‘Despite the recent growth of interest in the classical tradition’, writes Parker, ‘… it remains hard to persuade northern-hemisphere … classicists that Southern Africa has anything significant to offer’ (p. xxi). This volume is intended as a response to this perception, while suggesting that Africanists too might well find something of value in the study of the intersection between Greece and Rome and South African histories. In pursuit of these aims, the editor has assembled a team of eighteen contributors from several disciplinary backgrounds, who between them cover an impressive range of material and types of reception; if the chapters display some unevenness in quality and in closeness of relation to the book's main theme, together they make an impact.
Parker's introduction (Chapter 1) offers a panoramic sweep across the country's varied engagements with classical antiquity from earliest times. Politics broadly understood, as well as the more specific politics of the Struggle, are necessarily implicated, but, like the collection as a whole, the chapter does not share the intensely political focus of M. Lambert's polemical The Classics and South African Identities (2011; reviewed in CR 63 [2013], 612–14). Many of the topics later put under the spotlight are trailed here, with interesting additions by the editor himself, on, for example, the study and use of Latin by ANC prisoners on Robben Island and elsewhere (pp. 24–7). At the same time, a clear trajectory to the chapter seems wanting, and, despite its considerable length, surprisingly little argument is provided to persuade the reader of the importance of the issues under discussion.
Several chapters are devoted to material culture, including the most substantial piece in the volume, E. Rankin and R.M. Schneider's fine, scholarly analysis of classical traditions and ideals in the Voortrekker Monument (Chapter 5). This is a challenging task in the case of a building described by the authors themselves as ‘almost anti-classical’ (p. 167). But Rankin and Schneider expose an intriguing story of suppression of classical influence in the Afrikaner nationalist discourse surrounding the design and building of the monument, and argue for the presence of classical traditions in a variety of features, above all the great frieze. Their discussion deserves the detailed kind of critique it cannot receive here; if I remain unpersuaded that the classical associations of the building are quite as pronounced as the authors claim, it is their considerable achievement to have afforded us an excellent lens through which to see it differently. Indeed, there are ways in which their argument could be bolstered: for example, by stressing more emphatically how the frieze mythologises the foundation of Afrikaner history, and even showing how written descriptions of it (including their own) connect it to ancient ekphrases, in particular the shield of Aeneas.
The avowedly anti-classical conception of the Monument by the architect, Gerard Moerdyk, was in part a reaction to the practices of British imperialism. In Chapter 2, F. Freschi traces the persistence of classicism in the (public and private) architecture of Johannesburg across the past century. The essay contains much excellent commentary, linking the classical habit in this urban melting-pot to a complex web of cultural associations and social aspirations, and bringing in a comparative international perspective – though it cannot resist seeking to assert an intellectual-elitist aesthetic, in what is (despite Freschi's best attempts at self-discipline) a fundamentally sniffy judgement of taste about extreme instances of the use of classicism in contemporary domestic architecture.
Two chapters discuss collections of artefacts. S. Masters (Chapter 9) surveys the entire range of classical antiquities collections in South African museums, before turning to the histories of two of them, which are helpfully related to changing political and cultural conditions. The overall picture is rather bleak, the collecting of classical antiquities in South Africa judged to be the ‘practice of a bygone era’ (p. 315). In a similar key, A. Tietze (Chapter 10: a standout) tells the captivating story of the Beit bequest, a collection of casts of ancient statuary purchased under the terms of the will of mining magnate Sir Alfred Beit and brought to Cape Town in 1908. Out of sync with local taste from the start, the collection never achieved prominence, and already by the late 1920s several pieces had gone missing untraceably. A few scattered remnants survive, but the story seems emblematic of the historically uncomfortable relationship between South Africa and the classical world.
The Beit bequest, as Tietze compellingly argues, was ‘the brainchild of a group of Imperialists’ (p. 335), in particular Rudyard Kipling; in the background lurks the figure of Cecil Rhodes, who features more conspicuously elsewhere. J. Hilton's express purpose in Chapter 3 is to argue that Rhodes's imperialist ideas were significantly moulded by his interest in Classics and that, correspondingly, ‘the Classically inspired commemorations of his life … shaped the very terrain and cultural outlook of South Africa’ (p. 88). The chapter, however, havers over Rhodes's relationship with Classics and is endlessly speculative, often unclear and marred by factual errors (e.g. Evelyn Baring, not ‘Edward’ [p. 89]; elegiac couplets, not iambic pentameters [p. 101]). D. Wardle (Chapter 11) examines the collection of translations of ancient texts commissioned by Rhodes for his personal library in Cape Town. This usefully informs us about the project and the collection's contents, but analysis is largely restricted to a brief study of how Rhodes's translators handled sexually explicit passages – an odd choice of focus, given Wardle's questioning of the view that Rhodes's insistence on unabridged translations was driven by a desire to read such material. Less concerned with Rhodes, but similarly interested in South Africa and the British Empire, is P. Merrington's essay on ‘the classical (and generic “Mediterranean”) world as ethos in South Africa’ (p. 116) in the early twentieth century (Chapter 4). In fact, the emphasis is much more on the ‘Mediterranean’ world than the classical, but there is much of interest here concerning ‘performance of identity’ and issues of inclusion and exclusion.
