Does the discipline of classical reception studies shirk questions of distinctiveness and value? Such is the gauntlet thrown down by Michael Silk, Ingo Gildenhard, and Rosemary Barrow in their 2014 magnum opus, The Classical Tradition.Footnote ¹ Full consideration of this important work must be reserved for a later issue. It is nonetheless worth rehearsing its opening distinction between ‘the classical tradition’ and ‘reception’, since thinking about it has informed our reading of a number of the books reviewed below. For Silk, Gildenhard, and Barrow,

The classical tradition is thus wide and vigorous, and it is not – or not at first sight – subject-matter that differentiates it from classical receptions. The authors list a number of other distinguishing features: the classical tradition is resolutely post-antique (however we may draw that boundary), and includes indirect as well as direct engagements with Greek and Roman material. ‘Above all, though, whereas “classical” and “tradition” tend to prompt consideration of value, “reception” does not. In a nutshell, the “classical” of “the classical tradition” tends to imply canonicity, even when the post-antique engagement with the antique is anti-canonical’ (5). Silk, Gildenhard, and Barrow thus follow Charles Martindale, a godfather of Anglophone reception studies who, in recent publications, has rued what he sees as reception's tendency to collapse into a weak form of cultural studies, abnegating its responsibility to investigate and articulate the distinctive value of the Greek and Roman material.Footnote ² For these authors, too, ‘reception studies tend to operate in a relativistic spirit, generally preferring cultural-historical engagement…to critical engagement’ (5). Do these criticisms hold true of the works reviewed here? Our survey reveals a greater variety in methodological and critical engagement than is suggested by their characterization.

Erika Fischer-Lichte's Dionysus Resurrected. Performances of Euripides’ The Bacchae in a Globalizing World Footnote ³ is the publication of her Blackwell Bristol Lectures on Greece, Rome, and the Classical Tradition, given in 2010. The book comprises case studies of nine productions of Bacchae which have appeared since the seminal New York ‘happening’, Dionysus in 69 (and builds on the seminal collection that took its name from that production, Hall, Macintosh, and Wrigley's Dionysus since 69. Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium [Oxford, 2004]). After the first chapter, which deals with this production, Fischer-Lichte takes us on a world tour of further Bacchae, visiting locations and theatrical traditions as diverse as London's National Theatre, Indian Kathakali, Beijing's opera, and Brazilian carnival. Her aim is to understand why Euripides’ play has been restaged so regularly in recent decades (especially given the almost blank performance record prior to the late 1960s), and across such varied contexts, without resorting to the easy and – as Fischer-Lichte convincingly argues – erroneous explanation that Greek tragedy simply possesses universal value and appeal. Instead, this book makes a strong case for how the conditions of a globalizing modern world have both prompted and shaped recent returns to Bacchae, and for distinctive features of this play as holding contemporary resonance. In an age of fragmented communities, increasing fluidity and hybridity in collective and individual identities, and interchanges between classes, cultures, and religions, it is Dionysus’ status as a god who destabilizes identities, and Bacchae's potential as a dramatization of cultural clashes, that account for its appeal. Fischer-Lichte's case studies are detailed and searching, and not always easy to absorb; but they should be required reading for anyone interested in why Greek tragedy continues to matter to the modern world.

Classical culture and science fiction might at first glance seem like anachronistic and uncomfortable bedfellows. Yet, as a number of conferences and isolated journal articles over the past decade have shown, turning the lens of classical reception onto SF texts (broadly conceived) can be enlightening and fascinating. Now, Brett M. Rogers and Benjamin Eldon Stevens have edited a collection for OUP's Classical Presences series, Classical Traditions in Science Fiction,Footnote ⁴ which brings together fourteen rich and engaging chapters on material including Jules Verne, Blade Runner, Battlestar Galactica, and The Hunger Games. This volume is recommended reading for anyone with a serious interest in classical receptions in popular culture. Science fiction is, in some quarters, apt to be sidelined as a niche interest, the proponents of its study dismissed as mere ‘fans’. This volume shows that such disdain is unmerited and unwise (despite being implicitly endorsed by the jacket blurb's reference to ‘Sci-fi fans and Classics geeks’ in one quoted review). Aside from the fact that classical reception study in general has been lamentably slow to interrogate the importance of ‘fandom’ in this field (despite Gideon Nisbet bringing it to attention in his Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture, first published in 2006), Rogers and Stevens demonstrate just how central SF is to mainstream contemporary popular culture. They also demonstrate that SF is a complex and rewarding ‘locus of classical reception’ (5), a Janus-like mode which looks backwards and challenges the pre-modern world as much as it looks forwards, and which enters into mutually productive dialogue with classical texts and ideas. Their introductory case study of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is particularly useful in this regard, demonstrating not only the breadth of SF (Frankenstein is regarded as an inaugural text of the genre) but also its dynamism. Frankenstein's subtitle, ‘The Modern Prometheus’, constitutes a self-conscious signalling of its membership within a classical tradition, and an indication of the novel's commentary not only on classical texts but also on their later reception by authors such as Milton and Kant. Rogers and Stevens’ volume is far from a publication only for fans and geeks. SF novices, given a solid grounding by the editors’ accessible introduction, will likely find their appreciation of popular culture's uses of antiquity deepened, and perhaps even challenged, by the insights it contains.

