New Trends in Early American Classical Reception

Historians of the early modern European experience of the Americas have frequently noted the newcomers’ perception that the way of life of many American Natives resembled classical historians’ accounts of the cultural practices and even the appearance of the Europeans’ own ancestors before the Roman conquest (Piggott, Rome, Rubiés, Schnapp, Vaughan).

The generally accepted account of classical education in North America goes like this: in the seventeenth century, the first English colonists brought with them to new shores a deep regard for the classical past. Latin and Greek learning dominated an apparently little changed secondary school and collegiate curriculum throughout the colonial period and would inspire the so-called “founding fathers” in their quest to establish a new republic.

The two earliest indigenous North American writers from whom extensive bodies of writing in English survive -- Samson Occom (Mohegan, 1723-1792) and William Apess (Pequot, 1798-1839) -- both received an Anglo-American education, converted to Christianity in their youth, and became ordained clergymen. At the same time, they consistently write from an indigenous perspective, representing themselves as belonging to an ancient people who belong to North American soil, who have no collective memory of having been elsewhere, and who have suffered injustices in a colonial situation.

At the intersection of the Classics and studies in race and ethnicity stands much recent research on the reception of the classical tradition among Americans of African descent. Largely centered around the invocation of Greek and Roman characters in the twentieth- and twenty first-century works of African American poets, novelists, playwrights, and directors, this growing subdiscipline of classical reception has been termed ‘Black classicism’ (Ronnick 2010, 2018).