This chapter provides an accessible overview of the wide, diverse and ever-expanding field of classical reception studies. It begins with an overview of the word ‘reception’ and its origins in philosophical hermeneutics, and surveys a series of critiques that have been made of the word’s usefulness. Then the chapter makes three claims. First, allusions to antiquity have frequently occurred within a broader matrix of challenge and contestation, and so the critical analysis of classical reception should pay attention to voices that challenge the values accorded to classical literature, as well as those who embrace them. Second, a focus on the history of education can help us see classical allusion as a social challenge rather than simply a submission to prevailing literary or cultural norms. Third, the study of reception is at its most vital as a mode of communication outside classics, whether to the public, to students or to scholars in other fields. Ultimately, reception studies make up a vital part of the future of classical scholarship, and yet questions remain about whether the word ‘reception’ best communicates the subject’s intellectual range and ambition.

In the Conclusion to this book, we move from looking back to assembling a future. This chapter shows that the metaphorical uses of disability that have been examined throughout the book remain with us in the present. And it attempts to set out some approaches towards ending this practice of making meaning out of bodies. This will require, the conclusion argues, more than a commitment to neoliberal diversity initiatives and to inclusion (though inclusion remains nonetheless urgent) – it will require us to decolonise the way that we look, and to disassemble the classical tradition in favour of models that insist on the receiver’s accountability. Maria Oshodi’s 1992 play Hound is an important text in this chapter, which looks beyond the line, or inheritance model of classical reception to the example of Stacey Park Milbern’s ‘crip ancestorship’ model. Ultimately, the conclusion is invested in the core questions of this book: what kind of an ancient world would we need to imagine, who would we need to take as our ancestors, and how might we organise the models that figure our relationship with it and them, in order for a more equal future to become our reality?

According to Augustine, the limits of human autopsy restricted certain modes of knowing which relied on detailed observations. This claim unites Augustine’s criticism of the power of daemons and of astrology to predict the future. The minute calculations that astrology requires are beyond human sense perception (Conf. 7.6.9–10; Doctr. chr. 2.23.34; Civ. 5.1–6), so are the tricks used by daemons which Augustine equates to abilities specific to animals, such as the olfactory skill of dogs (Div. 3.7; cf. Civ. 9.15). This chapter examines the influence of a variety of texts on Augustine’s thought, including Ambrose’s Hexaemeron, Cicero’s De divinatione, and Apuleius’ De deo Socratis. I argue that Augustine consistently focuses his rhetoric against pagan divination on the limits of human sense perception through a unique combination of criticisms, inspired by both the Christian and the classical canons.

Scholars haveestablished that Rome is at once a place and an idea. This double formula, however, which limits Rome to a specific distant place (distant, that is, from the perspective of Britain) and an idea (that is, an immaterial concept or notion of that distant place), needs to be supplemented by an acknowledgement that the Roman Empire had left in its wake material remains and cultural practices that ensured that Rome could always be close-to-hand, familiar, and domestic—even a thousand or more miles from the Eternal City. Ruins, roads, the Latin language and the thickets of its grammar, cultural and spiritual institutions, liturgical texts and devotional regimens: these phenomena ensured that Rome could be, even as far away as Medieval or Renaissance Britain, experienced as near rather than far, and as a network of material remains and cultural practices rather than as an abstract idea. The book gathers these disparate phenomena under the rubric of the ‘fact’ of Rome (with an eye to the word’s derivation from the Latin factum) in an effort to show that lives lived in Medieval and Renaissance Britain were continually immersed in versions of Rome that oscillated between conspicuousness and invisibility.

Dante did not read Homer but thanks to the Latin tradition valued him highly: for Dante, Homer was such a paragon of poetic achievement that, in the Divine Comedy, he stands out even amongst Limbo’s “virtuous pagans” (including Dante’s own poetic master, Virgil). That complex reception is crystallized in Dante’s depiction of Ulysses (Odysseus), a sinner who is yet a “grand shade” described in language otherwise applied only to the spur of Dante’s spiritual journey, Beatrice.

Chaucer’s literary imagination is fuelled by a highly mediated and contextualised access to his classical sources, almost always supported by, filtered through, or read against the vernacular works of European contemporaries. He is a cultural synapse between Latin literature and the vernaculars of medieval Europe. Chaucer’s classical knowledge was a bricolage made up of direct knowledge of some Latin works (especially those of Ovid and Virgil); some knowledge of Latin works supported by translations or commentaries in the European vernaculars in which he was comfortable, especially French and Italian; and some knowledge of vernacular reworkings of earlier Latin materials which he was able to finesse and nuance by referring back to the Latin originals. Throughout the House of Fame, a key text for his literary self-awareness, Chaucer imaginatively explores his own understanding of, and relationship to, antecedent literature, and particularly to the literature of Latin antiquity as it had survived into his lifetime.

Thomas Hoccleve referred to Chaucer as the ‘firste fyndere of our faire langage’. The word fyndere is carefully chosen, as a modified translation of the first ‘canon’ of classical and medieval rhetoric, the ancestor of present-day English invention. Any assessment of Chaucer’s ‘poetic art’ requires us not just to identify the linguistic choices available to him, it also requires us to ask how those choices relate to his broader poetics. Chaucer’s use of ‘pronouns of power’, for example, do not only characterise particular choices from the linguistic resources of London Middle English, they are also a matter of style, a notion for which classical and medieval literary theoreticians had their own terminology, distinguishing high, middle and low styles, widely recognised as having distinct functions relating to social status and roles. It is conceivably as a metrist, however, that Chaucer’s skill as a ‘finder’ is perhaps most subtly demonstrated, as examples from his works show.