Moving from popular culture to what might be considered its opposite, Helen Slaney's The Senecan Aesthetic is a well-researched, wide-ranging, and passionate investigation of the history of stagings of Senecan tragedy from the Renaissance to the present day.Footnote ⁵ The subtitle (‘A Performance History’) provides the key to its argument, for Slaney – who is a theatre practitioner as well as a classicist – aims to revive critical appreciation of the aptness of Seneca's plays for performance in the face of modern scholarly traditions that have tended to dismiss them as, at most, ‘Rezitationsdramen’: composed for rehearsed readings among small groups. Her argument has two prongs. The first is the delineation of what she terms ‘the senecan aesthetic’, a particular mode of expression characterized by features such as rhetorical hyperbole, abjection, and sympatheia, but above all by ‘a disjunctive relationship between the speaking voice and the visible body’ (273), and exemplified by – although importantly, not confined to – the handful of ancient plays attributed to Seneca. This is followed by a historical survey of modern stagings of both Senecan and ‘senecan’ tragedy, which aims to decentre contemporary characterizations of its dramaturgical ‘defects’ by showing that such judgements stem from a historically contingent emphasis on visual verisimilitude in theatre with roots no deeper than the eighteenth century. The effect of this change in theatrical practice – which Slaney attributes in part to the influence of neoclassical Aristotelianism, in part to the eighteenth-century worship of ‘nature’ and ‘freedom’ and its corresponding turn from Rome to Greece – was to render senecan tragedy's central features of verbal overload, horror, and anti-realism distasteful: a reversal in fortune epitomized by A. W. Schlegel's influential dismissal of Seneca's heroes as ‘riesenhafte unförmliche Marionetten’ (‘colossal, misshapen marionettes’; 210). Neither Seneca nor senecanism would recover from this setback, Slaney nevertheless identifies a continued tradition of composition and performance exemplified in works such as Heinrich von Kleist's Penthesilea (sections of which were staged in pantomime in 1811), Shelley's The Cenci (not staged until 1935), and a rash of mid-twentieth-century, avant-garde productions inspired above all by the Theatre of Cruelty of Antonin Artaud. Slaney's book is meticulous in scholarship: its early chapters in particular – which range through neo-Latin declamations and verse drama composed and performed in universities, Jesuit colleges, grammar schools, and the Inns of Court, and through vernacular productions in both French and English – contain much that is of general interest to the intellectual historian as well as the historian of performance. Usefully provocative, too, is her relentlessly positive trans-valuation of those features of Senecan tragedy often cited as defects: its challengingly anti-mimetic excess and horror. This is indeed an example of reception studies making good its promise to open up new perspectives on the interpretation of ancient texts. It nonetheless displays two methodological quirks, which are central to the manner in which the argument is constructed and thus seem worthy of comment. As Slaney states from the outset, this is not a history of Seneca-in-performance so much as of ‘senecanism’: ‘the more subtle evolution of a mode of tragic expression, a mode which can be seen operating in texts whose conscious affiliation with Seneca is slender or non-existent’ (38). As Seneca's texts themselves do not suffice to ground such an account, she has recourse instead to a taxonomy of nine ‘senecan’ properties, such as ‘rhetoric’, ‘excess’, ‘metatheatre’, ‘abjection’, ‘confinement’, and ‘sympatheia’, which she derives from Seneca's tragedies (Slaney states that they are ‘ratified by Seneca's afterlife as a performance text’ [38]) but which may be identified in works with no obvious genealogical connection to the ancient author. In attempting to characterize the form of ‘history’ this method generates, Slaney refers several times to Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome, which she engages with via some recent methodological reflections on reception studies by Lorna Hardwick.Footnote ⁶ She approvingly cites Deleuze and Guattari's observation that ‘A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines…[It] can rebound time and time again after most of it has been destroyed’ (17), but her analysis as a whole does not sit easily with another key aspect of the Deleuzian–Guattarian model: the impossibility of identifying an origin. Slaney's overall treatment betrays a tension between her explicit endorsement of this decentred model, which ‘treat[s] Seneca not as a privileged point of origin but as an exemplary representative’ (17), and a more traditional approach that seeks, time and time again, to demonstrate that ‘senecanism’ does after all have rather a lot to do with ‘Seneca’. Her decision to make the identification of a finite set of ‘intrinsically senecan’ aesthetic properties the framework of her history, and to trace their persistence in works produced in different languages across diverse historical contexts, also results in a characterization of ‘the senecan aesthetic’ that is curiously unchanging. Slaney does not apply her method as mechanically in practice as suggested by the formulation ‘Not all of these factors must be present for senecanism to take shape, although two or more are minimally necessary to shift the relationship from pure coincidence to a meaningful instance of reception’ (17), yet a necessary consequence of her reliance upon such a list as a transhistorical heuristic is that the senecan aesthetic itself cannot ‘evolve’. It is unclear how aware she is of these tensions, which do not feature among the methodological challenges discussed in her introduction. Despite these unresolved difficulties, however, this is a valuable and provocative work of reception scholarship.

