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This essay employs hip-hop theory, specifically the ideas of the sample (incorporating text or music from another source) and the mashup (a free blending of two songs to form a third), to engage and explore the different iterations of Will Power’s The Seven, a rap adaptation of Aeschylus’ The Seven against Thebes. Specifically, The Seven is examined as a mashup that samples Aeschylus. Power does not merely transculturate a Greek tragedy into an African-American context, the different audiences for Power’s work and competing claims on it by audiences, critics, and scholars problematize the relationship between Greek original and twenty-first-century American adaptation, resulting in The Seven being perceived as both the product of shared cultural space and a work that itself creates shared cultural space.

The analysis and periodisation of the events and changes that take us from the Roman Empire at its height to whatever came after it have long occupied a distinguished place in European historiography. The collapse of the Roman state, however understood, issued in multiple polities of greater and lesser stability, as well as multiple vernaculars in law and language. This historiographic tradition was a European tradition, produced first in Latin and later in Romance and Germanic languages, and was preoccupied with explaining a European past and present. In the analysis of cause, much attention was focused on barbarism and religion, and in both cases there was a sharp divide in assessment. In addition, however positively the emergence of Europe was esteemed, the fall of Rome and the changes consequent to it were construed as a decline, a falling-off from classical ideals in reason, classical aesthetics in literary and decorative arts, and classical standards of prosperity in urban and economic life. This article explores when classical antiquity ended, focusing on literatures of the Roman decline and fall.

Chapter 33 focuses on Demosthenes’ reception in antiquity and during the Byzantine Era. In particular, it examines the character and value of the 15 ‘demegoriai’ that survive from Demosthenes’ Assembly speeches, first by discussing the peculiarly Demosthenic phenomenon of a first version written already in a highly elaborated form. Demosthenes was perhaps influenced here by Isocrates’ important innovation, the written speech that presented itself as if it had been delivered; this practice is also documented in Demosthenes’ circle by the On Halonnesus of his associate Hegesippus. These innovative practices became the object of attention for the generation of critics immediately following Demosthenes. The article considers the reception of Demosthenes by looking at the works of Theopompus of Chios, Anaximenes of Lampsacus, Timaeus, Aesion, Hermippus, Demochares, Callimachus, Polybius, Cicero, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Didymus of Alexandria, Hermogenes of Tarsus, Plutarch, Lucian of Samosata, Aelius Aristides, Libanius, Zosimus, and Photius.

Chapter 34 focuses on Demosthenes’ reception in the modern era. It was Cicero and Quintilian who made sure that Demosthenes will never be forgotten. The praise that they heaped on Demosthenes’ style made it possible for him to always remain a figure to conjure with. Plutarch established the status of Cicero and Demosthenes as the twin fathers of oratory. The article first considers how Demosthenes emerged as a central topic in political discussions during the modern period, as seen in the first English translation of the Olynthiacs and the Philippics by Thomas Wilson. It then examines how, from Wilson onwards, Demosthenes’ fortunes became largely intertwined with the fortunes of Athenian democracy itself, and particularly how his association with liberty and opposition to tyranny propelled Demosthenes into the limelight of American Revolutionary rhetoric. It also describes how Demosthenes became an important figure in popular culture.

“Greek Dramas in America: An Archival Interrogation” is a meditation on the timing of interest in Greek dramas in the U.S.A. that is informed by archival theory. The chapter argues that until the “culture wars” of the late twentieth century, Americans interested in Greek drama resisted the impulse to collect traces of them in American culture because they exposed the tension between an egalitarian ideal and the real distribution of power along lines of race and gender. Building on Derrida’s notion of the archive as the charge of those in power and as a symbol of the law, the chapter shows how Greek dramas inspired women and people of color to challenge the laws that limited their actions; it explores in depth the responses to Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century and the founding of “The Frogs,” an African-American social club in the early 1900s, to make the case.

The chapter studies the reception of Aristophanes in American musical theater, with a focus on three productions that represent the span of approaches to Aristophanes and the variety of twentieth-century musicals. In 1925, Lysistrata, a touring production directed by Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko of the Moscow Art Theatre, brought to the U.S.A. an avant-garde Soviet adaptation of Aristophanes’ play. In 1961, E. Y. Harburg, using music by Jacques Offenbach, adapted Lysistrata as a traditional musical comedy, which he called The Happiest Girl in the World. In 1968, Greenwich Village minister and composer Al Carmines and poet Tim Reynolds turned Aristophanes’ Peace into an anti-Vietnam War protest to be performed at Judson Memorial Church. The chapter studies each production’s approach to adapting Aristophanes for its own time, with particular attention to how music was integrated (or not integrated) into the storytelling and how characters were reshaped to suit authors’ purposes and audiences’ expectations.

