Investigating American women’s engagements with Greco-Roman antiquity, and
expanding the circle of ‘classicists’
Judith P. Hallett, University of Maryland, College Park, USA
My presentation focuses on an area of classical reception research that has recently attracted
substantial attention from both classicists and American intellectual and cultural historians: the
influential and as yet insufficiently appreciated role played by American women, from the late
18th century onwards, in both the academic study of Greek, Latin and Greco-Roman antiquity
and efforts that promoted appreciation of the classical past among a wider public. It features as
its case studies representative attempts, successful and unsuccessful, by classicists to work
with American historians, and evaluate work by American historians, on these two topics.
I distinguish between research on American women who learned and taught classical
languages, literatures and cultures in formal institutional settings and on those who, in Caroline
Winterer’s words, sought to ‘immerse themselves in the spirit of classical antiquity’ outside of
academe. I argue that these two classical reception projects often address different kinds of
questions and, accordingly, require different kinds of scholarly expertise. To illustrate the
importance of ‘synergetic scholarship’ involving classicists and American historians, I have
selected biographies of two female educators regarded as ‘classicists’: M. Carey Thomas,
president of the all-female Bryn Mawr College from 1885-1922; and Bryn Mawr alumna Edith
Hamilton, who, after serving from 1896-1922 as headmistress of a college preparatory school
for girls founded by Thomas, became a best-selling author of books about classical antiquity. To
illustrate problems arising when classicists fail to understand, and collaborate with, American
historians, I have chosen a response to Winterer’s The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women
and the Classical Tradition, 1750-1900 (2007. It uses archival evidence to document how
American women of this era embraced ‘classicism’ as an inclusive cultural movement rather
than an exclusive academic pursuit: through reading groups and study clubs, and—in the
domestic, material cultural realm—furnishings, art and fashion
PANEL: CLASSICAL RECEPTIONS, POLITICAL CULTURES, AND NOTIONS OF DEMOCRACY
The Reception of the Roman-Dutch Law of Treason in South Africa,
John Hilton, University of Kwa-Zulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa
‘The South African law of high treason was based not on English law but on
Roman Dutch antecedents, and defined high treason as a hostile intention
to disturb, impair or endanger the independence or safety of the state. The
punishment was death.’
(Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom. Randburg: Macdonald Purnell,
1994:189.(
Trials for high treason have a long and spectacular history in South African law. The most
famous of these is of course, the trial of 156 members of the anti-apartheid resistance
movement that took place between the years 1956 and 1961 referred to above in my lead
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quotation from Mandela’s autobiography, but there have been others: the Slagter’s Nek
Rebellion in 1815, the Makana revolt in 1818, the Jameson Raid in 1896, the Bambata
insurrection by Dinizulu in 1908, the Boer rebellion in 1902, the Miner’s Strike in 1922, and the
subversive activities of the Nazi Robey Leibrandt during the Second World War, among others.
Over all of these hangs the shadow of the lex Julia de maiestate and other Roman laws on
treason. This paper will investigate how the reception of the Roman law in South Africa shaped
the construction of the concept of treason at times of heightened political tension.
Nietzsche as Educator, Bracht Branham, Emory University, Atlanta, USA
My aim in this paper is to explore Nietzsche's conception of what the nature and purpose of a
humanistic education should be in the modern world. Specifically, I will examine his unfinished
critique of his own discipline -- classical philology -- and ask why he chose not to include it in his
second book, the Untimely Meditations.
Appropriations of Cicero and Cato in Colonial America and the Early Republic,
Barbara Lawatsch-Melton, Emory University, Atlanta, USA
The significance of classical receptions for the American Founders and nineteenth century elites
in the United States has received much scholarly attention during the past twenty years. Even
so, the emergence of Cicero and Cato as iconic figures, the extent of their reach beyond the
elites, and their role in the evolution of a democratic political culture in the United States has not
been fully explored. This paper will outline how Cicero and Cato emerged as iconic figures in
the eighteenth century and continued to play a role within widely disseminated publications in
the nineteenth. Examining classical receptions among both elites and wider circles of society,
this paper will investigate the significance of classical icons in shaping the foundational
narrative, concepts of liberty, and ideals of leadership and civic engagement. While exploring
the role of classical receptions in the evolving democratic culture, the paper will touch upon their
significance for more recent trends and receptions of the classics.
Labour and the Classics: Plato and Crossman in Dialogue, Michael Simpson,
Goldsmiths, University of London
Long before the current Labour Government had a closing appointment with electoral nemesis,
the New Labour project was criticised for the lack of a philosophical dimension. The same
stricture had been levelled at Harold Wilson’s Labour administrations of the 1960s. Yet Wilson’s
cabinets have generally been deemed a galaxy of talent, and they were, as it happens,
equipped with several philosophically literate members, of whom most had a classical
background. Denis Healey is an exemplary instance. The most classically furnished of all,
however, was Richard Crossman, political diarist, journalist, broadcaster, self-styled political
scientist, and accredited scholar of Greek philosophy. Other roles in Crossman’s profile were
those of WEA lecturer and populariser of Plato and Socrates.
The broad question behind this paper is: Did the collective classical hinterland behind some
members of the Labour Movement bear on its progressive, democratic, even radical edge at
mid-century? The narrower question that I pose and answer here is: How did Crossman’s
popular writings and radio broadcasts on Plato and Socrates, especially his Plato Today (1937),
play into any such radicalism?
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My answer consists of three elements: that this work is a critique of common and uncommon
factors in Plato’s Republic, fascism, communism and contemporary British society; that it seeks,
by its own admission, to re-establish democracy on a clearer conceptual and historical basis,
crucially against the looming spectre of fascism; and that it helps to clear the philosophical
ground for Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies (1943). Building on this answer
and on Melissa Lane’s Plato’s Progeny: How Plato and Socrates Still Captivate the Modern
Mind (2001), I further propose that Crossman’s dialogue with Plato is one beginning for a
Socratic future of socialism, potentially international in scope, in which power might be made to
speak truth to itself.
A KEY ISSUE: Can ‘Democratic’ Stagings of Modern Gerek Drama be Authentic?
Mary-Kay Gamel, University of California, San Diego
Several contributions to the Eseminar that preceded this conference (see here for Eseminar
papers) raised the question of authenticity in receptions of ancient drama. We need to raise
questions of the implicit theoretical models of reception that underlie our work, and seek to
broaden existing paradigms by considering/developing a plurality of approaches.’
