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.
Abstract Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa (Sandra, 1965) narrates an intimate drama by Luchino Visconti, which draws on a series of figures from Classical Antiquity for the construction of the script and the characters. The aim of this article is to study the rewriting and adaptation of the mythological story in order to understand the value of myth in Visconti’s films and its ultimate contribution to the meaning of this work. For the development of the analysis, the theory of the ‘cultural palimpsest’ (by Gérard Genette) has been chosen due to its taxonomic richness; this allows us to reflect on the different strategies used by Visconti when producing the script and creating the characters. This study will further examine the mythological dimensions embedded within Sandra, with particular attention to the psychic and emotional registers. It will also explore narrative structures commonly associated with classical literature, such as katabasis and anagnorisis, as they are reflected and recontextualized within the film. A relationship will also be established between Sandra and other works by Visconti, in which certain recurrences and aspects can be found that allow analogies and divergences to be established with the nature of the myth and its stories. Finally, taking this study of Sandra as a reference point, the survival of myths in the twentieth century and their processes of transformation will be assessed, paying special attention to the transmission of their existential dimension and their transcendent value.
Abstract This article reconceives the figure of Tiresias in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone as an ancient archive of trans memory — not a retrospective identity category, but an analytic of embodied metamorphosis structured by silence, gesture, and somatic repetition. Through close philological readings combined with performance-oriented analysis of metre, staging, and choral response, and informed by transgender studies and theories of cultural and archival memory, it argues that Sophoclean dramaturgy preserves Tiresias’s metamorphic past not through explicit narration but through ritual temporality, sensory inversion, and strategic opacity. Tiresias thus emerges as a figure of mnēmē without confession, whose bodily transformations persist in theatrical rhythm, miasmatic imagery, and choral mediation rather than in autobiographical disclosure. Tracing the Tiresian archive from antiquity to modern reception — from Ovid’s Metamorphōses to Cassils’s durational performance Tiresias and the community practices of the Archivo de la Memoria Trans in Argentina — the article shows how ancient dramaturgies of crossing are reactivated within contemporary debates on visibility, vulnerability, and archival ethics. By integrating philology, performance analysis, and trans theory, the article reframes classical reception as a practice of embodied remembrance, demonstrating how gender-variant histories endure through opacity, repetition, and form.
Abstract This study traces the reception of Tacitus in China from the seventeenth century to the present, following the historian’s movements from the Jesuit libraries of late-Ming Beijing to the lexicon of modern Chinese political discourse. Beginning with the arrival of Tacitus’ works among the books brought by Nicolas Trigault’s 1618–19 mission, it examines a sequence of sporadic yet revealing encounters through which Chinese scholars, translators, and intellectuals engaged with his writings. Tacitus’ afterlife in China, from the late Qing and Republican eras to the early People’s Republic and the present, both mirrored transformations in China’s intellectual and ideological landscapes and reflected broad shifts in the study of Western historiography and classical learning. This article concludes with an analysis of the so-called ‘Tacitus Trap’, a striking case of twenty-first-century appropriation of the classical legacy, and asks how an ancient author, once displaced and refracted through new cultural contexts, could acquire renewed political and moral resonance.
This article explores the genius of the American designer Irene Sharaff (1910-1993), who used her artist's eye to design sets and costumes for Hollywood films and Broadway plays. During her fifty-year-long career, Sharaff earned fifteen Oscar nominations for costume design and won five. With her rich creative imagination, Sharaff frequently inspired contemporary aesthetics in fashion and interior decoration by her innovative choices of fabrics and colours. I examine the visual brilliance of Sharaff's costume designs in the 1963 film Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and Rex Harrison. Sharaff designed a staggering 26,000 costumes for the lavish epic with its legions of extras. In the role of Cleopatra, Taylor required a record-setting sixty-five costume changes. Sharaff's designs for this film inspired new styles in women's beauty and fashion trends, such as snake-motif jewellery, high-waisted gowns, and dramatic 'Cleopatra Eye' make-up. For her work on the men's costumes, Sharaff did extensive research in the ancient sources to develop the unique looks she used to dress Harrison as Julius Caesar and Burton as Mark Antony. This article considers the impact Sharaff's 'ancient' designs had on modern popular fashion and contemporary tastes in the forward-looking years of the early 1960s.
