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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2025
On 30 January 1943, Adolf Hitler's close associate Hermann Goering made a radio broadcast to the beleaguered Sixth Army at Stalingrad on the eastern front. He compared the German army to the Spartan soldiers at Thermopylae in 480 bce when they stood, fought, and died to prevent the advance of the Persians (‘the barbarians’) into Greece. Goering's broadcast was not well received. The dispirited and starving listeners described it as ‘our own Funeral Speech’ and some officers joked ironically that ‘the suicide of the Jews’, besieged by the Roman army on the top of Masada in 73 or 74 ce, was a more apt comparison. This episode raises a host of questions about the reception of classical texts and ideas in later cultures. In this instance, not only was the classical allusion used as a model to sanction expectations of behaviour, but further allusions were used as a counter-text to challenge the rhetoric of the high command. It could be assumed that those involved recognized the allusions and that the classical material provided a site for claims and counter-claims.
1 The broadcast and reactions to it are described in Beevor 1999: 380. Beevor comments drily, ‘They did not realise how accurate they were. Hitler was indeed counting on a mass suicide, above all of senior officers.’
2 Morgan 2000.
3 See, for example, Wygant 1999.
4 Among outstanding works of this kind are Highet 1949; Bolgar 1954; Finley 1981; Jenkyns 1992. It is interesting to compare their scope and methods with subsequent studies such as the edited collections Wiseman 2002 (especially Schofield 2002 and Taplin 2002); Hardwick and Harrison 2013; and De Pourcq et al. 2020.
5 For discussion of European contexts, see Silk et al. 2014.
6 Particularly important in this field are Jenkyns 1980; F. Turner 1981; Clarke 1989; Stray 1998.
7 For discussion of appropriation of Greek civic values by extremists in the USA, see duBois 2001. For discussion of the institution of slavery in Greece and its effect on scholarship, see most recently Cartledge 2002. The website Pharos (https://pharos.vassarspaces.net) documents examples of the ongoing use of Greek and Roman symbols and figures to justify toxic masculinity, misogyny, racism, and violence.
8 See, for example, Martindale 1993; De Pourcq et al. 2020; Hardwick et al. 2024a and b.
9 For discussion of this aspect, see Wiles 1995, 2000.
10 See the discussion and references in Hardwick 1992.
11 ‘Text’ is used in its broadest sense throughout this discussion, to include oral sources, written documents, and works of material culture such as buildings or sculpture. Each type of text of course makes particular demands in terms of description and analysis of its form and content.
12 See especially Michelakis 2020: 1–28.
13 Jauss 1982.
14 This was based on the work of the philosopher of science Karl Popper and the sociologist Karl Mannheim, and had been elaborated by Gombrich 1960. For discussion, see Holub 1984.
15 Iser 1978. On drama and the audience, see Bennett 1990. On the audience as potential ‘translator’, see Hardwick 2001b.
16 Gadamer 1975.
17 For a helpful summary, see Budelmann and Haubold 2008.
18 See especially Rogers and Stevens 2015: 1–24.
19 Hardwick 2024.
20 See for example Wrigley 2015; Hobden and Wrigley 2018.
21 See, most recently, S. Harrison and Pelling 2021. See further the Oxford Classical Reception Commentaries digital and print project, with its first publications in Hardwick et al. 2024a and b.
22 See Bromberg 2021.
23 See further Zuckerberg 2019. For a measured analysis of classical receptions in various contexts of cultural and political trauma, see the essays in Richardson 2019. Hardwick 2021 addresses some of the issues involved in working critically on the past without either sanitizing or repressing key issues.
24 For a considered and penetrating analysis, see the Postclassicisms Collective 2020.
25 For Arabic receptions, see Pormann 2006, 2009, 2010, 2015. For South America, see Silva et al. 2022; Fradinger 2023. For Russia, see Torlone 2014.
26 See also Johnson 2019 for discussion of classical reception relationships between first nation peoples and settlers.
27 Hinds 1998 considers both dimensions.
28 For further discussion of levels of awareness and the implications, see Hardwick 2018; Foster 2020; and the introductions to Hardwick et al. 2024a and b.
29 Butler 2016: 17, 21–48.