This chapter focuses on theater productions that have crossed the Atlantic. It explores questions, sometimes contentious, about how performance is shaped by overt and covert assumptions concerning the cultural horizons and socio-political perspectives of audiences. This in turn raise issues about the distinctive agendas of writers and producers, including the commercial considerations that underlie festival and global touring productions. The examples analyzed represent cultural traffic across the Atlantic in both directions: Tony Harrison’s Hecuba, Seamus Heaney’s Cure at Troy, and Lee Breuer’s Gospel at Colonus. The discussion also contributes to wider debates about the relationship between aesthetic and contextual aspects of performance and its histories, and of translation. The role of the spectators (actual and imagined) is crucial in negotiating this interface and includes theater critics as well as the bulk of the audience.

In this chapter, Rankine argues for August Wilson’s place in the discussion of Greek drama in the Americas. Although Wilson never staged any of the big three Greek playwrights, Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides, and his advocacy for telling specifically African-American stories sometimes led to a strident public stance against black actors’ and playwrights’ uncritical engagement with European drama, his own reading of Aristotle’s Poetics and blackface minstrelsy belied his political stance. Given Wilson’s reading of Poetics, Wilson’s position in Greek drama is firm and operates at a theoretical level, while onstage his subversion of the stereotypes attendant to blackface minstrelsy challenges a Modernism central to the emergence of American drama. Owing to the Wilsonian understanding of Aristotle’s spectacle, opsis, Rankine argues that Wilson’s Radio Golf is Greek drama in America.

This chapter looks at the reception of two popular nineteenth-century figures, Medea and Cleopatra, that plot tensions between American Philhellenism and Egyptomania. Surveying their representations in nineteenth-century international expositions, fine art, popular theater, and evolutionary theory, the chapter examines how these queens troubled social and cultural hierarchies by places them on the boundary between the respectability of classical culture and the thrill of barbarian excess. Covering the years 1856–91, the chapter focuses on sculptors Edmonia Lewis, William Wetmore Story, as well as actresses Matilda Heron, Adelaide Ristori, Fanny Davenport, and Sarah Bernhardt. Public engagement with antiquity and its barbarians suggests that American classicism was deeply contradictory. As many elites adopted antiquity to define their idealized values, audiences hungered to experience the emotions and sensuality that were, they believed, the exclusive domain of barbarians.

This article discusses the biblical story of the Old Testament hero Samson in order to exemplify the various modes of biblical discourse in medieval Latinate culture. Whether in prose or verse, the medieval writers dedicated their efforts to finding the meaning of creation and to establishing how the human relates to the divine. A few representative works illustrate the multifaceted role that the Bible played in the medieval literary imagination. The various modes of expression discussed show unequivocally that understanding and explaining the message of the sacred page was the defining feature of the literary discourse. The variety of approaches to the Scripture exhibited by the writers demonstrates that their relationship to the truth and mystery of the Bible was not dogmatic and uniform; rather, it was an impetus for intellectual curiosity and an inspiration for literary creativity. The text of the Bible opened many doors of understanding and showed a multitude of paths to enlightenment. Sacred Scripture, albeit inerrant, did not imply one meaning for the thinkers. They did not approach the text of the Bible mechanically. Sacred Scripture was their point of departure but also their font of inspiration.

O pagador de promessas (Payment as Pledged, by the Brazilian playwright Alfredo Dias Gomes) involves classical elements of tragedy, in particular the collision of positive values exemplified in Sophocles’ Antigone and famously discussed by George Friedric Hegel, plus a solid grounding in Brazilian culture. Joe Burro, a cross-carrying pilgrim, espouses values of individual piety and inclusive charity (he desires a cure for his pet donkey). In refusing to allow Joe entrance to the chapel because of certain “heretical” particulars of his promise, Father Olavo demonstrates a commitment to institutional values, such as religious orthodoxy and obedience. The two characters thus constitute a clash of opposing systems of values, consistent with Antigone and other ancient tragedies. Following its own inclusive agenda, the play combines echoes of classical tragedy with much local color, playful satire, and protest against contemporary political realities.

This chapter discusses Cuban playwright Antón Arrufat’s adaptation of Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes. Although Arrufat’s play was awarded the prize for drama by the Union of Cuban Artists and Writers when it was first performed in 1968, it was subsequently banned in Castro’s Cuba because of its allegorical references to the Bay of Pigs attack and suggestions of implied criticisms of Castro’s regime. It is argued, based on a comparative analysis with Aeschylus’ original, that Arrufat’s tragedy is not a condemnation of Cuban Revolution although it does raise questions concerning what the Revolution had become. Arrufat’s Los siete contra Tebas finally premièred in Cuba in 2007, in a somewhat more liberal climate, and certain details of this production are addressed.