Finally, we turn to two new and exciting collections of essays on the role of receptions of antiquity in modern constructions of sexuality. Although they stem from separate projects, these volumes are in many ways complementary; there is also some overlap in their contributors. Fisher and Langlands’ volume is the most significant publication to emerge to date from their long-running ‘Sexual Knowledge, Sexual History’ project at Exeter. It has its origins in a conference held in 2009, but the breadth, consistent quality, and relative coherence of outlook of its twelve essays – which are authored by museum professionals and medical and social historians, as well as classicists – attests to a longer process of interdisciplinary discussion and collaboration.Footnote ⁷ As Fisher and Langlands explain in their substantial introduction, their project's aims go beyond the investigation and documentation of ways in which ideas about the past have been deployed in the service of constructing knowledge about sex. They also take antiquity-and-sex as a case study in order to explore the diverse kinds of investments that modern agents can have in particular interpretations of the past: the various ‘functions’ the past can assume in modern scholarly discourses. This volume therefore carries a methodological interest for historians of knowledge beyond the history of sexuality per se – although of course it is primarily a contribution to the latter field. Consonant with the emphasis on knowledge construction, a number of the papers (Blanshard on Symonds, Funke on Hirschfeld, Matzner on Ulrichs, Moore on psychoanalysis) concern the role of humanistic ideas in the development of modern ‘sciences of sex’: sexology and psychiatry. Others (Challis on the presentation of LGBT+ history in the Petrie Museum, Fisher and Langlands on the history of display and interpretation of the notorious Pan and Goat from Herculaneum) examine the processes that shape interpretations of erotic objects from antiquity and the choices and responsibilities of curators today. Still others (Cryle on the ‘libertine’ eighteenth century, Hall on the Victorian Age) press upon the periodizations that provide the architectonic sexual and social histories, and the self-congratulatory distinction of ‘us’ and ‘them’ they can often serve.

By contrast, the fifteen papers collected in Ingleheart's volume (most of which were presented at the wonderfully named ‘Romosexuality’ conference held in Durham in April 2012) are more variable in quality but more homogeneous in theme: their focus is on the role of specifically Roman material in the construction and validation of modern same-sex desire and identity.Footnote ⁸ Ingleheart begins her important and sophisticated introductory chapter by noting that studies of the role of antiquity in the development of homosexual identities have tended to focus on ‘Greek love’.Footnote ⁹ ‘Romosexuality’ has, by contrast, been little explored: perhaps because (as Ingleheart suggests, and as a number of the contributions bear out) cultural stereotypes of Rome as decadent and degenerate lent themselves less readily than Greek ideals to the apologetic strategies of early campaigners for homosexual emancipation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a result, Rome has tended ‘to be challenged and interrogated rather than simply viewed as ‘sex positive’ and so authorizing a modern sexual free-for-all’ (31). Yet Ingleheart also suggests that the passing over of Rome in favour of Greece may have resulted, and could still result, in its availability as a site of imagination and identification for a broader and queerer range of desires and practices: ‘Roman homosexuality, while less obviously present in modern discourses of homosexual identity, is able to encompass a variety of physical pleasures and erotic options to a much greater extent than “didactic” and “spiritual” Greek homosexuality’ (35). The case studies vary widely: from Ovid-inspired Elizabethan poetry (Ingleheart), through Walter Pater's and Gore Vidal's imaginings of High Imperial Rome (Orrells, Endres), to cinema and contemporary novels (Blanshard, Williams), and E. P. Warren's acquisitions of Roman erotic artefacts for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (Grove). Yet continuities emerge: Martial, Juvenal, and Petronius are revealed time and time again to be the key texts for Romosexual discourse; and several papers attest to the potential that Rome has offered as a more ‘physical’ corrective to overly spiritualized and domesticated understandings of the Greek pederastic paradigm. The blind spots within these receptions are also clear (and recognized by the editors): aside from Schachter's fascinating opening chapter in Ingleheart on a marked concern of Renaissance commentators on Martial and Juvenal with oral sex between women, those hoping to redress the relative ‘invisibility’ of lesbian compared to gay male history will find little resource in either collection. Neither volume purports to be comprehensive, but they certainly stake a claim for the importance and interest of the study of classical receptions in this field.