Contemporary aesthetic theorists distinguish between ‘historical’ authenticity, which tries to
replicate the meaning of an earlier artefact in its original context, and ‘expressive’ authenticity,
which tries to bring out the emergent ideas in complex works of art. Instead of trying to recreate
the purported original meaning, later scholars and artists can look for meanings as yet
unforeseen—and the more various those scholars and artists are, the more varied the meanings
they may find.
Drama productions often involve participants with very different backgrounds, skills and ideas. A
collaboration in which all participants are encouraged to contribute can increase more discovery
of new meanings. Professional productions, often dominated by star directors and actors, are
often rigidly top-down, but academic and community productions can explore more democratic
rehearsal processes. And productions which reflect the personal commitment of all the artists
involved are ‘authentic’ in terms of Sartrian ‘good faith.’
Audiences are as important as artists in creating the meaning of performance. Ancient
audiences scrutinized dramatic performances for their ethical, social and political implications
and responded vigorously. Modern productions which may seem radically innovative, unfaithful,
even subversive, but which powerfully engage (intellectually and emotionally) a varied audience,
create an experience which resembles that of the ancient audience.
Finally, an authentic ‘democratic turn’ in reception studies of ancient drama will encourage
scholars to consider a particular production’s whole process of development, not the just the
final ‘product.’
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PANEL: DEMOTIC POWER TO THE PEOPLE: THE SPREAD OF DEMOTIKE IN MODERN GREEK
PRODUCTIONS OF ANCIENT GREEK DRAMA
The use of language in the reception of ancient Greek drama in Modern Greece from the
liberation of the nation to the first quarter of the 20th century
Hara Thliveri, Pedagogical Institute, Ministry of Education, Athens
Hara Thliveri will discuss the development of modern Greek productions of classical plays, the
ideological significance of the choice of language, and the introduction of demotike into revival
tragedy at the beginning of the twentieth century. These developments resulted in a more
democratic and ultimately a more performative approach to modern productions of classical
theatre. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, modern Greek performances of
revival tragedy were ‘rational’ productions, which were driven by a philological approach. These
performances were mere illustrations of the ancient texts which failed to appeal to the general
public.
The beginning of the twentieth century brought important changes and productions began to
take on a more performative character. Konstantinos Christomanos at the Nea Skene company
and Thomas Oikonomou at the Royal Theatre were among the first of a new modern Greek
generation of professional stage directors who experimented with stage translations of ancient
drama in more vernacular registers of the demotic language. The democratization process of
the language, which was embraced by prominent modern Greek authors such as Kostis
Palamas, fostered a genuine revival of ancient tragedy and the emergence of a living and
accessible stage spectacle. The Delphic Festivals of Angelos and Eva Sikelianos in 1927 and
1930 presented Aeschylean drama in demotic translations and cultivated all other performative
aspects of genuine outdoor productions for mass audiences (scenery, costumes, music,
choreography etc.).
The triumph of demotike: the triumph of Medea
Anastasia Bakogianni, The Open University
This paper discusses a case study in which demotike as the democratic idiom of the modern
Greek language prevailed: in the 1997 production of Euripides’ Medea staged by the proponent
of the theatrical establishment, the National Theatre of Greece. This groundbreaking production
of Euripides’ popular play was based on the fully embodied translation into demotike written by
George Himonas. The accessible language was one of the many bold components that
enhanced the stylized, but poignant performance style of the production. The pared down
choice of language was attuned to the stark production values of this Medea which, however,
also distanced the audience which relied on the familiarity of the language to balance the
surrealism of the other components of the performance.
The production was characterized by innovation: it was the director’s, Nikaiti Kondouri’s, first
time in charge of an ancient tragedy. It was also the first time that Kariofillia Karambeti, the star
of the production, took centre stage in an ancient tragedy. The contemporary modern Greek
audience knew her as the lead actress of a popular Greek television show in which she
infamously killed her lover. The show was a dramatization of the scandalous novel The Yellow
File (1956) by Karagatsis. The director’s choice of a popular actress to embody Euripides’
heroine marked a more popularizing tendency in modern Greek revivals of ancient drama. This
trend was also coupled with a willingness among actors and spectators to experiment with new
techniques and approaches; a truly democratic treatment of classical Greek tragedy on the
modern Greek stage.
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A CASE STUDY:
‘Aristophanes in Performance as an all-inclusive event’: audience participation and
celebration in the modern staging of Aristophanic comedy.
Angeliki Varakis, University of Kent, UK
Karolos Koun’s Aristophanic productions were rooted in Greece’s live rural celebrations and folk
traditions which were formed on the basis of audience participation. The director offered his
Greek audience an equivalent mode of performance which helped them experience
Aristophanes from a common perspective that was not imposed but natural to both the actor’s
and spectator’s way of life.
In addressing the issue of classical reception in modern performance, the aim of this paper will
be to explore the way in which Greek directors, such as Karolos Koun, have dealt with the
systematic opportunities the Aristophanic plays provide for audience participation and
improvisation. These occur through the comic characters’ frequent aside remarks, the parabasis
and recurrent celebratory rituals. Such theatrical occurrences affect the audience’s perception of
the comedy by making them an active ingredient of the performance.
The democratic principle of audience participation which is inherent in Aristophanic comedy
seems particularly relevant to the entire notion of ‘the democratic turn’ in classical receptions by
allowing both performers and audiences to take an active role in the performance experience of
re-inventing the classical play. Although some may argue that in Aristophanic comedy many
verbal remarks or ancient festive occasions seem far removed from the world of the spectator in
order to prompt an exciting audience response, the reality of the performance might suggest
otherwise. For example, the actual effect of an actor’s gaze on an audience member during his
aside remarks, or the live sound of music, song and dance inspired by familiar traditions may be
more than enough to eliminate the cultural distance between a notional past and an immediate
presence. In the realm of performance, there are many parameters that shape the meaning of
the play and the issue of updating topical references may in fact seem irrelevant when it comes
to conveying something of Aristophanes’ vitality. This resides mainly in the dynamic atmosphere
of the performance rather than the thematic content of the comedy
PANEL: CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE AND ANCIENT GREEK TEXTS
Aristophanes and the Skills of the Comic Actor, Graham Ley, Exeter University
Michael Ewans is preparing a new set of translations of Aristophanes to go with his collections
of translations of Aeschylus and Sophocles, to which I and Greg McCart also contributed. He
follows two principles in this work, aiming to reproduce almost all the original allusions and to
track the jokes as far as possible, and also to provide a script that works for actors because it
has been put through a workshop. We decided to look into a further question, which was how
far a professional comic actor might be able to handle the script as it stood, and activate it with
his established comic skills. To that end, we brought in a director with whom I work regularly on
research questions, Martin Harvey, and Mike Burns as the comic actor, for a week’s work on
sections of the Ewans’s translation of Acharnians, which was preceded by two days of
dramaturgical discussion between me and Martin Harvey. The workshop raised and partly
answered questions about comprehension, allusion, topicality, comic skills and the ‘democratic
turn’ in Aristophanes ancient and contemporary, and may be a slight step towards the greater
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emancipation of Aristophanes in the modern theatre. My presentation will range over these
issues with a relatively light tread, incorporating responses from those involved, and showing a
selection from the recordings made of several stages of the workshop.
