Gender and Reception

Jean Racine opens both the first and second prefaces to his play Andromaque (1668) by quoting lines 3.301-332 of the Aeneid, where Aeneas happens upon Andromache at Buthrotum. Racine then writes: “here, in just a few verses, is the whole subject of this tragedy. Here is the location, the action which occurs therein, the four principal characters, and even their personalities….” (Racine, 36).

This paper addresses the history of poetic engagements with Sappho in the 20^th century, and the mediating relationship that these engagements have assumed towards the disciplinary practice of classics. Specifically, I argue that the aesthetic valorization of Sappho in her capacity as fragmentary author occurred through the canonizaton of modernist aesthetics in the mid-20^th century.

Dimitrios Moschos, a Greek intellectual from Sparta who lived in Renaissance Italy, wrote a comedy in prose entitled Neaira, published it in Italy around 1475/8 (Bouboulides 1966 and 1977), and dedicated it to the Duke of Mantova, Gonzaga, to whose circle he probably belonged (Geanakoplos 1962: 77 and 124). According to Andreas Moustoxidis (1845: 402-03), the first editor, as far as we know, of Neiara in 1845, the play contributed greatly to the revival of dramatic productions (mainly comedies) in the regions of Mantua and Florence in the 15^th century.

This paper will discuss representations of Roman private religious practice and domestic ritual in contemporary screen narratives, in order to address a correlation between characterizations of Roman religion in popular culture and in classical scholarship. Mid-twentieth-century ‘sword-and-sandal’ films projected the visually magnificent and imposing Roman state religion as emblematic of Rome’s systematic persecution of Jewish and Christian protagonists.