Classical Reception (By: Carys)

  Here, I am going to investigate information regarding classical reception. I have not heard of it before, that is why I am writing this to research and mention it. Before this, what is the definition of classical reception? It is the study of how the world of classics, especially ancient Greek literature and Latin literature, have been taken since antiquity. It is also the study of the portrayal and representation of the ancient world from last time till now. The nature of reception studies incredibly requires high interdisciplinary, consisting of literature, art, music, movies and games. This field of study has, within the past few decades, become an expandingly prominent and legitimized theme of interest in classical studies.  

  Do you know how the history of classical reception goes by? Here it comes…. This area of study was first and historically claimed as a subset of the classical tradition. To define the term of classical tradition, it is the reception of classical Greco-Roman antiquity by later cultures, especially the post-classical west, which includes texts, imagery, items, ideas, institutions, monuments, architectures, cultural artifacts, rituals, practices and sayings. Philosophy, pollical thought and mythology are 3 main examples of how classical culture lives and proceeds to have impacts. The West is one of several global cultures regarded as having a classical tradition, comprising of the Indian, Chinese, and Islamic traditions. Classical tradition studies differ from classical philosophy, which seeks to recover “the definition that ancient texts had in their original contexts”. It investigates both later efforts to disclose the genuineness of the Greco-Roman world and “innovative misunderstandings” that reinterpret old values, ideas and aesthetic models for contemporary usage. The classicist and translator, Charles Martindale, defined the reception of classical antiquity as a “two-way process….” in which the current and the past are in dialogue with each other. For its history, I will mention it later. Before the reception increased interest, the classical tradition was discussed and gained popularity in the 1920s. While it mainly emphasizes how and why Classics fit into the world currently, the word, reception, now encompasses classical traditions, with an immense range over the interplay between the cultures that draw inspirations from classical communities and the past itself. Due to the nature of classical reception, which was seriously impacted by reception theory, classical reception theory departs from the classical traditions in many ways. Traditions decide to put a premium and continuity, an easy passing down of one influence on another, the context that informed some earlier ingredients. On the other hand, reception focuses on the meditated, located, contingent character of readings, and the concept that there are no last, right definitions for any text. Charles Martindale claimed that “Our current analysis of ancient texts, whether we are precarious of it, are, in sophisticated methods, established by the chain of receptions through which their proceeded readability has been affected. As a consequence, we cannot get back into any ordinary meaning entirely free of subsequent accretions.” Classical texts are not handed down in a piece of cake, as implied by the classical traditions, but are in fact altered as they are passed along. While scholars fully understand and agree that classical reception diverse from the classical traditions, the term classical reception has a variety of meanings, Classical reception scholar, Johanna Hanink, says that classical reception means the way ancient past is visibly interwoven in the fabric of the moment currently. The Open University’s Classical Receptions in Drama and Poetry in English project adds that “classical receptions also involve analysis of the meditating aspects, such as translation, scholarship, cultural narratives, such as oral, written and performed, and the artistic and literary practices that make these”.

  Right now, I am going back to the history of classical traditions……The embarkment of a self-conscious classical tradition is often situated in the renaissance, with the work of Petrarch in 14^th century Italy. Even though Petrarch believed that he was recovering an unblocked view of a classical past that has been obscured for centuries, the classical tradition in fact had proceeded uninterrupted during the Middle Ages. There was no single time of devastation when the inhabitants of what the Roman empire was formerly went to bed in antiquity and awoke in the medieval world; rather, cultural alterations happened over centuries. The utilization and definition of the classical tradition may seem, however, to alter dramatically with the emergence of humanism. The phrase, classical tradition, is a modern label, articulated most popularly in the post-World War II era with The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature of Gilbert Highet in the year 1949, and The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries of R. R. Bolgar in the year 1954. The English term, tradition, and with it the concept of “handing down” classical culture, applied from the Latin verb called trado, tradere, traditus, in the feel of “hand over, hand down.” Writers and artists are impacted by the classical tradition that may name their old models or allude to their works. Scholars often infer classical influence via comparative ways that disclose patterns of ideas. There are times when authors’ copies of Greek and Latin texts will include handwritten annotations that provide direct evidence of how they read and understood their classical models. For example, in the late 20^th century, the exploration of Montaigne’s copy of Lucretius allowed scholars to document an influence that had long been distinguished.