The Silence of Eurydice: towards a new aesthetic for creating theatre in a conflict zone,
Dorinda Hulton, Exeter University
'The Silence of Eurydice' is a practice-as-research project based on the ‘minor’ character
appearing at the end of Sophocles’ Antigone who is unable to speak on hearing of the death of
her son. The project is planned to take place on either side of the military border in Cyprus in
May 2010 and aims to explore ways in which creative artists can contribute to a growth in
understanding between people of different faiths and cultures.
In the project, fragments of the Cambridge translation of the play will be used as an inspirational
springboard for an exploration of democratic processes relating to three principles that are
rarely brought together when creating theatre in conflict zones, namely: artistic representation of
shared content and concerns; creative artists from both sides of a conflict zone working together
in non hierarchical ways; and a multilingual approach that allows space for the voices of
ordinary people to be heard on a micro-political level.
In this presentation I will report on ways in which these democratic processes have been
explored on a small scale within the project, and influenced performance work. The silent figure
of Eurydice will be embodied through solo performance in outdoor sites on both sides of the
military border and be shared with local audiences. Also, processes concerning multilingual
form will be presented as indoor performance to invited audiences of artists, academics and
young adults. In these, the solo performance of Eurydice will be counter pointed with video
documentary of first hand testimony from relatives of the dead on both sides of the military
border. Each spoken, sung, and/or written fragment of language will interweave with each of the
others - Greek, Turkish and English - this contemporary counterpoint perhaps offering an
alternative to the inherently democratic devices of the debate and the simile within the original.
Re-animating Antiquity: Gardzienice Theatre's process into contemporary performance
Yana Sistovari (also known as Yana Zarifi), Artistic Director of Thiasos Theatre Company.
Thiasos
The Polish theatre group, Gardzienice Theatre is widely regarded as one of the world's leading
experimental theatre companies. Performance theorist, Richard Schechner, considers them as
constituting ‘the very heart and essence of Polish experimental and anthropological
performance…'
Led by Artistic Director, Wlodzimerz Staniewski for more than thirty years, from their base in a
small village in southeast Poland, the director and his ensemble have developed a new stylistics
of musical theatre which has been described as ‘ethno-oratorio'. It is a unique song theatre
inspired by the expressive traditions of indigenous culture and the musicality of the natural
environment. The work simultaneously engages with many of our current concerns – such as
ethnicity, identity and ecology whilst refuting that which Staniewski views as the dispassionate
qualities of postmodern art. The performance work evolves from a deep training process which
enables the actors to develop and refine their musical and physical abilities to a high degree of
articulacy. However, the shows also appear to be truly populist, recognised and appreciated by
isolated rural communities around the world, from the Indians of the Taos Pueblo to the Hutsuls
of the Carpathian Mountains in the Ukraine. At the same time, Gardzienice's work is appreciated
by urban audiences in international theatre festivals worldwide. The performances and training
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have also been filmed by leading Polish film makers and several have been shown on Polish
television.
Since 1999, Wlodzimierz Staniewski has turned to Ancient Greece as the primary source for
recent productions. In 2001, Metamorphoses was premiered in New York It referred to Apuleuis'
The Golden Ass as its subject matter while drawing on fragments of Ancient Greek music to
develop a musical frame which underpinned the montage of images based on vase paintings,
mainly from the 6th –4th centuries B.C.
In this presentation Yana Sistovari will introduce audio-visual extracts from Gardzienice’s Greek
performances to illustrate how Staniewski creates a dancing alphabet from ancient Greek vase
iconography and musical fragments.
A CASE STUDY: Terra Incognita: Classical Studies and People of African Descent
Michele Valerie Ronnick, Wayne State University
Until the early 1990’s classical scholars were oblivious to the Greek and Latin curricula taught to
students of African descent in Europe (as in the case of Juan Latino in sixteenth century Spain),
in various British colonies (as in the case of the 18th century Jamaican Francis Williams and the
Canadian H.A. A. Hartley, born in 19th century Trinidad) and in the United States to hundreds of
students in colleges and universities mainly black but also white. Today portions of the
pedagogical evidence are being pieced together by various scholars, but the concatenation of
social, political and intellectual factors that caused this ‘oversight’ still needs a full investigation.
And because this work demands facility with the complexities of several disciplines, each of
which are entwined with various racialized and politicized (mis)understandings about the history
of black people, the question of black classicism remains in many ways a terra incognita.
One terrible consequence of this has been a widespread unawareness of significant cultural
patterns revealed in the lives of these classically trained students. Thus the life and works of
William Sanders Scarborough who rose out of slavery in Georgia to become American’s first
professional classicist of African descent have been made available to us only in the last five
years. W.E.B. DuBois’s classical education is not widely known; nevertheless, he, 16 years
younger than Scarborough, later acknowledged that he would not have been admitted to
Harvard with this training. The writer Ralph Ellison was condemned as a man led astray by
Homer and Eurocentric values. But these men, seen by many for years as anomalies, were
working in fact within a larger tradition of classicism, specifically black classicism. They
profoundly shaped black intellectual endeavor in arts and letters, and laid the philological
foundation for work in modern languages and linguistics. Democracy depends on knowing the
achievements of all its peoples. Academic integrity demands it. Such is the argument of my
paper.
PANEL: AFRICAN AMERICANS AND THE CLASSICS
The Weapon of Oratory, Margaret Malamud, New Mexico State University, USA
Training in classical oratory and debate provided African Americans with a powerful weapon to
combat charges of racial inferiority and argue for their inclusion in the civic realm. In this paper, I
investigate the influence of classical oratory on antebellum African American abolitionists and
their uses of classical references in their writings and speeches. As I demonstrate, Alexander
Crummell, Frederick Douglass, Henry Highlands Garnet, James McCune Smith and others drew
on classical models to justify their full inclusion in the nation. Caleb Bingham’s Columbian
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Orator profoundly influenced all of them.