In the course of its millennial history, much changed in the world around Byzantium. The Roman Empire from which Byzantium emerged as the true successor state was gradually pulled to pieces in late antiquity, a process of disaggregation which was but fleetingly reversed in the reign of Justinian in the sixth century. Byzantium proper — the reduced medieval state — was fashioned in the seventh century, when the explosive force of Islam blasted both established empires in west Eurasia, the Persian as well as the Roman, out of existence. For all the pragmatism shown in two centuries of comfortable existence, Byzantium never relinquished claims which were solidly founded in a well-remembered historical past. The behaviour of its neighbours cannot be understood unless they are placed in Constantinople's force-field. Yet more important, Byzantium itself cannot be understood, if, in retrospect, it is subjected to ideological castration. For the ultimate rationale of its existence was its Christian imperial mission. That conviction, widely shared in a thoroughly Orthodox society, was the shaping influence on its foreign policy.

More often than not in the course of its long history, Byzantium found itself in a defensive posture and its most dangerous enemies were Asiatics: Persians, Arabs, and various peoples of the steppe such as the Huns and the Turks. The ‘education’ of the Slavs calls for a more nuanced judgement. It means in effect the spread of Byzantine Christianity from the ninth century onwards to encompass the Bulgarians, Serbs, Russians, and (in part) Romanians, thus forming what Dimitri Obolensky has called the Byzantine Commonwealth, an ideological, not a political grouping, united by a common religion and the acknowledgement of Constantinople as its spiritual centre. Byzantium cannot be equated with Greece, nor is there any evidence that the Byzantine Empire pursued the diffusion of Greek language as a matter of conscious policy. That spoken Greek has survived, even as a minority language, may be considered, however, as one of Byzantium's positive contributions. This article considers Byzantium's role in world history.

This article focuses on the problematics of a medieval Latin canon and medieval Latin literary history, emphasising the idea of “minor literature” that Deleuze and Guattari reference in their subtitle. Given the dominance of the classical, one might well say that medieval Latin literature does not need to have either its own literary history or canon. Medieval Latin would then be appropriately treated as a mere phase of Latin literary history. It depends on a canon of auctores. Yet among the challenges of mapping medieval Latin literary history and its canon, it can be noted that there is no new and complete set of medieval Latin auctores or masters. Medieval Latinity is a literary culture content to have inherited the great majority of its masters and, further, one that, while affording the role of auctor supremacy, understands literary culture as involving a much more collective sense of authoring, including all the other functions involved or implicated in the processes of copying, annotating, and commenting.

Playwright Charles Mee is interviewed by theater director and performance historian Erin Mee (his daughter) about the adaptations of Greek tragedy that he has staged since the 1990s, including Orestes 2.0, Bacchae 2.1, Agamemnon, Trojan Women: A Love Story, and Big Love. Drawing parallels between American concerns over empire, and those in ancient Greece, and contrasting the private spaces of modern American tragedies (such as those by Arthur Miller) with the public space of Greek tragedies, Mee lauds the move in the latter half of the twentieth century towards the larger, more complex world of the Greeks. He discusses his collage-playwriting technique and the appeal that Greek drama holds for him, as well as the way the political environment in the United States throughout the second half of the twentieth century has impacted the theater that has been developed and staged there.

This chapter demonstrates how twentieth-century choreographies that reference the Classics embody changing images and ideas of gender and sexual dissidence. Analyses of Isadora Duncan’s dancing, Vaslav Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun, George Balanchine’s Apollo, Martha Graham’s Errand into the Maze, and Mark Morris’s Dido and Aeneas link onstage images to offstage contexts for non-normative conceptions of gender and sexuality. The chapter furthers a dialogue between classical reception studies and dance studies by periodizing twentieth-century choreography of the Classics and by arguing for the significance of the Classics for stagings of dissident gender and sexuality in modern dance and twentieth-century ballet. In this way, the reception of the Classics among modern choreographers departs from the reception of the Classics among theater artists.

This article shows how the work of physical construction of a city involved the creation of a history, an ideal past for the polis, which is owned by each individual citizen as much as the corporation. Its history is the citizen's ancestry. Since the citizen might be memorialized in inscription or statue, he might in his turn aspire to a kind of immortality as part of his city's historical identity. Within cities, the construction of memory may have been the means or the prize in power struggles or personal agendas. The story of Athens may bear rethinking in terms of competing political personalities. This should act as an invitation to consider that ‘collective memory’, like other products of the Greek city, may have to be read against the grain.

The Romans were not the first road builders in history, but they were the first to attempt to cover the whole empire up its frontiers with a systematic and dense network of carefully engineered and well-maintained roads. As the Byzantine Empire is the Roman Empire of the east, Byzantine roads are in effect the Roman roads of the eastern provinces, which the Byzantines in the course of their history little by little adapted to changing circumstances, needs, and means. This article focuses on the central regions of the Byzantine Empire, the Balkan peninsula, and Asia Minor. The article discusses the main routes of the Byzantine Empire; the purposes of road-building, their users, the means of travel; road administration, Byzantine road-building and repairing activities; different levels of roads and their Byzantine designations; the archaeological aspect of roads, bridges, and staging posts.