Classical Reception Studies are somewhat of a zeitgeist in contemporary media, where discussions on afterlives of Greek and Roman authors and artists have raised issues around cultural elitism and one-to-one equations between ‘Classical inheritance’ and ‘European civilisation’. Explosive reactions to S. Bond's recent article on modern reception and perception of polychrome in ancient Greek and Roman statuary perhaps, more than anything else, highlight these perceived equations between cultural elitism and the Classical world (S. Bond, ‘Whitewashing Ancient Statues: Whiteness, Racism and Color in the Ancient World’, Forbes [April 2017]). Studies in Classical Reception often ask the reader to move away from a fixed, neat and tidy trajectory that traces the lineage of Greece and Rome through Europe and the Unites States towards a diverse and complex, ever-shifting, interplay of cultures (see e.g. J. Porter, A Companion to Classical Receptions [2007], pp. 474–7). Nevertheless, addressing the complex interaction between the Classical world and diverse cultures is not an easy task that, to paraphrase the editors of this volume, is filled with pretensions, impositions and frictions (p. 7).
Stemming from a 2014 conference of the same title, this volume brings together artists, poets and historians with the goal of confronting the relationship between ancient Greek and Roman culture and contemporary New Zealand. Divided into five thematic sections (‘Writers and Artists’, ‘Visual Arts’, ‘Myths’, ‘Poets’ and ‘History & Society’), the volume comprises fourteen essays. At first glance, it can appear as if there is no overarching thesis woven through the essays, that they stand alone as loosely-bound, well-conceived representations of New Zealand's engagement with the ancient world. However, as the reader dips again and again into the essays, E. Greenwood's theory of the omni-local classic begins to emerge as a lens through which the reader can interpret the volume (E. Greenwood, Dædalus 145 [2016], 43–7). Greenwood's omni-local approach to Classical Reception privileges a ‘horizontal, two-way relationship in place of a vertical, hierarchical tradition’ (p. 43) by emphasising the local adaptation/reframing of the source text in its original context as well as the subsequent adaptations that reflect the local, contemporary community who reframe the text. The editors have intertwined essays that balance scholarly experience in the Classical world with interpretative communities who have engaged with and responded to the source material. By considering the essays via an omni-local approach, the reader sees a rich and contemplative rethinking of New Zealand self and place embedded within, but not because of, the Classical world.
Perris opens the volume with an insightful and comprehensive survey of the history of Classical Reception in New Zealand. In his ‘Introduction: Classics in New Zealand, from Athens to Aotearoa’ Perris carries the reader through a chronological and thematic review of (primarily) Pākehā and Māori literature that ‘explores cultural identity in Aotearoa New Zealand by way of the ancient Mediterranean’ (p. 12). Building on his meticulous and engaging account, Perris demonstrates the myriad of manners in which Aotearoa New Zealand artists, writers and poets have reframed and retold Classical narratives inside and outside of the elite, white, male paradigm (pp. 34–5).
Grouped together in the first section, ‘Writers and Artists’, are two writers, a poet and an artist. The editors have intelligently fronted the (re)production of meaning through writers and artists, giving voice to interpretative actions of these authors as both readers and audience. In ‘What if Cyclops was Alive and Well and Living in a Cave in Invercargill?’ W. Ihimaera draws the reader inside his creative process by unveiling his eidolon and interlacing this with a wider Māori/Classical construct. His writing is at times breathless and bold, slower-paced and insightful, but at all moments underpinned by a self-deprecating humour. Ihimaera carries the reader, on the wings of memory and humour, through his rationale for rethinking Māori literature through Classical analogues in the 1980s, because Māori literature was ‘just as epic’, and that ‘by providing parallels I could get people to see it that way. Oh, the thoughts that happen in that room behind my eyes’ (pp. 60–1). As Ihimaera layers his frame narrative, inside a second story, set inside a third narrative transporting the reader down into his stories, he also pulls the reader up through time towards his gradual displacement of the Classical analogue. He muses that Māori literature no longer needs any equivalents, instead Māori deities, myths and histories exist in their own right (p. 63). We the reader reach, with Ihimaera, what I. Willis has so eloquently noted: ‘a sharpening of our own interpretations in response to those of others’ (I. Willis, Reception [2018], p. 170).
K. Healey's ‘Girls Going Underground: Navigating Mythologies in Aotearoa's Literary Landscape’ is a ‘literary autoethnography: a deep-mining expedition through palimpsestic strata of influence; a solipsistic katabasis of the imagination’ (p. 76). The essay is self-conscious, a personal mythology that transmutes the author into a character of shared Māori/Classical origin: ‘Ka mua, ka muri, I thought. Walking backwards, into the future’ (p. 82). Towards the end of her essay, Healey grapples with some of the ‘frictions’ the editors noted at the beginning of the preface, frankly acknowledging cultural appropriation (a Pāhekā writing Māori myth). The essay is an interesting interplay of Classical Reception, the underlying creative interpretation of Classical mythology onto Māori mythology and a critical evaluation of the action of reception.