The Columbian Orator was one of the most popular schoolbooks of the early Republic and was
in regular use up until the Civil War. Bingham’s 1797 text is a primer on oratory and it contains
nearly a dozen speeches from classical sources or on classical topics. In his reader, Bingham
paraphrases Cicero’s De Oratore—and offers students pages on rules for speaking, including
gesture, pronunciation, harmonious cadence, and emphasis. Excerpts from Demosthenes,
Cicero, Quintilian, Caesar, Plato, and others illustrate rhetorical theory. Bingham’s rhetorical
sections are specific in their recommendations and they direct the reader to the appropriate
classical authors for further study. Crummell, Garnett, and Smith all used the Columbian Orator
and Douglass avidly studied the pages of the Columbian Orator while he was still a slave; its
contents gave him the same rhetorical weaponry as his white playmates and other readers like
the young Abraham Lincoln. Douglass later recounted that he cherished this book so much he
carried it with him as he escaped from slavery in 1838. As I show, Douglass and other
abolitionist orators mastered the skills discussed in the Columbian Orator and present in
classical oratory (the works of Demosthenes and Cicero were widely available in translation):
mimicry, political humor, and subversive theatrics. They used classical rhetoric to bolster
arguments for freedom and equality in the American republic and to assail the romantic
pretense of classical republicanism and virtue advanced by Southern slave owners. They
frequently punctuated their oratory with classical references and used the classics both to
critique white America and to argue for African American emancipation.
African-American Rhetoric, Christian Political Theology, and Classical Culture,
Steven Mailloux, Loyola Marymount University, USA
In ‘The Race-Problem in America,’ the Anglican minister Alexander Crummell told the tale of
how, as a boy of 13 in the 1830s, he heard the famous Southern orator and statesman John C.
Calhoun remark ‘that if he could find a Negro who knew the Greek syntax he would then believe
that the Negro was a human being and should be treated as a man.’ Later, the AfricanAmerican classicist William S. Scarborough was motivated by this racist comment in making his
vocational choice and authoring his textbook First Lessons in Greek. Scarborough was not
alone in embracing classical culture as a means for asserting intellectual equality and achieving
his political rights as an African American. Before and after the Civil War, Black intellectuals
and political leaders used a synthesis of Christian political theology and Greco-Roman culture to
perform their racial identities within a democratic public sphere whose configurations were
constantly shifting.
In this paper, I will examine how African-American intellectuals of the nineteenth-century
employed religious and classical rhetoric to negotiate their identities and the contradictory
responsibilities they felt to their race and to all humanity. In so doing, they entered directly into
the socio-political conflict between identitarian particularism and Universalist humanism within a
democratic polis set within a transatlantic world. I will focus on the writings and speeches of two
influential Black intellectuals: Alexander Crummell, Du Bois’s hero in Souls of Black Folk, an
Anglican missionary to Liberia, and later founder of the American Negro Academy in the United
States; and Edward Wilmot Blyden, a Presbyterian minister and Crummell’s classicist colleague
at Liberia College, subsequently a Liberian cabinet member and ambassador to England, as
well as author of influential books such as Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race.
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The Classical Curricula at Black Colleges and Universities: Subtext for Self- and GroupAffirmation
Kenneth W. Goings and Eugene O’Connor, Ohio State University, USA
New and exciting scholarship demonstrates the ways in which free African Americans, in the
period before emancipation (1619-1865) appropriated what was considered the ultimate in
intellectual achievement, the classics, to argue for the freedom of their brothers and sisters still
in slavery and for their own full citizenship. What our paper does is to extend this conversation
by looking at the ways in which the classics were used in black colleges and universities after
emancipation to continue the fight for full inclusion in the body politic.
We will discuss the courses and authors taught at historically black colleges. For African
American students, their teachers, their parents, and their community, classical education held
special significance as a tool of social and racial uplift in a segregated society. Knowledge of the
classics bolstered not only their self-esteem but also their argument that, as intellectual equals,
they should be full citizens of the republic. The classics were also a ‘positive’ non-slave link to
the African past— as opposed to a past that had been constructed by the larger society to
demean African Americans and make them feel second class. By establishing a link between
Africa and the classical world, African Americans could and did argue that if the classical past
was what distinguished white American and made them worthy of citizenship, the same could
be said for African Americans.
A broad look at the course catalogues we have collected, dating from the late 1860s to the
1940s, reveals the breadth and depth of the courses taught. Not surprisingly, given the call for
leaders who could speak in behalf of the race, the catalogues across schools heavily favoured
rhetoric, predominantly Cicero and Demosthenes, as ‘Republican’ models who spoke out
against tyranny. The classics were essential for the training of effective rhetoricians. It was the
case for white orators, too, but it had special urgency for educated African Americans who
would be delegated to speak out in behalf of the race. Indeed, the classical curriculum provided
a common locus for articulating a positive group identity and for deliberating about social
organization and political action.
PANEL: DEMOCRACY AND POPULAR MEDIA
Democracy and popular media: classical receptions in 19th and 20th centuries political
cartoons: statesmen, mythological figures and celebrated artworks
Alexandre G. Mitchell, Institute of Archaeology, Oxford, UK
There is much debate today on who reads classics. I approach the problem from a different
perspective, that of visual humour, which I studied in depth in the ancient Greek context (Greek
Vase Painting and the Origins of Visual Humour C.U.P. 2009). The previous study, of the social
and political functions of humour within a democratic context, and based on the most popular
and cheap art form in archaic and classical Greece, Greek pots, has given me the tools to
pursue a new project. The cheapness of the product, the huge market available and the need to
please customers to sell the artefacts, the wide-ranging possibilities of visual humour, and the
democratic context, all pointed me in the direction of freedom of expression and popular art
forms. This was for ancient Greece… what about 19th and 20th century democracies? In 1874,
R. Buss wrote: “Had caricature and photography existed in past centuries, how delighted should
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we be to behold an Alexander, a Nero, a Caesar, or any other be-praised blood-shedder of
public liberty, transfixed by the etching-needle of a Gillray or a Cruikshank! Without civil and
religious liberty, joined to an unshackled press, caricature cannot exist; thus it becomes, by its
free exercise, a sure exponent of the degree of freedom enjoyed in any country”. There are
some who assume that only the elites had/have access to classics, but what should we make of
the many hundreds of caricatures in prominent newspapers, propaganda leaflets, from the 19th
century to today, which use classical references, whether they are visual myths, events or
statesmen, and much more, to mock current affairs? Did everyone understand the references?