This article explores William Blake's engagement with the Belvedere Torso, a Hellenistic fragment he sketched during his student years at the Royal Academy (1779-80). In 1809, Blake declared the Torso to be 'the only original work remaining', claiming that all other Classical sculptures were merely 'copies' of more ancient originals. This essay examines why Blake isolates the Torso from other canonical statues and situates this claim alongside his reading of Winckelmann and Hogarth, and within a broader Romantic fascination with the fragment. Analysing the narrative significance of the Torso across four of Blake's visual works - The Stoning of Achan (1800), The Death Chamber drawings (1800-07), and Jerusalem, plate 25 (1820) - this paper argues that Blake adopted the fragment as an imaginative archetype of heroic suffering. Rather than viewing the fragment as a symbol of decay, Blake instead used it as a site of visionary potential: both in his writings and his visual work. In doing so, Blake transforms Classical reception into a mode of imaginative renewal, and rather than proving his isolated genius, the essay demonstrates his deep embeddedness within the visual and intellectual culture of his time.
The significant body of films produced by Bob Mizer which are set in antiquity represent an important archive for understanding the role of the Greco-Roman world in the fantasy life of gay men in mid-century, middle-class America. In numerous ways, these films are deeply indebted to the representation of antiquity produced in Hollywood epic cinema. Examining their costuming allows us to see just how significant this debt is. For a range of logistical reasons, these films developed their own costuming 'shorthand' that permitted the evocation of antiquity with minimal effort and investment. This shorthand could only operate because the visual grammar for evoking antiquity had been so firmly established by preceding mainstream, normative, cinematic ventures.
This article explores the recasting of Homeric narratives as folklore-fairytale in the latter half of the nineteenth century in Britain, taking William Morris's 1887 translation of the Odyssey as a case-study of a 'folkloric' version in contrast with Alexander Pope's 1725/1726 'neoclassical' version. Following the excavations of Heinrich Schliemann at Hissarlik and Mycenae in the 1870s, there was a renewed fascination with classical narrative at the same time as the intellectual study of European folklore and fairytales was reaching its heyday. I explore how Morris employed a folkloric mode encompassing both the fantastical tropes of and gritty historical realism behind folklore and fairytales, to convey a kind of proto-'magical realist' interpretation of the Odyssey through which to probe social ideals and which contributed to the development of his socialist vision.
Did you know that Meleager of Gadara (first century BC), the prolific epigrammatist whose Garland is the root of the Greek Anthology tradition, composed two books of erotic epigrams, the first homosexual (the work of his confused adolescence) and the second heterosexual (the product of his maturity)? Countless English readers have known it from the late eighteenth century to the present day, but it has no evidentiary basis. The poetic career it assigns to Meleager is a collaborative fiction at the root of his Anglophone reception tradition, explaining away the blended bisexuality of the transmitted corpus, and initially abetted by critical editions that chose not to present the text in manuscript order.This article examines the modern myth of Meleager's books and analyses the mechanisms of its durability (two centuries and counting) in nonspecialist and public-facing scholarship, suggesting that it offers a paradigmatic case study in fake news about antiquity.
This article examines Organicit & agrave; e astrazione (1956), the most polemical book by Italian Marxist archaeologist Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, as an intervention in postwar debates about socialist aesthetics within the Italian Communist Party. Written in the aftermath of Khrushchev's Secret Speech and amid the growing visibility of American abstract expressionism in Italy, Bianchi Bandinelli attempted to displace both the neoclassical tradition, from Winckelmann to fascist romanit & agrave;, and the formalist relativism of Alois Riegl and Wilhelm Worringer, by developing a historicist account of organic realism in Greek and Roman art. Arguing that ancient Greek art emerged from a rational, democratic society, Bianchi Bandinelli critiqued abstraction-from Neolithic geometry to Mondrian-as evidence of irrationalism and political decline. The article traces the book's intellectual genealogy across Gramsci, Luk & aacute;cs, and Hauser, and argues that Organicit & agrave; e astrazione is best understood not as a resolved theoretical statement but as a transitional text-one that attempts to invent the aesthetics of a socialist antiquity while remaining indebted to the idealist frameworks it sought to overcome. Bianchi Bandinelli would retrospectively disavow his book as a maledetto libriccino because of the criticism he received 'from all sides.' Nevertheless Organicit & agrave; e astrazione marks a breakaway from fascism's legacy towards an alternative and emancipatory historiography of the ancient world.