  This is how the definition of classical reception derived from……Lorna Hardwick, a professor emerita of classical studies at the Open University, and Christopher Stray, a British historian of classical scholarship and teaching, assert that classical reception studies is devoted to investigate “the mechanisms in which Greek and Roman material has been transmitted, translated, excerpted, analyzed, rewritten, re-imaged and represented.” Martindale also claims that classical reception “encompasses all work concerned with postclassical material.” Lorna Hardwick had also previously stated that classical reception means “the artistic or intellectual processes involved in choosing, imitating or adapting ancient works,” but also treats display and viewing as active processes. They also claim that scholars of reception studies hold the relationship between the ancient and modern to be reciprocal, notwithstanding acknowledging that others believe that reception studies only shed light on the receiving community, and not on the ancient text or its context. Even though reception theories came from Hans Robert Jauss, a German academic, notable for his work in reception theories and modern French literature in the late 1960s, classicist took about 30 years to genuinely adopt the term. Humongous-scale acceptance did not happen until 2009, with the launch of Oxford’s on-line periodical, the Classical Receptions Journal, which is a peer reviewed academic journal talking about reception studies, covering all aspects of reception of the texts and material culture of ancient Greece and Roman from antiquity to the modern days, published by Oxford University Press.

  This is how the classical reception world looks like. The classical world, also known as classical antiquity, era, period, age, or simple antiquity, is the period of cultural European history between the 8^th century BC and the 5^th century AD. It includes the interwoven civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome, also known as the Greco-Roman world, centered on the Mediterranean Basin. It is the period during which ancient Greece and Rome flourished and had a tremendous influence via much Europe, North Africa and West Asia. Classical antiquity was defeated by the period currently known as the late antiquity. Conventionally, it is usually considered to embark with the earliest recorded Epic Greek poetry of Homer in the 8^th to 7^th centuries BC and end with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD. Such an immense span of history and nation covers many disparate cultures and periods. Classical antiquity may also mean an idealized vision among later people of what was, in Edgar Allan Poe’s, an American writer, poet, editor, and literacy critic who is notable for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales containing of mystery and the macabre words, “the glory from Greece, and the grandeur from Rome”. The culture of ancient Greeks, together with some influences from the ancient Near East, was the basis of art, philosophy, community and education in the Mediterranean and Near East until the Roman imperial period. The Romans protected, followed, and spread this culture throughout Europe, until they were able to challenge with it. This Greco-Roman cultural discovery has been widely influential on the language, politics, laws, educational systems, philosophy, science, warfare, literature, historiography, ethics, rhetorics, art and architecture of both the Western, and via it, the modern world. Surviving parts of classical culture aided in producing a revival beginning during the 14^th century which later came to be known as the renaissance, and various neo-classical revivals occurred during the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

