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I. From the Classical Tradition to Reception Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2016

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On 30th January 1943, Adolf Hitler’s close associate 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.

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Research Article
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New Surveys in the Classics , Volume 33: Reception Studies , 2003 , pp. 1 - 11
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2003

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References

1 The broadcast and reactions to it are described by Beevor, Antony, Stalingrad (London, 1998), 380 Google Scholar. Beevor comments drily, ‘They did not realise how accurate they were. Hitler was indeed counting on a mass suicide, above all of senior officers.’

2 Published text, Morgan, E., Phaedra (Manchester, 2000)Google Scholar.

3 See for example Wygant, Amy, Towards a Cultural Philology: Phèdre and the Construction of Racine (Oxford, 1999)Google Scholar.

4 Among outstanding works of this kind are Highet, G., The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (Oxford, 1949)Google Scholar; Bolgar, R.R., The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries (Cambridge, 1954)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Finley, M.I. (ed.), The Legacy of Greece (Oxford 1981)Google Scholar; Jenkyns, R., The Legacy of Rome: a New Appraisal (Oxford, 1992)Google Scholar. It is interesting to compare their scope and methods with a recent study such as Wiseman, T.P. (ed.), Classics in Progress: Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome (Oxford, 2002)Google Scholar, which contains chapters on ‘Contemporary Poetry and Classics’ (Oliver Taplin) and ‘Socrates on trial in the USA’ (Malcolm Schofield).

5 Particularly important in recent scholarship in this field are Jenkyns, R., The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford, 1980)Google Scholar; Turner, F.M., The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT, 1981)Google Scholar; Clarke, G.W. (ed.), Rediscovering Hellenism: the Hellenic Inheritance and the English Imagination (Cambridge, 1989)Google Scholar.

6 For discussion of appropriation of Greek civic values by extremists in the USA see du Bois, Page, Trojan Horses: Saving the Classics from Conservatives (New York and London, 2001)Google Scholar. For discussion of the institution of slavery in Greece and its effect on scholarship see most recently Cartledge, Paul, ‘Greek civilisation and slavery’ in Wiseman, T.P. (ed.), Classics in Progress: Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome (Oxford, 2002), 247–62 Google Scholar.

7 For discussion of this aspect see Wiles, D., The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre (Oxford, 1995), ch. 2Google Scholar.

8 See the discussion and references in Hardwick, L., ‘Convergence and divergence in reading Homer’ in Emlyn-Jones, C., Hardwick, L. and Purkis, J. (edd.), Homer: Readings and Images (London, 1992), 227–48 Google Scholar.

9 ‘Text’ is used in its broadest sense throughout this discussion to include oral sources, written documents and works of material culture such as buildings or sculpture. Each type of text of course makes particular demands in terms of description and analysis of its form and content.

10 Jauss, H.R., Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, tr. Bahti, T. (Minneapolis, 1982)Google Scholar.

11 This was based on the work of Karl Popper, the philosopher of science and Karl Mannheim, the sociologist and had been elaborated by Gombrich, Ernst in Art and Illusion (Princeton, 1960)Google Scholar. For discussion see Holub, Robert C., Reception Theory: a Critical Introduction (London, 1984)Google Scholar.

12 Iser, W., The Act of Reading: a Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore and London, 1978)Google Scholar. On drama and the audience see Bennett, S., Theatre Audiences: a Theory of Production and Reception (London and New York, 1990)Google Scholar. On the Audience as potential ‘translator’ see Hardwick, L., ‘Who owns the plays? Issues in the Translation and Performance of Greek Drama on the Modern Stage’, Eirene 37 (2001), Special Edition Theatralia, 23–39 Google Scholar.

13 Gadamer, H-G., Truth and Method, first published 1960; the translators Barden, G. and Cumming, J. (New York, 1975)Google Scholar used the second edition (1965).