A. Jackson, in ‘“I, Clodia”: I had a Dream I was a Ghost’, presents an engaging exposition of the process of creating her 2014 sequence of poems, ‘I, Clodia’. Within the essay she revisits the poems, the narrative context as imagined responses to Catullus’ own poems, and her introspective look at her own motivations for turning to Classical source material over indigenous Māori literature. Closing this section, M. Maguire presents an exploration of her visual art, in ‘A Fabricated History of Greco-New Zealand Interaction’. Throughout her essay, she guides the reader through an interpretation of her own work, problematising the concept of history and how history is recorded. She creates analogues between European explorers and settlers and ancient Greek figures, linking the classical tradition to cultural ‘baggage’ the settlers surely brought with them. Her stylised adaptations of Māori warriors into pseudo-Greek soldiers, alongside her naturalistic renditions via lithographs are explained in her fascinating historical deep-dive.
Two essays comprise the second section on ‘Visual Arts’. First, G. Hawes presents an etic perspective of six of Marian Maguire's etchings, in ‘Discussions with Mountains in Marian Maguire's A Taranaki Dialogue’. One of the highlights of this volume was the ability to read Maguire's rationale from her own perspective and then to contemplate Hawes's scholarly, Socratic, approach. Hawes challenges the reader to view Maguire's etchings in layers: the physical landscape, the mythical landscape and the interaction between word and image, while considering the rich, fictional Graeco-New Zealand history Maguire has conceived and created. T. Stevenson tackles the 1990s television show, Xena: Warrior Princess, which was filmed in New Zealand, in his ‘Julius Caesar in Xena: Warrior Princess’. Stevenson recasts the binary relationship between Julius Caesar and the title character, Xena, as one not so much influenced by the ancient world, but as an appropriation of classical figures to exemplify the modern norm-challenging persona that Xena represented.
The third section, ‘Myths’, has the reader re-encounter Greek myths through the lens of New Zealand writers and poets. In one of the standout essays of the volume, Perris deftly surveys the reception of Orpheus in New Zealand literature, while knitting together the myths of Orpheus and Maui. Perris's nuanced analysis does not neatly fit the two figures side-by-side, in perfect parallel, but rather he unravels how authors such as Witi Ihimaera and James K. Baxter negotiated Māori/Pāheka and heterosexual/homosexual identifiers through their juxtaposition. G. Miles, in ‘“The Darkly Recurrent and Improbable Dream”: James K. Baxter and the Venus/Anchises Story’, and S. Matthews, in ‘Dionysus, Christ and the Publican: Ambiguous Gods in The Day That Flanagan Died’, both tackle the use of Greek myth within the works of James K. Baxter. Both authors demonstrate the way in which Baxter embedded and reinterpreted Greek myth to further his underlying narrative, often creating new and conflicting explanations of classical myth rendering it thoroughly familiar to an Aotearoa New Zealand audience (p. 216).
Entitled ‘Poets’, the fourth section includes two essays that delve into the reception of Latin poetry through personae of New Zealand poets. In the perceptive ‘C.K. Stead Writes Catullus: Persona, Intention, Intratext and Allusion’ M. Lewis negotiates the changing persona of Stead and his poetic responses to Catullus. Her analysis gets to the heart of the fraught imposition for reader and poet: ‘how might a poet's awareness of possible misreadings guide their poetic practice?’ (p. 248). The concept of poetic mediation is continued in J. Davidson's ‘Horace, Catullus, Virgil, Lucretius and Mason’. Davidson argues that R.A.K. Mason's poetry was an ongoing and adaptive interaction with Latin literature. Remaining with poetry, but analysing the only non-New Zealand poet, P. Whiteford discusses Anna Seward, in ‘Anna Seward's Elegy on Captain Cook’. Whiteford has identified Seward's Elegy as the first literary work in English to explicitly name New Zealand, and ‘Seward thus has the distinction of being the first person to link Athens to Aotearoa, from the somewhat unusual position of never having seen either’ (p. 297).
In the final section M. Trundle succinctly summarises how the Classical world ‘played an important role in framing the military context of New Zealanders at war’ (p. 313). Trundle highlights how key military events such as Gallipoli were associated with the Trojan War in provincial New Zealand newspapers to provide a sense of the greater glory of war amidst the loss of life and limb. Closing the volume, A. Holmes-Henderson provides a snapshot of the ‘current state of Classics education in New Zealand’ (p. 326). Her analysis provides the closing bookend for Ihimaera's opening companion. Ihimaera notes in the opening lines of his essay: ‘One of my major regrets about the time I was growing up in the 1950's is that I never had the opportunity to take Latin, Greek, and Classics’ (p. 51). Perhaps most sobering, then, is that, as Holmes-Henderson has noted, the study of Classical Studies is in steady decline in New Zealand.
The success of this volume lies in the thoughtful manner in which the editors have linked the essays together creating a dialogue between scholars of Classical Reception and writers, poets and artists who continue to adapt and reimagine the Classical world in light of their unique geographical and cultural situation. Despite the niche subject, the volume is just the beginning of a conversation that can continue to critique Classical Reception from an omni-local perspective. As Ihimaera writes in Thrill of Falling: ‘Mate, you don't know the half of it’ (p. 9).