Adriana Vazquez is an assistant professor of Classics at UCLA specializing in Latin literature of the Augustan period, with particular interest in its legacy in the Lusophone literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She is currently working on a monograph on the legacy of Latin literature in the poetry of colonial Brazil, which analyses the literary output of the poets of the Arcadia Ultramarina, a literary academy which emerged in colonial Brazil, for its dialoguing with the ancient poetic tradition. She has published articles on topics ranging from religious language in Augustan poetry to the legacy of Virgil in Portuguese epic and Brazilian poetry. She held the Andrew Heiskell/Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Rome Prize in Ancient Studies at the American Academy of Rome in 2021-2022 and a Loeb Prize Fellowship in 2024-2025. She is a cofounder and former steering committee member of Hesperides: Classics in the Luso-Hispanic World, an interest group focusing on Ibero-global reception.The appearance of Fama in The Lusiads is of tremendous importance for cementing her status as a fixture of Lusophone epic and for coining a Portuguese lexicon for her representation, but it is by no means the end of her story. This article seeks to identify a topos of receptive engagement here termed 'aggregative reception' through a case study of the appearances of Fama, the divine personification of 'rumour', in five Portuguese epics published over the course of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, each one interesting in its own right for its unique contribution to an expansive vision of Virgil's monstrous figure: Gabriel Pereira de Castro's Ulisseia, ou Lisboa Edificada (1636), Ant & oacute;nio Sousa de Macedo's Ulyssippo, Poema Her & oacute;ico (1640), Miguel Mauricio Ramalho's Lisboa Reedificada (1780), Vicente Carlos de Oliveira's Lisboa Restaurada (1784), and Teodoro de Almeida's Lisboa Destru & iacute;da, Poema (1803). By reading the appearances of Fama in Portuguese epic together as not competing, but rather complementary, diffused across texts, aggregative reception offers a framework for reading receptions sympathetically by accommodating, and even encouraging, a diachronic consideration of the afterlife of a topos with its contextualization in a literary longue dur & eacute;e. The consideration of her appearances as cooperative allows for apparent inconsistencies to present opportunities for increasing complexity.
This paper argues that Anne Carson's 2003 translation of Sappho's fragmented poetry, If Not, Winter, is a work that both critiques the Western artistic canon for its systemic oppression and erasure of queerness and expands that canon to include disruptive and nonproductive lesbian identities and texts. Using gender studies scholar Judith Butler's concept of disidentification and queer theorist Jos & eacute; Esteban Mu & ntilde;oz's expansion of the term, I explore how If Not, Winter both identifies with hegemonic knowledge systems and simultaneously disidentifies with them to create a lesbian remattering of the text. Importantly, it is largely the lesbian claiming of the Sappho-Carson connection that rematters If Now, Winter as a lesbian text. Carson's fragmented, bracket-riddled translation and discursive citations ripple with a queer affect that holds particularly important weight for lesbians, who are mattered through similar fragmented means as Carson's translation. Lesbian bodies resonate with the queer-especially lesbian-affect of Carson's translation, claiming it for themselves as a lesbian text. Carson's translation rematters Sappho's fragments as a piece of contemporary lesbian reception largely because it matters to bodies that don't matter under hegemonic, productive heterosexuality.