Who was/is mocked? The contemporary politician, or Herakles? More importantly, why would a
cartoonist need a reference to Herakles, Caesar or the statue of the Laocoon to mock a 19 th or
21st century politician? Does everyone understand these references today? Newspapers: the
material is cheap, paper, it has to “please” the public, at least in its design if not in the
information it contains; newspapers thrive in democracies. Are certain newspapers more “high
brow” than others? Do they change over time? Political cartoons, as individual and powerful
images, crystallise a number of different gazes all within a democratic context.
Truth, Justice, and the Spartan Way: Affectations of Democracy in Frank Miller’s 300
George A. Kovacs, Trent University, Canada
The comic book industry was begun in the 1930s and produced fantasy fiction in which
characters fought to enforce (American) democracy. Yet these depictions are problematic:
Superman and Captain America articulate their democracy by beating into submission
America’s foes, not by arguing for fair representation or carefully monitored elections. The
superhero, an elite enforcer rather than a petitioner for social change, has been depicted in
many recent graphic novels (Moore’s V for Vendetta, Watchmen; Miller’s Dark Knight Returns)
as antithetical to democracy: agents of chaos, anarchy, and even fascism.
Miller’s 300, published two years before 9/11, is replete with contradictions in its depiction of
democracy. It enhances – and further distorts – the “Spartan Mirage,” positioning Leonidas and
his Spartans as fearsome proto-democrats, despising the Persians for the employment of
slaves – denying by omission Sparta’s own employment of a large slave population. Miller
imbues his Spartans with a hyper-masculinity, fighting foes who are effeminate, foreign-looking,
and sexually deviant, further limiting the scope of inclusivity. Snyder’s 2007 film adaptation
widens this Orientalist distrust of the Other (though it mitigates some of the comic’s misogynistic
sentiment).
This paper explores how Miller’s deployment of a Classical model toward an explicitly
democratic agenda articulates many of the contradictions inherent in the current American
political climate of fear.
In search of ancient myths: documentaries and the quest for the Homeric World
Antony Makrinos, University College London, UK
The expansion of the TV audiences over the last few years has caused made-for-television
series and documentaries to set new aims in their digestion of Greek and Roman world.
Hollywood blockbusters introduced new audiences to Homer and aided documentaries to open
debates about its depiction and to create new markets interested in exploring historical truth
behind the stories. The Homeric matrix has been omnipresent over the years and directors and
audiences have repeatedly assigned new meanings to it depending on current political and
social dynamics. Scholarly interest in the cinematic portrayal of the Homeric epics has seen a
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recent resurgence and new unexplored viewpoints of the texts have come to surface. What is
the relationship between the cinematographic depiction of the Homeric epics and its
presentation by documentaries and how do the documentaries influence our reception of
Homer?
In this talk I will examine the study of the Homeric world by documentaries, the way(s) in which
they shape, transform or elaborate the views of modern (especially young) audiences and their
impact on education. The need for legitimisation of our culture by the esteemed ancient cultures
through a visual dialogue between modern and ancient have led to the production of counternarratives of the past. These alternative narratives encourage modern interpretations of the
ancient world by practitioners and new audiences and seek to be authorised by the classicists.
Have the documentaries been successful in focusing away form the association of the Homeric
epics with the élite groups? How do classicists receive this persistent search for the historical
truth through fiction, and the leisure and education of suspected and uneducated audiences?
Why does the Iliad attract more the interest of documentary makers than the Odyssey?
The talk will examine the role of documentary as a part of modern education and entertainment
(ways of visualising the ancient, use of technological effects, representation of War, etc.) and
the differentiation of the visual representation in comparison to the literary texts. The discussion
will explore how and why documentary making has changed popular conceptions of the
classical world and our reception of classical myth and history.
My methodology will be based on the examination of innovative techniques for the visual
digestion of the Homeric narrative by modern audiences (in situ visits, archival research,
archaeology, reconstructions and recreations actual or virtual, computer graphics, interactive
menus). Additionally, I will examine specific themes which interest the practitioners and which
associate with the literary texts or the historical sources: the visualisation of gods and heroes,
women in ancient societies, use of technological effects and archaeology, religion and its
impact. Overviews will be organised chronologically and thematically, based on a series of case
studies selected to illustrate larger themes in the modern appropriations of the distant past.
My objectives will be to investigate the notion of a “Democratic Turn” in Homeric receptions
stimulated by the practice and the research of documentary making and to evaluate the
attempts to visualise and explore the Homeric world. I will aim to show –in the course of
selected case studies- how the ancient world has played an essential role to the creation of
highly-developed sets of cultural appropriations by documentary and its audiences. This will
also help to assess the relationship between theory and practice and to explore the role of
scholarship in documentary making.
PANEL: CLASSICAL RECEPTION IN LATE 20TH/EARLY 21ST CENTURY WOMEN’S WRITING: A
DEMOCRATIC TURN?
Colonising the ‘provinces of masculine knowledge’: women’s writing and classical
reception today, Elena Theodorakopoulos (Birmingham, UK) and Fiona Cox (University
College Cork, Ireland)
This paper maps out the terms of our project: we introduce the unprecedented range and
quantity of classical reception undertaken by women writers in the past few decades, and
outline some of the reasons and motivations for it. We examine some prominent examples, and
question the connection between feminist critical theory and practitioners’ creative output. We
address the questions we put in our e-seminar opening statement: to what extent does the
increasing dominance of women’s creative re-writing of Classics constitute a ‘democratic turn’?
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Are some themes or genres of classical literature are excluded at the expense of others? Are
the preoccupations of women readers and writers as tyrannical in their way as those of earlier
exclusive groups? How problematic is it that women writers turning to Classics have also tended
to benefit from an elite education?
Ovidian Metamorphoses in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt, Fiona Cox
A. S. Byatt has attracted an unusual degree of censure from readers who find her work elitist
because it is so full of information and literary references. She is astonished by these
complaints, since she is endlessly fascinated by the ways in which her characters (especially
her female characters) are shaped by their educations and by their national cultural pasts. In
Byatt’s view the literary allusions which crowd her writing energise the new work, ensuring that it
is alive with multiple meanings. She has expressed deep pleasure at the idea that certain
readers have turned to Tennyson, Milton or Virgil through having first encountered them in her
fiction. On this reading, far from being elitist, her work democratises classical literature, bringing
it to those who no longer have direct access to it through their education. It is no accident that
so many of her characters are academics and writers – even, on occasion, classicists. This
paper will examine Byatt’s use of Ovidian myths to which she alludes as she examines the
dilemmas and outlooks of several of her female characters. In particular I shall focus on her
response to the myth of Proserpina, as it is played out in the Frederica Quartet (The Virgin in
the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman) and on her essay ‘Arachne’.
