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G. B. Smith’s “Elzevir Cicero” and the Construction of Queer Immortality in Tolkien’s Mythopoeia
(2022)
Following the death of J. R. R. Tolkien in 1973, an obituary appeared in The Times quoting Tolkien as having said that his “love for the classics took ten years to recover from lectures on Cicero and Demosthenes.” This contentious relationship between Tolkien and the Greco-Roman past contrasts with the work of unabashedly classicizing poet Geoffrey Bache Smith, a school friend of Tolkien’s who was killed in the Great War. When Tolkien collected Smith’s poems for posthumous publication, this paper shows, Smith’s engagements with the ancient world became part of Tolkien’s own philosophy of immortality through literary composition. Within his 1931 poem “Mythopoeia,” and his 1939 speech “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien articulated a unified method of mythmaking by looking back to his lost friend’s understanding of mythology as a type of ancient story-craft that enabled poets to preserve the dead against the ravages of time. By tracing a triangular path through the relationships between Tolkien, Smith, and the classical past inhabited by figures like Cicero, this paper argues that Tolkien not only recovered a “love for the classics,” but used classical texts to “recover” his lost friend, granting Smith a queer, classical immortality in return.
This article proposes several conceptual frameworks for examining the widespread use of classical intertexts depicting the supernatural in popular media. Whether the supernatural is viewed as reality or simply a trope, it represents the human capacity and desire to explore worlds and meanings beyond the obvious and mundane. Representations of classical gods, heroes, and monsters evoke the power of mythic stories to probe and explain human psychology, social concerns, philosophical questions, and religious beliefs, including belief about the paranormal and supernatural. The entertainment value of popular media allows creators and audiences to engage with larger issues in non-dogmatic and playful ways that help them negotiate tensions among various beliefs and identities. This paper also gives an overview of the other articles in this journal issue, showing overlapping themes and patterns that connect with these tensions. By combining knowledge of classical myths in their original contexts with knowledge about contemporary culture, classical scholars contribute unique perspectives about why classical intertexts dominate in popular media today.
Application areas and drugs of Egyptian, Greek and Roman medi-cine are popular references of research in the field of recent aes-thetic dermatology. There, Cleopatra VII is referred to as “mother of chemical peeling” because she is said to have bathed in donkey’s milk. Although extremely popular, there is no ancient source sup-porting Cleopatra’s bath in milk. Nevertheless, Poppaea Sabina, the second wife of Emperor Nero, is said to has bathed in donkey’s milk to beautify her skin. The aim of the paper is to reconstruct the genesis and develop-ment of the modern myth of Cleopatra bathing in donkey’s milk. The origin of this myth can be traced back to the cinema of the 1930s. The result is that in the person of the actress Claudette Colbert her two roles as Cleopatra and Poppaea converged. This convergence was the basis for the popularization of the milk bath by the Cleopat-ra movie of 1963 with Elizabeth Taylor.
This work journal recounts the experiences of a project undertaken with students of the University of Trier over the course of two semesters. The project attempted to design and produce an innovative audio guide pertaining to the cultural heritage of the Roman city, with students gauging market opportunities, writing a business plan, researching information and producing content for the audio guide. The work created, „Talking Stones“ (https://www.talking-stones.de/), takes the listener on a tour of Roman Trier embedded in a literary narrative and is available via download on Google Play and the Apple App Store.
Theocritus’ id. 4 has been considered by some scholars as an example of rural mime; the fact that the poem, a unique case in the Corpus Theocriteum, does not contain any pastoral song or contest contributes to the impression of ‘realism’. This lack could be an obstacle for the poetological approach to the bucolic genre in antiquity, which considers metapoetry as its main feature. Our reading of the idyll shows that this limitation is only apparent.
Die abgetrennte Zunge by Katharina Wesselmann deals with gender and power relations in ancient literature and beyond. It has received widespread attention, particularly in popular media. In this interview, thersites examines the book from an academic perspective. We talk to Katharina Wesselmann about the reactions to her work, her methodology and her conclusions. The primary focus of this interview is on what ancient texts may tell us about today’s gender issues and vice versa – it, thus, entails a broader discussion about modern Classics.
This article analyses, as an example of the advertising of cosmetic products, a campaign launched by the US-American company “Johnson Soap” for their product, the facial soap “Palmolive”. Examining its ads of 1911 in which certain ancient exempla are employed, it becomes clear that the Palmyrene queen Zenobia and with her the semi-historical Semiramis and the more mythical Dido are aligned to the “1001 Nights” character Scheherazade. Since they are jointly labelled as “historically famous oriental queens” and because of the reference to Zenobia’s white skin, they fall into the fantasy of fair-skinned harem women and evoke thoughts of all the pleasures and comforts of the luxurious Orient. To the modern female customer of 1900 (well steeped in the knowledge of those ancient characters) Zenobia and the other exempla should serve as celebrities worth emulating. Above all they are deemed to be beautiful, and experts in cosmetics which would guarantee the effect of the product they are standing for. A finding that proves to be valid even in an advertising concept of today for the Syrian-German “Zhenobya-soap”.
Sängers Glück
(2020)
The German singer-songwriter Reinhard Mey, although not pretending to be a second Orpheus, nevertheless appears to be very familiar with classical myth.