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Jacopo Sannazaro (1459-1530), one of the foremost Neapolitan humanist poets, is recognized as an innovator in pastoral poetry for his

integration of the Italian seascape into his Piscatory Eclogues . Sannazaro himself calls attention to his novel use of water in his fourth

Eclogue , where he announces that he "was the first to bring down [the Muse of the seashore] to the salty waves, daring to risk their

dangers in an untested bark" (salsas deduxi primus ad undas / ausus inexperta tentare pericula cymba , IV.19-20). Sannazaro's interest in

In 1498 Johannes Baptista Mantuanus (1447-1516) published a revised version of his

Adulescentia, a collection of ten eclogues in Latin hexameters. The Carmelite friar engaged

deliberately with his Mantuan poetic predecessor through repeated references to noster Tityrus

(2.8, 3.172-174, 5.86-89)—a poetic figure who, in singing about wars, agriculture, and pastures,

assumes the identity of Vergil himself. Pastures populated by herdsmen provide a fittingly

Vergilian setting for Mantuanus’s eclogues, but the two poets from Mantua differ markedly in

This paper will argue that Calpurnius Siculus suggests a metapoetic reading of pipes in Virgil’s Georgics

as instruments of pastoral song. Calpurnius’ second eclogue uses the image of irrigating a garden through

canales (pipes) to signify song in the pastoral landscape (lines 34-35). The gardener Astacus invokes

Hesiod’s poetic initiation in the Theogony as he counters the shepherd Idas’ claim to have received a pipe

from the pastoral god Silvanus: he has been instructed by the Nymphs to take the water of their springs

In 1428 the humanist poet Maffeo Vegio, then a young law student at Pavia, wrote a thirteenth book to Vergil’s Aeneid – a continuation of the existing text designed to tidy up and resolve the loose ends of Vergil’s notoriously inconclusive epic. Indeed, Vegio’s Aeneid supplement was not the first of its kind: eight years earlier, Pier Candido Decembrio undertook to write a supplement to the Aeneid, though his truncated effort never achieved the international celebrity of Vegio’s version.

The writings of Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges (Buenos Aires, 1899 - Geneva, 1986) have not been considered as a ground for broader theoretical thinking about Classical Reception. With the exception of a study in Spanish in Borges’ translations of Homer and Virgil (García Jurado and Salazar Morales), and despite the interest in modern theory in Borges (e.g. Wood), the question of Borges’ classical receptions in theory remains unexplored. This is possibly because Borges’ engagement with classical antiquity is seldom fully sustained in his oeuvre.

This paper will address the themes of the panel by looking at recent scholarship on the philosophy of tragedy as a phenomenon of classical reception (e.g. Billings & Leonard). It will maintain that within this tradition the idea of Greek tragedy as reconstructed in part from Shakespeare’s plays continues to play a role in the testing of hypotheses about the relative merits of the three main ancient tragedians. It will do this, in particular, via a reading of A.C.

Why should we go beyond the case study in reception studies when the case study has been so fruitful? This paper finds its starting point in the evident success of case studies – the detailed analysis of a delimited example, be it from literature, art, theatre: reception study has become a boom subject.

The term “reception” has been repeatedly criticized for assuming a too-passive relationship to the texts and artifacts transmitted from classical antiquity. The term “response” allocates more agency to the reader, but one might worry that it allocates too much. Yet response opens, too, onto the idea of responsibility, and with it the notion of reception as a particular kind of embedded act, one in which historical actors but also present-day scholars, are implicated in a relationship to the past and the present that entails forms of responsibility.

Several of Plato’s texts reflect on hospitality, and at least three of his dialogues (Sophist, Statesman, Laws) feature a xenos. But how does the trial and defence of Socrates raise the question of hospitality? In order to sketch out an answer, I would like to consider two influential thinkers who have written about hospitality in relation to the Apology. One of these is Gandhi, who responds to Socrates while he is trying to work out the rights of foreigners in South Africa; the other is Derrida, who responds to Socrates in his seminars on hospitality.