Three novels about Catullus and Lesbia,
Elena Theodorakopoulos
Counting the Stars (2008) by Helen Dunmore, The Floating Book (2003) by Michelle Lovric, and
The Key (1988) by Benita Kane Jaro are novels about Catullus which concentrate substantially
on his relationship with Lesbia. While The Key is in some aspects rather more scholarly than the
other two novels, all three are not aimed at specialists, and target a relatively mainstream
market of readers of historical fiction. All three seem also to accept the identification of Lesbia
with Clodia Metelli- and to some extent also to go along with some of the misogynistic
interpretations which cling to Clodia. All three authors also have translated some of Catullus’
poetry and integrated their own translations in the novels with varying degrees of success.
Because of this, the three works are not ‘just’ historical genre fiction, but must be read as more
serious responses to the poetry itself, rather than as mere perpetuations of the romantic
mythology of Catullus and Lesbia. I will also compare the novels with related, and roughly
contemporary, fictions by male authors (e.g. Clodia (1999) by Roberto de Maria or The Venus
Throw (1998) by Steven Saylor), and will scrutinize in particular the extent to which they all
exclude the bawdier, more aggressively Roman and perhaps rather alienating side of Catullus in
favour of the lyrical romantic poet more in keeping with much popular and scholarly reception.
PANEL: EDUCATION
Crossing Boundaries through Digital Humanities: HESTIA and US Schools,
Elton Barker (Open University) Chris Ann Matteo (Stone Bridge High School, Virginal)
Because a dedication to democratization is central to classical reception studies and to outreach
generally, we must also consider what is being done outside of the academy to foster
collaborations among researchers, teachers and the public. This presentation describes the ‘lab
school’ collaboration between the HESTIA digital mapping project and a US high school. Since
the mid-1990’s and the success of searchable classics databases such as Perseus (Tufts),
electronic texts and digital media are now credible and authoritative learning resources about
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the classical world. HESTIA (the Herodotus Encoded Space-Text-Imaging Archive) offers not
only digital mapping of Herodotus’ geography, but also the ability for students to interact with
this geography through Google Earth. Because of its capacity to access students who are
already very competent in using digital media, the HESTIA project enables students closer
access to primary-source documents (the geography, Herodotus’ Greek text in both Greek and
English) than their textbook-based study currently affords. At Stone Bridge High School
(Ashburn, VA), classical studies are taught both in the Latin classroom as well as social studies.
In the ninth-grade in the state of Virginia, ancient Greek history and geography is part of the
standards of learning for the state, and thus, indispensible in the curriculum. Students in
Matteo’s Latin classes have already been using HESTIA since its launch, and in early 2010 they
will be presenting this digital resource to all students in the ninth-grade as ‘student researchers’.
An online survey of what students have learned from HESTIA will deliver results to Barker and
his team. Using Promethean board technology, web-surveys and other digital communications,
we hope that this team-effort serves as a valuable test case for how we might foster more
collaboration between the academy and the public.
Classics in African Education
Barbara Goff, University of Reading, UK
Work on the twentieth century reception of classics seems almost inevitably to become
implicated in a ‘democratic turn’ simply because the century itself is characterised by an
enormous increase in the franchise. It is only in that much maligned century that women in
western countries obtain the vote, that the vote is extended to young people in many western
countries, and that, perhaps crucially for our understanding of the century as a whole, the
colonised countries of Africa and Asia attain independence from the European powers. While it
is well known that classical epic and drama were redeployed by creative writers in postindependence cultures, this paper hopes to draw attention to a lesser-known cultural and
educational shift.
One of the narratives of independence in the African continent concerns the place of classics in
the education of Africans. The missionaries who helped to spearhead colonialism in the
nineteenth century perceived the classical languages as a sine qua non for the ministry, and
selected African converts were thoroughly trained in Latin and Greek. Yet the acquisition of
classics by Africans becomes deeply controversial in later years, particularly in the early part of
the twentieth century, when there is a clear move to confine Africans to a more practical and
vocational education. This can be read in the Report of the Phelps-Stokes Education
Commission of 1922, where Latin is denigrated as a distraction from Africans’ ‘natural’ destiny.
By 1945, however, the pressure for independence, and a consequent turn to democratic values,
can be read in the rhetoric of a further educational commission. In the Report of the Elliot
Commission on Higher Education in West Africa, the classical languages and culture are
heralded as a shared heritage that can unite Europeans and Africans. They become testimony
to the common humanity which the Report is busy building in the face of colonialism’s end.
The Democratic Turn in (and through) pedagogy: a case study of the Cambridge Latin
Course
Jo Paul, University of Liverpool, UK
The pedagogical systems and material used in teaching Classics (broadly conceived) are
important vehicles for spreading familiarity with the ancient world. As receptions of the past
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themselves, they are the first point of access to antiquity for many people, and may set out
actively to encourage participation among a diverse range of audiences. Moreover, they can
determine the nature of those audiences’ ongoing engagements with the past, thereby
influencing subsequent ‘classical receptions’, and a more general understanding of the social
and political relevance of the ancient past. The importance of pedagogy in constructing notions
of a ‘Democratic Turn’ will here be examined through a case study of the Cambridge Latin
Course (CLC), focusing on two central issues. Firstly, how do the CLC’s origins – closely
connected to the spread of comprehensive education in the late 1960s, and other
‘democratising’ moves in education – help us to understand changing views of Classics as an
elitist subject? Secondly, how do its methods (innovative at the time in their use of cognitivism
and inductive learning theories) also contribute to the CLC’s role as a potential catalyst for a
‘Democratic Turn’? These, along with its exploitation of material culture, and now digital
technologies, have increasingly enabled students (in ever broader constituencies) to ‘inhabit’
and claim ownership of antiquity in new and interesting ways. Simultaneously, though, the
content of the CLC, with its narratives of slave-owners and dutiful women – and the ensuing
debates around them – perfectly demonstrate the pitfalls in trying to communicate
‘undemocratic’ histories to a consciously pluralistic audience. Careful consideration of how the
CLC was devised, developed, and used (worldwide, as well as in the UK) thereby allows us to
confront some of the most critical issues regarding who uses the ancient past, for what
purposes, and with what consequences.
