Chapter 5 investigates the political uses of antiquity during wartime. It argues that the War of the Morea was a turning point in the reception of classical tradition that enacted the imperial topos of translatio imperii et studii. The mastery of Greek territories was also a mastery of archaeological sites and artifacts that renewed the culture of antiquity in Venice. The chapter shows that patrician collecting and the public display of antiquities as war trophies were inseparable from an aggressive military antiquarianism that supported the Republic’s new imperial regime with intellectual and cultural power from ancient Greece. Specifically, the occupation of Athens, with its famous history and symbolic potency, inspired strong associations between Venetian maritime supremacy and the fifth-century Athenian empire. But it also launched a new phase in the European rediscovery of Greek art and architecture through one of the darkest episodes of Venetian history: the bombardment and despoliation of the Parthenon.

This introductory chapter is a headland to the larger field of the history of English georgic writing. It is set aside for a general survey of English georgic viewed through the contexts of agrarian history in the British Isles and of non-literary agricultural writing published over the last five centuries. The aim is to draw out some historical patterns and to fill in some of the literary gaps between chapters. It begins with three contemporary snapshots of British writers demonstrating some of the formal resources the georgic tradition can afford today. Six further sections survey about a century of georgic writing each.

Chapter 2 turns its attention to the cultural foundations on which medieval ideas of kingship built. It falls into two parts. The first summarises key episodes from the Old Testament; outlines concepts of just and legitimate power as defined by Cicero in his De Officiis and in Seneca’s De Clementia, which were among the mostly widely read classical texts in the central Middle Ages; and draws attention to important patristic and early medieval writers like Gregory the Great, St Augustine and Pseudo-Cyprianus. A recurring theme in all these is the relationship between the divine and worldly power, in each case reimagined so as to fit the specific circumstances and traditions of an author’s community. Kingship meant something different to semi-nomadic desert tribes in Syria, educated Roman elites and theologians coming to terms with the collapse of the Roman Empire. The second part highlights key themes in the medieval reception of these foundational texts, and in a range of more abstract engagements with worldly power. Especially important prove to be questions of justice, humility, the role of virtue, the subservience of the ruler to the divine and the need for oversight and admonition. These themes were pervasive across Latin Europe.

This chapter is an overview of the ways in which Seamus Heaney engages with Greek and Latin mythologies and literatures in his work, from Death of a Naturalist (1966) to Aeneid VI (2016), and from allusions to more sustained forms of intertexuality, including versions. First discussing classical presences in his early poetry, the chapter shows how Heaney became increasingly interested in Greek and Latin literatures after the late 1980s, at a time of personal and political crises in Northern Ireland. It explains that, in those years, classical texts helped him address family deaths as well as contemporary violence in the North. Finally, it argues that in his rewritings of Sophocles, and in his classical poetry, mostly inspired by Virgil, Heaney ultimately revisits Ireland as a classical and secular space, reflecting social and cultural changes on the island, in the context of the Northern Irish peace process, as well as of globalisation.

This chapter focuses on the reception of ancient Greek tragedy by African writers. It starts with a definition of the term post-colonial and related aspects such as the use of language in post-colonial writing. It attempts to trace the path this reception followed from Europe to post-colonial Africa, then to Carribean and Afro-American cultures as part of the first diaspora, and then back to Europe as part of the second diaspora. Selected examples will be analysed in order to illustrate how African writers have used the ancient Greek plays in order to 'write back' to the (former) colonial centre as part of post-colonial discourse.

In 2015, Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre staged a highly controversial adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone. The critical reception could not have been more polarised and was seemingly entirely split down gendered lines. This chapter, written by the author of (and an actor in) that adaptation, provides both a personal account and academic theorisation of the production. Analysing the context of the Malthouse Antigone, the chapter explores issues of cultural appropriation, national identity, gender performativity, and creative pragmatism that underpinned the creation of the show and contributed to the controversy surrounding it. The chapter also proposes a pragmatic twist to the tendency of classical reception studies to attribute intentionality to production decisions. Whereas analysis of the finished production can give a false sense of a secure directorial intention, analysis of the process demonstrates that the journey from page to stage is constantly at the mercy of contingencies, collaborations, and compromises.

This chapter explores the ways in which stage adaptation, as a form by definition open, volatile, and thus susceptible to both the marvels and the injuries of interpretation, is forever attached to the unresolved debate pertaining to directors’ so-called ‘respect’ and ‘loyalty’ towards the original text. Whether adaptation is seen as an invitation to deepen and expand the source material or (at the opposite extreme) as a gratuitous statement of ultimately uninspired defiance, one needs to address and perhaps attempt to settle the issue of directorial freedom and/or mediation in a process that is inevitably indebted to an inceptive core. Focusing on auteur directors’ adaptations of Greek tragedy, this chapter interrogates such controversial notions as authority and deference to the received primary agent of creativity, namely, the writer of the original text – a text which qua material for adaptation bears the brunt of change, be that appropriation, growth, abuse, or subversion. The problem of directorial freedom is especially pronounced in the case of ‘canonical’ texts, which are customarily regarded as agents of authority and may generate a range of audience expectations and directorial responses, from absolute reverence to the text’s accepted meaning to a radical reinterpretation of the source text.

The introduction explores the genesis of Dionysus and the Greeks in Nietzsche’s thought, from their initial appearance at the publication of The Birth of Tragedy in 1872 until his breakdown in Turin at the dawn of 1889. It argues that one of the central elements of their appeal to later authors is that Nietzsche used the Greeks to develop an innovative way of speaking about modernity. It was this explosive mixture of the archaic and the present that encouraged authors to consider the way that the example of classical antiquity could help them think through the rapidly changing conditions of their contemporary era. By examining different approaches to the temporality of antiquity and to ancient works of art, the chapter argues that Kracauer and Bloch’s idea of the ‘contemporaneity of the uncontemporaneous’ captures the way that classical antiquity exists in the present, as one obtrusion among many within a confusing fabric of competing times and experiences. This is also linked to the aesthetic and literary movement of modernism and to the vogue for tragedy that sprang up in the twentieth century.

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.

The conclusion (‘Post-Mortem’) suggests future possibilities and brings together the interrelated threads of individual chapters to restate the case for the importance of the biofictional reception of Roman poetry not only to the understanding of ancient literature and its reception, but also to the history of modern life-writing. Taken together, the chapters in this book tell a cultural history of the biofictional reception of Roman poetry. They put the author back into the discussion of Roman poetry, and in doing so bring to light a fundamental mode of reading and writing Latin poetry which opens up new perspectives on the ways in which antiquity and its reception have helped to shape paradigms of how to read, write and live lives.

The introduction makes the case for fictional biography (or ‘biofiction’) as fundamental to understanding the reception of Roman poetry. Bringing together developments in life-writing studies and recent work on ancient biography and poets’ Lives, it develops a concept of biofictional reading as a key mode of the reception of Latin poetry. Aware of ancient habits of reading poetry ‘for the life’, Roman poets wrote autofictional versions of their Lives for later readers to pick up, creating a body of literature that demands to be read in terms of Lives in reception.