“And Yet You…Call Us a Horde of Barbarians!”: Race Rhetoric and Greco-Roman Antiquity during Reconstruction
By Benjamin Howland (Southeastern Louisiana University)
In his classic autobiography, Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington remembers how during Reconstruction (c. 1865-1877), the turbulent period following the American Civil War, “two ideas were constantly agitating the minds of the colored people. . . the craze for Greek and Latin learning” and “a desire to hold office” (Washington). This desire of newly emancipated African Americans to learn the languages that had long been considered markers of intellectual and moral capacity in the American imagination is well documented (Malamud).
The Confederacy, Cato the Younger, and Lost Causes
By Thomas E. Strunk (Xavier University)
In the American South’s political imagination during and after the American Civil War, Cato the Younger came to represent the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy. Perhaps the most prominent display of the South’s appropriation of Cato as defender of the Lost Cause is the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, which commemorates the Confederacy and Cato by quoting Lucan’s lines on the Roman civil war (49-45 BCE): victrix causa deis placuit sed victa Catoni (BC 1.128, “the victorious cause pleased the gods, but the lost cause pleased Cato”). Cato was indeed seen
The “traps” of Classics: the use of (Western) Classics in Chinese state propaganda
By Xinyi Huang (University of South Carolina)
This paper investigates the perception of (Western) Classics in Chinese society through the discourse phenomena such as “Thucydides’s trap” and “Tacitus trap”. The popularity of these terms is marked by appearance in speeches of President Xi since 2014 on multiple occasions, and in state-run newspapers such as People’s Daily and China Daily.
Smelling Like the Mother of Monsters: Perfume, Wearable Texts, and the Odiferous Reception of the Classics
By Britta Ager (Arizona State University)
Reception studies have traditionally focused on aural and visual media, but our noses offer us another route to the past. In this paper, I use sensory and reception studies to discuss the ephemeral but evocative reception of classical antiquity in modern perfume.
Classics and the US Craft Beer Industry
By Kyle A Jazwa (Maastricht University)
This paper explores the reception of Classics by the US Craft Beer industry. It is grounded in a survey of all beer sold between 2011-2021 by the 7800 US breweries currently in operation. With more than 3000 beer names and can art designs with Classical themes (hereafter: Classically-themed, or “CT” beers), Classics represents one of the more common thematic categories of beer branding.
“An Army of Lovers Cannot Lose”: Greek Antiquity and Militant Eroticism During the AIDS Crisis
By Emilio Capettini (University of California, Santa Barbara)
In recent years, many scholars in the fields of Classical Reception Studies and Queer Studies have explored in detail the fascinating role that “imaginary ‘returns’ to ancient Greece by gay men and lesbians” (Bravmann 1997, 48) played in the articulation of queer identities during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Less attention has been paid, however, to the ways in which Greek antiquity was evoked and transformed by queer writers, artists, and activists in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s as a result of the sudden onset of HIV/AIDS.