In this article, I analyse the 2021 adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses which opened at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare's Globe in London. I argue that the production conjoined horror and humour in a particularly Ovidian style through a collaborative mode of spectatorship, creating an atmosphere in which actor and spectator came together to imagine a 'magical space' in which the traditional hierarchies relating to sex and power were subverted. In Rabelais and his World, Mikhail Bakhtin theorizes about the carnival, a festival of the common people that temporarily subverts social order and can create a momentary utopia. I show that there was a sense of the carnival in the Globe's Metamorphoses, which touched on many of the themes that relate to Bakhtin's notion - sex, violence, greed, and power. As the performance transcended from purely theatrical to carnival, the utopian potential of performance was liberated, allowing the re-imagination of social worlds and order. Overall, this article demonstrates how Bakhtin's theory of the carnival provides a fresh methodology for engaging with Ovidian reception, one that resonates with contemporary discourse relating to Ovid and gender.
This paper considers the role of costume in the depiction of 'barbarians', looking Eastwards to the Persians, as seen in The 300 Spartans (1962), 300 (2006) and Alexander (2004), and then to the West, focusing on the Celts and the Germans depicted in Centurion (2010), The Eagle (2011) and Barbarians (2020-22). It examines the ways in which costuming is exploited to manipulate audience attitudes towards these peoples, who are presented as a foreign 'other', but with a marked contrast between them. In the case of the Persians, their colourful clothing, luxurious fabrics, hairstyles and cosmetics mark them out as spoilt, pampered and effeminate, weakened and corrupted by their own riches. The Celts, on the other hand, in Centurion and The Eagle are lacking in civilization, depicted as rough, wild, primitive peoples who lack any kind of elegance or sophistication. Thus, the Persians are over-civilized and the Celts under-civilized, in contrast to the Classical world. In Barbarians, by contrast, the Germans are the heroes and therefore more attractive in appearance than the Romans. In every case the costuming sets up expectations regarding the virtue or vice of the characters, conditioning the spectator to admire or despise the non-Classical 'other'.
This paper examines the interplay between the ancient and modern worlds by looking at the ways contemporary fashion trends of the period of a film's production influence the ways ancient costume and style are depicted. Scholars writing about the reception of classics in popular culture face the challenge of educating people about the original sources, as well as explaining how the new texts explore social messages, cultural concerns, and artistic sensibilities relating to both the time of production and also to various points of reception. Anachronisms and appropriations are inevitable, not simply because of the unconscious perspectives of filmmakers, but also because the intentions of those involved in production are multiple. I examine four films produced over a period of approximately 66 years to explore how costume designers intertwine the changing styles of women's dress, hair, and make-up with audiences' expectations for the illusion of historical reality: Cleopatra (1934) with Claudette Colbert; Quo Vadis (1951) with Deborah Kerr; The Trojan Women (1971) with Katharine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, Genevieve Bujold, and Irene Papas; and Jason and the Argonauts (2000) with Jolene Blalock.
This article examines how Theodoros Terzopoulos's stagings of Greek tragedy expose and resist necropolitical power. Drawing on Achille Mbembe's theory of necropolitics and Judith Butler's notion of grievability, it argues that Terzopoulos reimagines tragedy as an embodied politics of resistance, where the performer's body becomes both the instrument and the battlefield of sovereign power. Through physical extremity, ritual abstraction, and fractured choral speech, his theatre transforms mourning into insurgency and the stage into a site of ethical confrontation. Focusing on the Trojan Women (2017) and the Oresteia (2024), the article demonstrates how Terzopoulos dismantles classical narratives to reveal the ongoing cycles of war, displacement, and political erasure. The Trojan Women, performed in multiple languages by actors from divided cities, resounds as a polyphonic lament for the stateless and ungrievable, while the Oresteia exposes the disintegration of justice and democracy as ritualized sovereign violence carved into the flesh of the living. Together they remake tragedy as an insurgent epistemology - one that confronts the governance of death and asserts the obstinate endurance of life.
This introduction establishes the framework for a special issue on costuming the ancient world on screen. It explores the influence of costumes on actors and their art, the agency of the designers creating the costumes as part of a process of worldbuilding, and finally the way costumes drive/inhibit audience engagement with antiquity. The essays in this issue address both historical films and costume dramas set in the ancient world.