  Here is the political revivalism of the world of classical reception goes. In politics, the late Roman conception of the Empire as a global state, ordinated by 1 supreme divinely appointed ruler, united with Christianity as a worldly religion likewise headed by a supreme patriarch, proved incredibly influential, even after the vanishing of imperial authority in the west. This tendency approached it’s maximum when Charlemagne was crowned as “Roman empire” in the year 800, an act which result in the formation of the Holy Roman Empire. The notion that an emperor is a monarch who outranks a king date from this period. In this political ideal, there would always be a Roman Empire, a resemblance of jurisdiction of which extended via the whole civilized western world. The model proceeded to exist in Constantinople for the entirety of the Middle Ages, where the Byzantine Emperor was considered the sovereign of the whole Christian world. The Patriarch of Constantinople was the Empire’s highest-ranked cleric, but even he was subordinate to the emperor, who was “God’s Vicegerent on Earth”. The Greek-speaking Byzantines and their descendants proceeded to call themselves “Romioi” until the establishment of the latest Greek state in 1832. After the captivation of Constantinople in 1453, the Russian Czars, which is a title derived from Caesar, stated that the legacy of Byzantine as the champion of Orthodoxy; Moscow, the capital of Russia, was described as the “3^rd Rome”, and the Czars ruled as divinely appointed Emperors into the 20^th century. In spite of the fact that the western Roman secular authority vanished fully in Europe, it still left traces. The Papacy and the Catholic Church in particular remained Latin language, culture and literacy for centuries; to this day the popes are termed Pontifex Maximus that during the classical period was a title belonging to the emperor, and the ideal of Christendom proceeded the legacy of a united European civilization even after its political unity had stopped. The political opinion of an Emperor in the West to merge the Emperor in the East proceeded after the Western Roman Empire’s collapse; it was revived by the coronation of Charlemagne in the year 800; the self-explained Holy Roman Empire ruled central Europe until the year 1806. The idea of Renaissance that the classical Roman virtues had been lost as a subsequence of medievalism was especially strong in European politics of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Reverence of Roman republicanism was strong among the Founding Fathers of the United States and the Latin American revolutionaries; the American described their latest government as a republic, which is the term derived from res publica and offered it a Senate and a President, which is another Latin term, instead of utilizing available English terms such as commonwealth and parliament. Same goes to Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, republicanism and Roman martial virtues were promoted by the state, as can be seen in the architecture of the Panthéon, the Arc de Triomphe, and the paintings of Jacques-Louis David. During the revolution, France transitioned from kingdom to republic to dictatorship to Empire, which is a fulfilled with Imperial Eagles, that the Romans had experienced centuries earlier.

  Last but not least, I am going to narrate about the cultural legacy of classical reception. Classical world is a general term for a prolonged antiquity of cultural history. Such a tremendous sampling of history and nation includes a lot of rather disparate cultures and periods. “Classical world” usually defines as an idealized purpose of later people, of what was, in Edgar Allan Poe’s words, “the glory from Greece, the grandeur from Rome!” During the 18^th and 19^th centuries AD, reverence for classical world was much better in Europe and the United States than it is currently. Tribute for the ancient people of Greece and Roman influenced politics, philosophy, sculpture, literature, theatre, education, architecture and sexuality. Epic poetry in Latin proceeded to be written and circulated well in the 19^th century. John Milton, an English poet, polemicist and civil servant, and even Arthur Rimbaud, a French poet renowned for his transgressive and surreal themes and for his influence on modern literatures and arts, prefiguring surrealism received their first poetic educations in Latin. Genres like epic poetry, pastoral verse, and the frequent usage of characters and topics from Greek mythology impacted Western literature deeply. In architecture, there have been a lot of Greek Revivals, which seem more influenced in retrospect by Roman architecture than Greek. Washington, DC, United States has myriads inordinate marble buildings with façades made to look like Greek shrines, with columns constructed in the classical orders of architecture. The St. Thomas Aquinas’s, Italian Dominican friar and priest, the foremost Scholastica thinker, as well as the most notable philosophers and theologians in the western traditions’ philosophy, was derived widely from that of Aristotle, an ancient Greek philosopher and polymath, in spite of the intervening alterations in religion from Hellenic Polytheism to Christianity. Greek and Roman authorities like Hippocrates and Galen made the fundamental of the practice of medicine even longer than Greek thought prevailed in philosophy. In the French theatre, playwrights like Molière and Racine wrote plays on mythological or classical historical subjects and subjected them to the stern rules of the classical unities derived from Aristotle’s Poetics. The decision to dance in a manner allegedly same as the manner of the ancient Greeks caused by Isadora Duncan to form her brand of ballet.

  In summary, classical reception is jam-packed with myriads aesthetics inside. Everyone can read or look at its work, especially for fans!