Month: March 2018

Anachronism and Antiquity: looking backwards

The conference is an important marker of progress in any research project. It offers a forum in which new ideas can be tested and deepened through collaboration and discussion, and patterns and connections recognised and further explored.

Thanks to the speakers, and to other participants from our hosts at Florida State University’s Department of Classics, we felt that our conference delivered this. We were pleased to find links across papers on different authors and genres, bringing out common themes across time and connecting ancient and modern. There will be much more to come from the conference as we develop our papers and the connections they have forged, but this initial report aims to give some idea of the energy of the event itself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The conference began with a brief welcome from project leader Tim Rood and collaborator John Marincola.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Snow in New York meant that there was not enough time for our first presenter, Constanze Güthenke, to reach us in person, but connected via Skype across space and time zones she was able to deliver a paper that explored the relationship between anachronism and exemplarity, a significant theme that would recur in other talks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mark Payne’s paper explored the temporality of post-apocalyptic fictions, from Hesiod to Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, exploring the persistence of classical motifs of destruction and the relearning of the skills necessary for human survival from Works and Days to contemporary speculative fiction.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brooke Holmes explored the way in which ancient thinkers seek to connect themselves and their ideas to the past, even generating anachronisms in their interpretation of the work of predecessors. Her paper focused on this phenomenon in medical texts, particularly Galen’s reading of Hippocratic texts, but it may be a broader phenomenon of ancient intellectual history.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In exploring ancient use of the past as a means of providing authority and legitimation for new ideas, Brooke also provided an important reminder of the importance of understanding how these processes still operate, and particularly the political implications of claims to the authority of the classical past in the context of American history and the legacy of slavery and inequality.

Scarlett Kingsley looked at some of the earliest texts in which the language of anachronism makes an explicit appearance, late antique commentaries on classical texts surviving as comments in the manuscript tradition. Scholiasts struggled to interpret the temporality of tragedy, with its mixture of heroic myth and references to contemporary fifth-century Athenian political practices and concerns. Scarlett highlighted how such concerns often emerged as identification of transgressions of the boundaries of genre.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Emily Greenwood approached the temporality of Thucydides’ History through the idea of ‘literature as witness’, taking his reportage of the Athenian plague as a starting point. Writing as witness is key to modern construction of crisis; Emily read Ali Smith’s prose poem from her 2016 novel Autumn as an example written in response to the Brexit vote:

All across the country, there was misery and rejoicing.
All across the country, what had happened whipped about by itself as if a live electric wire had snapped off a pylon in a storm and was whipping about in the air above the trees, the roofs, the traffic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Emily also emphasised the work on Nicole Loraux on anachronism and historical analogy.

Missing from the live-tweeting is Carol Atack’s own paper, ‘Plato’s Queer Time: Dialogic Moments in the Life and Death of Socrates’, which used queer theories of temporality to explore Plato’s use of affective and non-linear time in constructing his dialogues, and his affirmation of non-reproductive filiation in the relationships between educators and educated.

The second day began with a team photo:

Anachronism team photo
The Anachronism and Antiquity team: from left to right John Marincola, Carol Atack, Tim Rood and Tom Phillips.

The three remaining papers connected a wide range of ground, from ancient philosophy to contemporary politics via the romantic revolutionary spirit of Percy Shelley. Barney Taylor explored the highly self-conscious archaism of Lucretius’ verse as he interwove Greek philosophy and emerging traditions of Latin poetic form. Tom Phillips looked at Shelley’s reworking of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes as the Hymn to Mercury in the context of Shelley’s own dissatisfaction with the politics of Periclean Athens as a radical reception of the classical past.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, Ellen O’Gorman discussed Jacques Rancière’s use of Tacitus’ history and Auerbach’s reading of it in his Mimesis to explore the way in which proletarian voices are included or excluded from historical narrative. Rancière’s thought on anachrony and the problem of identifying and describing intellectual and historical change had been a frequent point of reference throughout the conference, and this detailed reading was particularly helpful.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ellen closed her paper with a look at the voice of the excluded in contemporary Dublin, through the rapper Tommy KD’s reading of the Irish Proclamation

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, John Marincola concluded the proceedings with some thoughts on Polybius’ cyclical view of history and change.

 

 

 

 

 

At the time that the conference was closing, many young people gathered outside FSU’s Westcott Center to march to the nearby State Capitol as part of the national March for our Lives. We were reminded of the role of Tallahassee’s students in previous campaigns for social change, such as the bus boycott begun by two students at the city’s Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in May 1956.

 

 

 

That afternoon, we explored the deeper past of Florida, with a visit to the state park at Wakulla Springs, where animals and humans have been nourished for many millennia. We were thrilled to see alligators and manatees, in a beauty spot that has served as a film location (Tarzan, Creature from the Black Lagoon) for films that attempt to connect contemporary human life with the distant past, an extreme and in some cases problematic version of the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous.

