V Ancient Epigram in Reception

Extract

‘Reception’, the study of how the present recognizes and constructs its past, has developed from sober origins (the literary hermeneutics of Gadamer and Jauss) into a hot topic in contemporary classical studies. This rapidly changing ? eld resists stable definition of methodology or subject matter, and elicits firebrand rhetoric. Some practitioners are explicitly confrontational, exposing the historically recent ‘uses and abuses of antiquity’ perpetrated in the service of reactionary ideologies, and critiquing the disciplinary sleights of hand by which classics itself has come into being. Others use reception terminology to repackage Nachleben, the post-classical afterlives of ancient texts, or a broader ‘classical tradition’: the conventional study (blurring at times into optimistic hagiography) of the enduring influence of antiquity in literature and the arts. Recent trends are thoughtfully surveyed in Lorna Hardwick's New Survey, Reception Studies (Hardwick 2003).