Why speak of ‘reception’ in classical antiquity, rather than ‘allusion’ or ‘intertextuality’? This chapter begins by assessing the reasons for the emergence of the term reception in the scholarship of the last thirty years, identifying (a) a shift away from unilateral models of ‘influence’; (b) a postmodern promotion of the status of the ‘copy’; (c) a pedagogical need for multiplication of access points into the ancient world. But the idea of ‘reception’ has been applied primarily to post-antique cultures: why? Speaking of reception helps us break down the idea that antiquity itself was sealed off from later cultures, and that it was a homogeneous monoculture through which a single, cohesive tradition ran. It puts the emphasis on discontinuity, and the specificity and idiosyncrasy of each act of receiving; such acts can therefore be understood as ‘theorisations’ of the idea of tradition. This approach to literary history creates an equivalence between all receptions, however apparently ‘central’ or ‘marginal’. It also spotlights the political embeddedness and materiality of each act of reception. The chapter closes by considering how the volume’s contributions further this agenda.

Within the last fifteen years there have been two additions to Sappho’s corpus (the Cologne fragment on old age, published in 2004, and the more recent Brothers and Cypris poems, published in 2014) both discovered in Greco-Roman Egypt. Notwithstanding this fact there is a general tendency to treat Egypt as idiosyncratic: useful when some aspect of a recovered text fits a scholar’s notion of Sappho’s poetic practice or ancient reception in the Archaic or Classical Period, but otherwise dismissed as irrelevant in taste and in patterns of survival. To test this assumption, I consider the survival of Sappho’s poetry from two perspectives: what ancient Greek sources outside of Graeco-Roman Egypt reveal about literate (as opposed to performative) reception of Sappho and how papyrus and parchment sources recovered from Egypt nuance that picture. My conclusion is that reception outside of and within Egypt is remarkably similar, that it is not possible to make a case for more than a specialized readership in either location, and that ancient readers read Sappho no more frequently than other lyric poets who do not, however, command the modern attention.

This chapter focuses on the Sufferings in Love, the mythological collection of racy stories by Parthenius of Nicaea. It proposes that Parthenius’ ‘little notebook’ was eminently ‘good to think with’ in the context of the various dance idioms evolving in first century BC Rome, particularly in the period of vigorous miscegenation and experimentation leading up to the flamboyant, official entrance of pantomime dancing into Roman public life. Although we are unlikely ever to know whether any performances wrought around the material assembled by Parthenius actually materialized in the twilight of the Roman Republic, the possibility should act as a warning against any uncritical assumption that stylish Hellenistic/ neoteric work and corporeal, performance dialects could not have much in common. The chapter uses the example of Parthenius’ putative afterlife ‘in the flesh’ to make a wider case about the need of writing the non-verbal, kinaesthetic, and thoroughly embodied medium that is the art of dance into the bigger narrative of reception in antiquity. ‘Reception into dance’ is neither inferior nor futile but immensely liberating, empowering, and potentially pathbreaking

When the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus compared the cosmos to a posset of barley, cheese and wine (kukeōn) whose ingredients separated if they were not stirred, he spawned other alimentary images for states of many-in-oneness, from variegated poetry to modern multicultural societies. This chapter explores the reception of Heraclitus’ image in later Greek and Latin literature. Plautus’ cook-figures and culinary neologisms have been read as analogues for the poet’s versatile reassembly of Greek culture, while an epic pun in Virgil’s Aeneid frames as “child’s play” a special moment in etymological, culinary and territorial history. In the pseudo-Virgilian Moretum, a peasant’s miniature cosmos takes shape, culminating in the production of a garlic- and herb-flavoured cheese whose many-in-oneness gave a motto to the United States of America (e pluribus unum). At Petronius’ Cena Trimalchionis, dishes based on verbal and visual puns reinforce the freedmen’s liminal identity. Culinary conglomerates have repeatedly transcended their ludic, extemporized contexts to serve the politics and aesthetics of diversity, from antiquity to modern times.

The surviving ‘Judaeo-Christian’ Sibylline Oracles, recomposed over several centuries from the late Hellenistic period onwards, offer an understudied example of overlap between didactic, oracular and universalising strands in ancient Homeric and Hesiodic receptions. This chapter makes a multifaceted case for viewing the Sibylline Oracles as latter-day ‘Hesiodic rhapsody’, whose blend of universal history and ethical exhortation is informed by supra-Homeric perspectives.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus discusses the Athenian funeral orations in his Antiquitates Romanae and his literary-critical essays. He takes a negative view of both the Athenian public funeral and of three specific examples of funeral orations –the Periclean epitaphios in Thucydides, Socrates’ speech in Plato’s Menexenus, and the funeral oration ascribed to Demosthenes (Dem. 60). The nature of his negative pronouncements suggests that his moral aversion to the orations, and to what the public funerals had represented, guided his aesthetic responses to the individual texts. While the encomiastic commonplaces on view in the funeral orations provide the blueprint for Dionysius’ idealised conception of Athens, the speeches themselves are vehicles unworthy of conveying those ideals. The case of the funeral oration offers a good illustration of how Dionysius’ classicism is inherently, recursively nostalgic and so ultimately chimerical. His idealised view of Athens is defined not by the funeral orations themselves, but by the valorisation of authors who made a project of berating their compatriots for failure to live up to the example, and exempla, of earlier generations.

Socrates presents particular challenges to reception studies for the obvious reason that he did not write anything and thus left no textual corpus for posterity to receive. It is instead his own body (corpus) that often becomes the focal point of reception. This chapter examines the reception of Socrates in the works of Isocrates. Unlike other Socratics who had direct access to Socrates and left careful portraits of the philosopher from a group of like-minded admirers, Isocrates offers an interesting insight into the way in which Socrates (both his physical presence and his turning into an imaginary model figure) was perceived to have shaped the cultural and philosophical landscape in Athens. Though sometimes also counted among Socrates’ admirers, this chapter argues that Isocrates’ works offer a fundamentally critical reflection on Socrates and his teacher role in Athens. This critical insight becomes a key motivation for Isocrates’ own work and there is indeed much at stake: according to Isocrates, Athens is need for a new teacher and philosopher figure (Isocrates himself) who would supplant the statuesque Socrates.