Back to the demos. An ‘anti-classical’ approach to Classics?
Martina Treu, IULM, Milan
As a theatre practitioner and a teacher, I work between two areas, theatre an school, already
treated respectively by Joanna Paul and Shelley Hales (Session 2) and Dorinda Hulton
(Session 3). I propose, therefore, to gather together in one Panel –“Classics, theatre and
School” – those who share interest and experiences in those areas, in new methodologies of
pedagogy where classical plays are written and staged in schools.
We could compare problems, solutions, methods, case studies of adaptations and production, in
different countries, in order to understand how these experiences work. We could ask
ourselves, more specifically, what could possibly mean ‘democratic’ in such cases. Could we
somehow bring theatre ‘back to demos’ (i.e., to make it available to younger, wider, less
educated audiences)? Could a school become a community theatre and aim at a ‘democratic’
model? Could this ‘turn’ involve all members and what contribution can they give? And if the
‘demos’ of ancient Athens somehow reflected itself in tragedies and comedies, is such an
identification still possible today?
I can bring as case studies to discussion the Takkuligey Project (Senegal) and Teatro delle Albe
(Italy). Their unconventional and non-hierarchic ‘method’ includes the re-writing and staging of
classic plays. Their main pedagogical targets are ‘difficult’ subjects, mostly students, in poor and
marginal areas.
Could such experiences happen in other contexts and how could they affect the perception of
classics, but also, in turn, change the whole idea and definition of ‘classics’? If we work together
on these matters we could have a hint of what classical theatre could be tomorrow and if a
‘democratic turn’ is actually taking place, or is about to happen, inside and outside schools.
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A KEY ISSUE: Conflicts of democracy and citizenship: Between the Greek and the roman
Political Legacies
Aleka Lianeri, University of Thessaloniki, Greece
The past thirty years or so have witnessed a renewed interest in the ancient democratic
traditions, which are evoked both in the field of classical studies and the disciplines of cultural
and political theory. This paper explores how this democratic turn has been grounded in an
entanglement of the Greek and the Roman democratic heritages, which has produced an
internally conflictual genealogy of the democratic imperative. Heidegger identified this
entanglement as central to western democratic politics, when he wrote of the need to reflect on
the Roman transformation of Greece and the ways in which the legacy of the Greek polis has
come to be understood in Roman terms: “Since the time of the Imperium, the Greek word
‘political’ has meant something Roman. What is Greek about it is only its sound.” (Heidegger, M.
Parmenides (Indiana UP, 1992:45) However, this act of appropriation has been neither final nor
complete, but has manifested gaps and inconsistencies inscribing a conflict into the centre of
the western democratic genealogy. The paper will discuss this conflict as constitutive of the
relationship between the modern notions of ‘people’ and ‘citizenship’. Focusing on key moments
in the constitution of these concepts against the Greek and Roman legacies, from Machiavelli
through Rousseau to Grote, it will explore how the Greek democratic heritage allowed the
dissociation of the two categories and constituted an idea of the ‘demos’ that challenged the
forms of normative prescription of sharing implied by a Roman in origin idea of citizenship. From
this perspective it will put forth an idea of the demos that begins outside the realms of
citizenship on the basis of the exclusion of those who are deemed to be unworthy of the status
of the citizen.
APA PANEL: DEMOCRACY AS POPULAR AND POLITICAL
Venus orta mari and Other Fantastic Advice
Kate Bosher and Jordana Cox, Northwestern University, USA.
Chicago has been of interest to scholars of late 19th and early 20th-century theatre in part
because of Jane Addams’ Hull House theatre, and Maurice Browne’s Little Theatre, two
organizations that rejected the artistic and financial norms of the commercial theatre. In the
1890s, Hull House produced Electra and a play The Return of Odysseus in ancient Greek.
Shortly thereafter, with a mandate of a simplified, non-commercial theatre, Maurice Browne
produced Trojan Women, which he took on tour during the war years, funded in part by the antiwar women’s movement of Jane Addams. This history, which casts Greek plays in the part of
social conscience and rebel, has been discussed (MacDonald 1992, Hartigan, 1995, Wiley
1999, Christiansen 2006). However, what has rarely been noted is that the popular theatre
against which the small arts movement reacted also rooted itself in large part in antiquity.
If we include popular stagings of Classical myths and stories within the conceptual framework of
the democratic turn we are faced with a peculiar development. Addams and Browne pioneered
politically engaged productions of Greek tragedy and, to some extent, laid the groundwork for
the sort of productions my colleagues discuss in the other two papers of this panel. Yet, at the
same time, they rejected the enormously popular, class-crossing, and gender-complicating
genres of burlesque, roman toga drama and melodramatic adaptations of Greek tragedy that
had dazzled and entertained for half a century.
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From programs and scrapbooks in Chicago archives, I sketch the history of popular mainstream
plays based on antiquity and performed in Chicago between 1850 and 1930 and examine the
relationship of these plays to their better known Little Theatre and Hull House counter-parts.
Projecting Lysistrata: Classical Drama and Political Activism
Dorota Dutsch, University of California Santa Barbara
In January 2003, two New York actors, Kathryn Blume and Sharron Bower, decided to stage a
reading of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata to protest the US invasion of Iraq. Thanks to electronic
communication, the scope of the project expanded with astronomical speed. On 03.03.03 not
one but over a thousand readings were staged in fifty-nine countries and all fifty states, raising
$100,000 to assist war victims. The Lysistrata Project counts as a spectacular instance of
classical drama’s becoming a vehicle for contemporary political action.
My concern in the proposed paper is with the kind of reading that inspired and enabled the
project’s success. I ask to what extent the Lysistrata’s status as a cultural artifact produced in
classical Athens was important to the organizers, participants, and audiences of the multiple
readings.
To explore this question I draw on the coverage of the Lysistrata Project in international press,
M.P. Kelly’s documentary Operation Lysistrata (2006) and Kathryn Bulme’s play Accidental
Activist (2007). Moreover, Ms. Blume has kindly agreed to answer my questions about the
motivation behind her and her colleagues’ choice of the play, their perceptions of the
Lysistrata’s original context, and the role expert classicists played during their work on the
project and afterwards.
Ultimately my analysis of the Lysistrata Project offers an opportunity to consider the place of
learned interpretations of classical drama among other possible modes of reception.