A different take on Classics and empire is afforded by J. Allen's study of the ‘competing discourse’ on imperialism which he finds in the thought of classicists J.H. Hofmeyr and T.J. Haarhoff and philosopher M. Versfeld, all Afrikaners (Chapter 7). This is the most politically engaged chapter in the book, which makes suggestive connections with contemporary issues, but the attempt to combine Versfeld's Augustinian rejection of imperialism with the efforts of Hofmeyr and Haarhoff to conceptualise a more accommodating and inclusive form of real-world empire carries a cost in terms of overall coherence. Classical scholars are also the subject of contributions by J. Atkinson and J.-M. Claassen. Atkinson's biohistory of the Irishman Benjamin Farrington (Chapter 13) illuminatingly links his interest in Greek science with his left-wing politics; much of the chapter, however, concerns Farrington's life after the early-career years in Cape Town and has in general little to say on the interface between Farrington as classicist and South Africa. Claassen's essay (Chapter 12) is devoted to D.D.T. Jabavu, ‘the first Black African teacher of Classics at a South African institution of higher learning’ (p. 353). This is a story well worth telling, but stories also need critical distance. While conceding Jabavu's ‘small vanities’ (p. 373), Claassen delivers an encomium: an ‘international academic’ (p. 365), ‘with a Cicero-like impartiality’ (p. 366), Jabavu ‘towers in the history of South African political life as the voice of reason’, a ‘man for all seasons’ (p. 375). With his comparatively privileged background and education, international travel experience and gradualist politics, other critics might incline to see him rather (for all his attested gifts as a teacher) as a bit of a patsy. A similarly rosy filter colours Chapter 8, where D.H. van Zyl surveys legal thought from antiquity through Roman-Dutch law to the new Constitution of 1994. ‘Graeco-Roman values’ are held to remain ‘prevalent in the new constitutional dispensation’ (p. 276) – indeed, to be ‘eternal’ (p. 280). One might reasonably ask: whose values are these, exactly? If elite values, that is very interesting in context. Van Zyl connects them particularly with Cicero (p. 277) – in response to which one might cite the consul's treatment of the Catilinarian conspirators.
Three chapters consider various kinds of literary reception. P.R. Bosman (Chapter 6) evaluates the classical references in the monumental Afrikaanse Kinderensiklopedie (1943–53), with fascinating results. While a patently nationalist enterprise, with a strong, idealising focus on ‘origins’ (though Bosman does not mention democracy) and an implicit cultural/racial agenda, ‘the AKE emerges as a manifestation of liberal nationalism’ (p. 229), with a surprising humanistic-secular tendency. K.M. Coleman (Chapter 15) discusses classical ‘resonances’ in the poetry of Douglas Livingstone, stressing how Livingstone's use of classical allusion consistently poses questions of relevance in the southern African context, itself so central to his work. Criticised by some for being a ‘non-political’ poet (though an exponent of an ecopoetics that now seems highly political), Livingstone invites comparison with the novelist Mary Renault, whose political commitments (or lack thereof) are examined by N. Endres in Chapter 14. Endres attempts to distinguish between Renault's real-world political positions, which he represents as shifting, detached and increasingly conservative, and those implied by her ancient-world fiction: for Renault, finally, ‘democracy remains fictional, not factual’ (p. 409). But implicit criticism of apartheid in the fiction cannot be disregarded as a real-world political statement; while (on the other hand) the political values that, on Endres's own account, are most evident in the fiction are more of the enlightened-ruler type than democratic, thus meshing quite closely with Renault's private views.
The final section presents two chapters on post-apartheid engagements with Greek tragedy. In Chapter 16 the theatre director R. Sargeant discusses his 2002 Kirstenbosch production of Euripides’ Bacchae. This practitioner's perspective enriches the collection, though the chapter contains little on the immediate political/cultural context and includes some unfortunate non-specialist's errors on ancient tragic conventions and performance. E. Steinmeyer (Chapter 17) explores Yaël Farber's adaptation of ‘the Electra myth’ in her play Molora, informed both by the hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and by aspects of Xhosa culture. This piece raises many interesting questions; in general, Steinmeyer could probe further, for example into the complex effects of casting a white actor as Clytemnestra and black actors as Electra and Orestes. In a short epilogue (Chapter 18), the editor suggestively proposes the idea of a collage as a metaphor for the varied heritage of South Africa, within which the classical world has its own particular place.
Editing appears to have been light-touch, and a closer eye might have eliminated a not negligible number of substantive (as well as typographical) errors. One wonders, too, if consideration was given to the metacommunication implicit in the book as artefact, an expensive product, with generous margins, 150 illustrations and 12 colour plates, most duplicating images also present in black and white: an item, then, unlikely to fetch up in many southern African libraries. Will it, however, change those northern-hemisphere perceptions of the relevance of South Africa to the study of classical reception? Probably not – but if so, that will not be the fault of the book but of tenacious cultural assumptions. Indeed, if it must be considered in several respects a rather mixed bag, the volume should also be regarded as setting an agenda for future work in a field where there are assuredly riches to be mined. For that, Parker and his contributors deserve much congratulation.
