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Ringing trumpets announcing the arrival of a Roman emperor, an oriental flowing and delicate harp reverberating inside the intimate palace of an Egyptian queen, a rude aulos singing in a bucolic Greek landscape: where are these familiar sound images coming from? Are these creations inspired by archaeological data or built after modern fantasy? The scarcity of ancient musical data necessitated, in fact, to reinvent the films’ soundscape taking place in the Ancient world. It is therefore a question of seeing on which models a peplum’s soundtrack is conceived and what it can reveal on our way of perceiving the ancient and contemporary world. Far from wanting to gauge the historicity of the sound backgrounds offered to the spectator of dark rooms, it is rather a question of seeing the imitation phenomena that can appear from the sound clichés created by the peplum itself and of also deducing from them thought patterns which, contextualized, influence these compositions. This article will focus on post-2000 productions.
Demagogen dichten
(2022)
Manipulative rhetoric is a common issue in ancient sources. As the issue of political populism and rhetoric still attracts a high degree of interest among a wide range of people, the author, a singer-songwriter, attempts to ‘revive’ these ancient sources and to adapt them into a lyrical/musical format for modern audiences, in order to test different strategies of manipulation and gauge the reactions of modern audiences. The following article describes the process of adapting and performing two of these experiments, as well as the results and feedback from audiences. The ancient case studies chosen for this are Thucydides’ description of how Alcibiades lead the Athenians into a fatal expedition to Sicily, and Xenophon’s blames of two public orators for executing Athenian generals after the battle of Arginusae through their manipulative speeches.
Taking its cue from the portrayal of Hercules as muscleman in both films and ancient sculpture this article turns to poetry as a verbal art and examines when and how the hero's body comes into focus in Roman epic and elegy. It is argued that moments of crisis contrasting Hercules’ state in a given situation to his former heroic achievements give rise to representations of his body, while epic fight scenes rather draw attention to the bodies of his inferior opponents. The body is described through references to different body parts, qualified by attributes as masculine in elegiac contexts. A somewhat exotic word as tori suffices to highlight the hero’s muscular body.
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”.
In March 2021, the IMAGINES Project – an international and interdisciplinary research network for the modern reception of antiquity in the visual and performing arts – held their seventh conference online. The event focused on PLAYFUL CLASSICS, and was hosted from Göttingen University by the organizers Juliette Harrisson, Antje Kuhle and Martin Lindner.
The keynote by Dunstan Lowe on „The Danger of Seriousness: Play and the Future of Classics“ outlined the potential of researching classical reception as a creative process. The following sections brought this to life with in-depth treatments of the underlying mechanics of constructing and deconstructing, playful learning, the „Faces of Antiquity“, forms of interaction and national/nationalistic traditions. The programme combined scholarly contributions with presentations and workshops by various artists and open discussion elements.
The shift to an online format allowed the participation of an unusually international audience, while the interactive elements – including a thematic game as a continuous side event – especially encouraged a large number of students to participate actively. Therefore, this conference report will not just summarize the content of the event, but also provide a student perspective on attending a conference on classical reception – a research area which is mostly neglected in the teaching curriculum.
Etymologie und Erotik
(2020)
On the surface the television series Lucifer (2016 – 21) is a simple police procedural but, in actuality, the criminal cases in the show serve merely as window-dressing and structure for the deeper consideration of issues, such as guilt, shame, love, and even the meaning of life on both an individual and universal level. These topics are explored through the ever-developing character of Lucifer himself, who, like other recent anti-hero depictions, is initially presented in a manner that is very different from traditional portrayals of the Devil, and is, in fact, far closer to that of the Greek Olympian gods. Over the course of six seasons, the depiction of Lucifer alters, however, as he becomes a figure that is in many ways Christ-like, but with a 21st century twist that places the individual in an exalted position that is superior to that of divinity.
Within Persona 5’s modern Tokyo setting, imagined worlds are created that represent the cognitive processes of various characters. These ‘palaces’ allow the player to explore locations far removed from the game’s real-world, contemporary backdrop. One episode creates an ancient Egyptian world. This article examines how this world has been produced and the different transmedial tropes and other influences that its developers have drawn upon. Many references are recognisable to a broad audience (pyramids, gods, hieroglyphs), while others reflect Japanese pop-cultural trends (in various manga and anime), including the mention of an obscure Egyptian god, Medjed. The intentionally fictitious nature of these ‘palaces’ means that the Egypt that appears in this game is not bound by the need to replicate an ‘accurate’ landscape. Instead, the developers were free to design a gamescape that combines multiple and diverse receptions of ancient Egypt.
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.