Theorizing Ideologies of the Classical: Turning Corners on the Textual, the Masculine, the Imperial, and the Western

From the eighth to the sixth centuries, the Mediterranean was transformed by what has come to be known as the “orientalizing” phenomenon. Approaches to the impact of Near Eastern civilizations in the Mediterranean Iron Age are particular to the countries involved, and in each case different emphases are placed on the agency of the local cultures and on that of the colonizing or external cultures.

How might we make sense of classical reception in South Africa today? Nearly a full generation has emerged since Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990, and there are plenty of criteria by which to evaluate change and continuity. In one sense, the place of classics came rudely to the fore when the Rhodes Must Fall movement started focusing attention on colonial and apartheid symbols, many of them classicizing.

While creative artists in the modern world have continually sought to reanimate and inhabit the figures of classical mythology, scholars of gender—both classicists and others—have tended to warn us against their seductive power. Characters such as Odysseus and Helen have been seen as embodying roles to which we are tempted to aspire, only to find ourselves trapped in relations of domination and submission. The challenge for the next generation of scholars is to balance this valid warning with an appreciation of the myths’ potential for empowerment in the molding of gendered selves.

The modern printed page conveys the words of antiquity with apparent stability and authority to a global readership. Yet today’s standardized, mass-circulated classical text is itself the product of a series of contested historical developments and multiple displacements over time and space. This paper will re-open that history by examining the materiality and spatiality of the classical text in Pietro Bembo’s De Aetna, printed in 1496 by Aldus Manutius in collaboration with the author (Davies; Lowry; Pincus; Dionisotti; Dionisotti and Orlandi).