 

 

Welcome to Anachronism and Antiquity: Configuring Temporalities in Ancient Literature and Scholarship

Our Florida team has prepared a poster for our project conference which takes place at the end of this week.

Full details of paper titles and the running order is now on our Events page.

Anachronism and Antiquity poster

‘Do this!’ Performing political analogy in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

BRUTUS: Peace! count the clock.

CASSIUS: The clock hath stricken three.

Search the internet for a definition of ‘anachronism’ and it’s likely that this exchange in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar will be cited as a prime example. Shakespeare uses the conspirators’ response to the sound of the clock striking to interrupt their meeting, reminding them of their limited opportunity for action. But does it also disrupt the audience, reminding them that they are watching an incomplete depiction of an ancient society in which there were no striking clocks? Does Shakespeare deliberately collapse the historical distance between Rome and the present, or is he unconcerned about separating the two or even unaware of the difference? And what are the implications for performances now, when both Rome and Shakespeare are in the past?

Julius Caesar performance
Staging the opening scene of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as contemporary protest and performance, Bridge Theatre.

The relationship between Roman past and dramatic present in Shakespeare’s play is fluid, with plenty of other elements – especially material objects and props, costumes, weapons, books – that suggest slippage between the two. But the audible interruption of the clock, itself indicative of his characters’ anxiety about time, is particularly telling. As with his series of English history plays, part of Shakespeare’s purpose appears to be to connect past events with present political concerns, to explore the present through the past, and so one might expect past and present to merge. The Tudor era scarcely lacked political conspiracy and violence, although in a significantly different political landscape from that of the Roman republic; scholars debate the extent to which Shakespeare elided the different societies, although the emergence of strong leadership in a state of growing power offers clear parallels.

For each new production of the play, directors have choices to make in drawing analogies and connections between the Roman past, the Tudor past and the political present. Their choices in emphasising or collapsing historical distance between Rome, Shakespeare and themselves perhaps reveal the political anxieties of the present. They also remind us of the role of drama in providing exemplars and analogies through which we can think about our present concerns.

The current production at London’s new Bridge Theatre, directed by Nicholas Hytner and designed by Bunny Christie, is the first production of a Shakespeare play at this new venue, just as the play’s debut in 1599 was one of, if not the first, productions at the Globe Theatre. For both Shakespeare and Hytner Julius Caesar can perhaps be read as a statement of theatrical intent. The new production’s immersive approach simultaneously acknowledges the active audience of Shakespeare’s theatre, and uses it to foreground present political concerns. Long before the clock strikes, the audience through its participation has bridged past and present. The standing audience in the pit is co-opted to represent the mass of Romans – but kitted out in red baseball caps labelled ‘Caesar’, and exhorted to ‘Do this!’, emphasising their performative role. Like crowds at a contemporary demonstration or festival the spectators wave flags and sing along to the rock band performing for the rude revels of the Lupercalia, its cover versions of rock standards standing in for the low culture of the mob scene that opens Shakespeare’s play.

The audience surges around performers as they rise into view to speak, enacting the changing allegiances of the Roman crowd, as Brutus and Mark Antony take the stage in turn at Caesar’s funeral, to defend their actions and to claim the loyalty of the crowd, many still wearing their Caesar-branded hats. But the constantly moving staging also generates uncertainty and division. As the Roman factions enter battle, the audience is scattered to the margins, performing the collapse of civic order along with the actors.

One aspect of the production’s own manipulation of past and present is to dress the proto-tyrant in the costume of a presidential contender, as other recent US productions have done, to some controversy. In doing so they insist that both Roman politics and Shakespeare’s drama can inform our analysis of present-day events, and that a play insistent in its concern about time can become a timeless commentary.

Indeed, as Mary Beard notes in her note on Roman history for the programme, the whole play is an exercise in exemplarity, setting up Caesar’s death on the Ides of March as the prime example of assassination. And as an exemplar, it benefits from connection to the present through analogy marked by anachronistic references. But as Matthew D’Ancona notes in turn in another programme note, it is not Caesar himself who provides the exemplar for us in our present political circumstances, but Brutus, played in this production by David Calder and Ben Whishaw respectively. D’Ancona sees Shakespeare’s Brutus, the idealist and philosophical conspirator happiest at home with his books, as a paradigm for the failure of Britain’s liberal elite to explain itself and its political projects to the wider public. He connects this to the ‘post-truth’ political rhetoric on which he has written in his book of that title. But Brutus’ inability to match the rhetoric of Mark Antony also taps into a long classical tradition that begins with the disdain for the philosopher depicted by Plato, or even in the Sicilian Expedition debates of Thucydides, and shows no sign of ending.

  • Matthew d’Ancona (2017) Post-Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back (London: Ebury).
  • Dennis Kezar  (2005) ‘Julius Caesar ’s Analogue Clock and the Accents of History’, in Zander, H. (ed.), Julius Caesar: new critical essays (New York: Routledge), pp. 241-255.