Expansion of Tragedy as Critique
Nancy S. Rabinowitz, Hamilton College, USA
I would define the “democratic turn” as an opening up of classics to a wider audience and a
wider set of participants, including women, men and women of color, and men and women from
a broader class background. While conservative critics blamed the left for the death of classics,
the performance of Greek tragedy in the late twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries arguably
owes much to feminism and progressive politics in general (see Dionysus since 69). Indeed,
the democratic turn seems to have become encourage growth in performances of tragedy.
The paper I propose will intersect with the democratic turn in specific by showing how tragedy
has been used to undermine claims by the U.S. and UK that the war in Iraq was politically
democratic, that is, bringing democracy to the people of Iraq. I will take as my example the ways
in which anti-war activists have used tragedy as a vehicle to criticize the American empire and
its expansionism in the 21st century. Specifically, I will focus on the interweaving of gender
analysis and anti-war sentiments in recent performances of Euripides’ Trojan Women and
Hekabe. In the build-up to the current war in Iraq, women’s subordinated roles in orthodox
Islamic Afghanistan helped to authorize the attack on Afghanistan (Rabinowitz 2005). The
Greek plays on the Trojan War theme, through the treatment of Helen, facilitate an analysis of
the present situation. These particular plays (as well as the Medea) offer ample opportunity to
comment on aggression and revenge and their consequences; they also offer a vehicle for
analyzing women’s role in wartime. Though neither Trojan Women nor Hekabe are among the
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canonized Euripidean plays, productions have proliferated because they offered an opportunity
to comment on the anti-democratic and imperialist War in Iraq.
PANEL: PUBLIC EXPERIENCE AND POPULAR CLASSICS
Penguin(’s) Classics,
Robert Crowe, University of Bristol, UK
In this paper I will first set out the types of evidence for the popular reception of classical
publications by Penguin Books, before moving on to assess the role classics—with heavy
emphasis on the translations of ancient Greek and Latin texts in the Penguin Classics series
edited by E. V. Rieu (1945-64) and Betty Radice (1964-1985)—played within any broader
mission espoused (or not) by the publishing house. Examining some of the critical issues
involved in popular translations of classical texts promises to be a fruitful and illuminating
stimulus for discussion within Classical Reception Studies about the interface of mass and elite
culture. A key question would be, what is the relation between Penguin’s classics list and the
vague ideal to produce ‘the good, well-written and educational book’ (Allen Lane)? Also, to what
extent does the fact that Penguin Books is (unlike the BBC, for example), first and last, a
business affect the way the books were created for, and read by, the public?
Civilization versus Savagery at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition
Robert Davis, City University of New York, USA
The subject of this paper is the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, which was attended by almost
50% of the United States population. The Fair presented cultures from around the world on a
massive site, the core pavilions of which were largely modelled after Greco-Roman design, and
there were also many versions of classical art, especially sculpture. It will be argued that, by
aligning American (and Western) progress with classical civilization, the planners of the Fair
attempted to legitimize American culture by placing it in opposition to the recreations of socalled primitive cultures, such as the on-site Inuit villages. A wealth of print and photographic
evidence exists for how the public negotiated and interpreted a multitude of historical and
contemporary cultures within an educational and entertainment context. By focusing on the
design of the Fair and the (non-dramatic) performances within its grounds, this paper will look at
how fairgoers (who, during the fair’s six-month run, totalled twenty-seven million) responded to
the living villages both in terms of and against the White City. While the superiority of classicism
dominated the discourse of the Fair, most fairgoers flocked to the Midway for its often dubious
pleasures. In reading audience interaction with ancient referents among plenitudes of
contemporary subjects, I hope to show the complex ways that Americans experienced
contemporary classical culture. This paper will argue that classicists and historians studying
nineteenth-century World’s Fairs—and American culture at large—must read the concept of
civilization in light of the loaded cultural politics of receiving antiquity.
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Pompeii in the Crystal Palace: Comparing Victorian and Modern Virtual Immersive
Environments
Shelley Hales, University of Bristol, UK
This paper explores a JISC funded project to build a virtual 3D model in Second Life, a popular
multi-user online virtual world, of the Pompeian Court of the Crystal Palace. The Court was a
life-size model of a Pompeian house, housing a collection of copies of paintings from recent
excavations. It was part of a sequence of reconstructions of past civilisations arranged in the
Crystal Palace after it was moved from Hyde Park to Sydenham by private speculators and
opened in 1854 as an encyclopaedic museum of the world. Like the Chicago World’s Fair, the
Palace was an extraordinary showcase of nineteenth century knowledge and taste in which
huge audiences met the classical world within an eclectic environment of ancient and modern. It
was an ambitious social and educational experiment, which was completely destroyed by fire in
1936. The paper will examine how the social and educational experiences offered by the virtual
model compare with the successes and failures of the original Court, which was designed to
educate audiences by creating immersive environments deemed more appropriate for
instruction than crumbling ruins. Both environments take classics beyond the academy to
interact with new audiences in eclectic contexts. The project explores the experience of
inhabiting these modelled spaces examining the reception of the modelled environment in both
the Victorian and twenty first century context and presenting some initial observations of
responses to the project model by user groups and the Second Life community.
Broadcasting the ‘Nation’s Cultural Wealth’: Ancient Greece on BBC Radio in the Two
Post-World War Periods
Amanda Wrigley, Northwestern University, USA
This paper offers a consideration of the ways in which the numerous BBC Radio programmes
which drew substantially on ancient Greek literature, myth and history were presented as an
important part of the Corporation’s wider cultural mission in the two post-war eras. The
reception of the ‘nation’s cultural wealth’ amongst listeners will also be brought into discussion
in order to evaluate the extent to which and the ways in which the intentions behind
broadcasting policy and programme-making were in tune with the audience. Under the
leadership of John Reith, from 1922 BBC Radio’s cultural project was driven by an almost
‘missionary’ zeal which echoes late-19c socialist movements which were concerned with the
social and educational conditions of the masses: Reith believed that broadcasting had the
potential to unite society and at the same time elevate educational, artistic and even moral
standards. By contrast, during the second half of the 1940s through to the end of the 1950s—a
period known as the ‘golden age’ of radio—the self-avowed ‘high cultural’ Third Programme
aimed its erudite programming at the culturally educated listener rather than the ‘aspirants’ who
actually composed a great part of its audience. The BBC’s radio programmes which drew on
Greek antiquity—and others which drew on many other aspects of the nation’s ‘cultural wealth’,
such as poetry readings and dramatic productions of Shakespeare—are documented to have
been heard by a wide and decidedly non-specialist public. The rich evidence that exists for the
ways in which the public engaged with these programmes encourages reflection on the impact
and importance of the BBC’s cultural and educational project in these two periods.
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