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II. Reception within Antiquity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2016

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Extract

This chapter is in three sections. The first sets out the proposition that movements in ancient oral, written and material culture themselves involved reception and refiguration of material from inside and outside the Hellenic and Roman world. The second section looks at some aspects of these receptions and at the scholarly and critical tools which were developed in association with them and which have often set the parameters for subsequent investigation and evaluation. The third section identifies some important examples of how different aspects of reception within antiquity have contributed to the patterns of reception with which scholars and practitioners have engaged in subsequent periods. Overall, the model used is one which will be taken forward in later chapters of the book. It consists of an axis between reception as activity, as ‘doing’, ‘making’, ‘responding’ and ‘creating’ and reception as selecting, analysing and evaluating. The points of intersection are many but the more divergent areas of the model are also significant and may also contribute to dialogue between ancient and modern. Many critical terms and categories set out in the ancient world have fed into modern systems and in turn many aspects of modern practice, of reception ‘activity’, have prompted further analysis of cultural practices in the ancient world.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Surveys in the Classics , Volume 33: Reception Studies , 2003 , pp. 12 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2003

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References

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18 See below ch. 4, p. 63 with n. 28.

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23 Polybius does not refer to the episode and the story may have been invented to excuse the killing of prisoners from Carthage in Rome after Regulus’ death (Diodorus Siculus 24.12.).

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27 For discussion of the politics of imitation and its relationship to paideia, with extensive references and bibliography, see Whitmarsh (2001), especially Part One, and Goldhill (2001), esp. 8–17.

28 For discussion of this aspect with examples see Murray, P., introduction to P. Murray and T.S. Dorsch (edd.), Classical Literary Criticism (London, 2000)Google Scholar. Translated extracts from Plato, Aristotle, Horace and Longinus are included in Murray, together with specialist bibliography and chronological tables of authors and events. There is a slightly wider selection, with explanatory notes, also including Horace, ’s A Letter to Augustus, Tacitus, ’ Dialogue on Orators, Dio of Prusa, ’s Philoctetes in the Tragedians and Plutarch, ’s On the Study of Poetry in Russell, D.A. and Winterbottom, M. (edd.), Classical Literary Criticism (Oxford, 1998)Google Scholar.

29 For discussion, see Murray (2000), xxiii-ix.

30 See Murray (2000), xxxii for discussion.

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32 FHG 246.1 Andron = Athen.Deipn. 184b. For further discussion and bibliography, see Whitmarsh (2001), 7–9.

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34 For further discussion see Swain, S., Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism and Power in the Greek World AD50-250 (Oxford, 1996) and Whitmarsh (2001), 12–20.Google Scholar

35 Goldhill (2001), 8.