Abstract The 2024 song ‘Cassandra’ is Taylor Swift’s first significant engagement with the Classical world. It continues a pre-established songwriting mode in which Swift has used references to fairytale, historical, and literary women to deconstruct society’s sexist portrayals of ‘mad women’ and ‘witches’. Co-written with Aaron Dessner, ‘Cassandra’ reflects Swift’s experiences of, and previous portrayals of, sexual objectification and public shaming. I examine Cassandra in ancient Greek texts to show how her sexed and gendered life experiences serve as a foil for Swift to critique sexism. Through a close reading of the song’s structure, themes, and musical elements, I show how Swift constructs parallels and connections between Cassandra and herself, using the Trojan prophetess—abstracted from her original narrative and cultural context—to legitimize the contemporary songwriter’s claim to be a female truth-teller. Lastly, I examine how Swift and Dessner intervene in Cassandra’s story and migrate it to a new context. Throughout, I show that Swift and Dessner’s artistic choices serve the song’s critique of sexism and cast women’s silencing as a transhistorical phenomenon that exists across time, space, and place.
Abstract While a significant amount of scholarship has been dedicated to the study of Sophocles’ Antigone through a biopolitical lens, few analyses have applied this framework to its contemporary adaptations, considering the historical and sociopolitical circumstances that surround localized receptions in Latin America. This article will examine Luis Rafael Sánchez’ 1968 La pasión según Antígona Pérez (The Passion According to Antígona Pérez) as an example of how theoretical frameworks that have been traditionally applied to the study of classical Greek works have the potential to provide novel insights when analysing key differences between modern adaptations and their source material, such as Sánchez’ reconceptualization of Antigone’s transgression as a theft rather than as the burial of Polynices’ remains. Through a close reading of the language of appropriation and ownership in the text, this article examines the play as an allegorical framework by means of which Sánchez engages with Puerto Rico’s colonial history. Additionally, it reviews Giorgio Agamben’s definition of the homo sacer alongside Achille Mbembe’s ‘necropolitics’ to study how the archetype of the homo sacer and colonized subjects alike are figures whose ambiguous political existence is similarly delineated by a sovereign power. In juxtaposing both perspectives and specifically linking them to Puerto Rico’s modern political history, it seeks to complement the existing corpus of biopolitical studies of Antigone as a liminal figure that lies at the margins of life and death, nature and human jurisdiction.
Abstract This article examines how Pier-Daniel Huet’s and Montesquieu’s readings of Pliny the Elder’s account of Indo-Roman trade reflected contemporary debates on empire, commerce, and luxury. Pliny’s complaint that Indian trade drained enormous sums from Rome was largely overlooked before the eighteenth century; when Montesquieu highlighted it, he did so to comment on France’s (and other European states’) financial and imperial ambitions in the Indian Ocean. The article compares and examines these two authors’ interpretations of Pliny. Pier-Daniel Huet’s Histoire du commerce et de la navigation des anciens (1716) reads Indo-Roman trade positively, as a source of Roman prosperity and imperial grandeur, consonant with Colbertist ambitions for French commercial empire. Montesquieu’s Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734) and De l’esprit des lois (1748) instead recast the same evidence to argue that empire and commerce were fundamentally incompatible, and that Rome’s turn to luxury eroded the military discipline sustaining its empire. Read together, these accounts reveal a decisive, under-acknowledged shift in the historiography of Indo-Roman trade, one that shaped how the relationship between prosperity, luxury, and empire was understood in France during the Enlightenment period.
Abstract This paper considers the purpose of wardrobe in films about antiquity with particular regard to recent depictions of Pontius Pilate. In 1963, designer Vittorio ‘Nino’ Novarese had almost quit production on The Greatest Story Ever Told over issues of historical accuracy. Half a century later, designers feel very differently, as revealed in interviews with Simonetta Mariano (who worked on HBO’s 2010 series of Ben-Hur), Varvara Avdyushko (designer for 2016’s feature-length Ben-Hur), and Luciano Capozzi (NBC’s A.D. The Bible Continues, also 2016), all of whom feel costuming must be seen as participating in a film’s overall thematic purpose.
Abstract Natalie J. Swain is an assistant professor of Classics at Acadia University (Canada) where her research focuses on Latin literature, narratology, and the reception of the ancient Mediterranean world in comics and video games. She has a collected volume on the reception of antiquity in Wonder Woman (co-edited with Amanda Potter and Connie Skibinski) and a monograph that applies a comics-based methodology to the reading of Latin elegy both with Bloomsbury. When not working, she can be found wrestling her cats or walking her dog along the beautiful Nova Scotian coastline. In episode 24 of Rachel Smythe’s webcomic Lore Olympus, Persephone is raped by Apollo. The scene is terrifyingly realistic as Persephone retreats into her mind, physically freezing and responding with confusion and dissociation. Persephone’s response here has a clear basis in psychological examinations of real-life trauma. In Ovid’s account of the rape of Proserpina in his Metamorphoses too, these experiences are represented with an eye to real-world trauma. Yet, it is their media—the ‘infinite canvas’ of webcomics and the carmen perpetuum (1.4) of Ovid’s Metamorphoses—which fully engage the reader by blending different people’s experiences of rape trauma (including the reader’s) to recreate the experiences of the characters on the page/screen in the reading experience. This article therefore performs a close reading of episodes 24 (the rape of Persephone), 170, and 171 (the transformation of Daphne) in Lore Olympus alongside Ovid’s account of Proserpina’s kidnapping (including the assaults of Cyane and Arethusa) in Book Five of his Metamorphoses. By reading these texts in tandem, this article argues that readers find similar representations of real-world rape trauma that are shared across people within the story and without, employing their forms to bring the reader, too, into these shared moments of sexual trauma.
