Year: 2011
Type: book
Abstract: s e r i e s e d i t o r s ' f o r e w o r d her chamber endowed with a yet more beautiful naturalness, with freedom, depth, and serenity"; the human spirit's profundity is no longer manifested "in confusion, gloom, or arrogance, but in perfect clarity." 2 Even in subsequent reversals of this idealist hieros gamos of antiquity and modernity, we still find a giddy clarity reached through excavating a deeply unserene Dionysian or Oedipal pre-history among the ancients.What will happen to us when antiquity no longer comes forward as a natural and self-evident bride, but instead, as already riven with loss, poisoned by irony and inauthenticity, restless in its cultural discontent, unclear in its relation to history, nature, and the world?This book shows us we need not fear to face the ancients in their untimeliness and unclarity (their untiquity, we might say).If anything, we have more to gain by admitting that they too had their all too human struggles with being at home in the world.That is the basis for the discussion the reader will find here, one the authors and the editors hope will continue on into this new millennium.We will try to have the courage of our suspicions and to rethink antiquity as something as unsettling, confounding, and compelling as our own troubled age.Alston and Spentzou find the importance of antiquity lies in analogy, not genealogy; in this work, they seek out situational resonances, not timeless or foundational truths, in order "to find the human and humane in the spaces between the closed epistemes, and in so doing fracture those enclosures" (21).It is a passage to humanity through Romanity, a "history of the past for the present" that we are proud to present in this series. See note 1.This book is, amongst other things, about memory and recollection.Drafting our acknowledgments, we recall, in conversation, that first exchange in a corridor in the Institute of Classical Studies in London about research and what each one of us might do next, and the surprise we felt when we realized that we were thinking about shifting our research to the same period.And then more conversations followed, and then a project, and then a grant and then we started to research and write.Inevitably, schedules never quite matched.One of us would be working on our project, while the other was just finishing off something else.And then our lives and programs would switch.We brought to the project different skills and interests, different approaches and different voices, but for us the journey was not one of trying to amalgamate those separate voices into a coherent form, making one book from two studies, but of finding a third voice, of working our way into new modes of thinking and expression, of challenging the disciplinary boundaries in which we separately worked, and thinking afresh our understandings of the world we studied.We both, then, had to separate how we wrote and thought together from how we write and think as individuals, creating almost a separate dream of writing in which we wrote as each other, Efi as Richard, Richard as Efi, to make a new author.It may be that a discerning critic, if they can be bothered, and one who knows us both, might be able to pick through the text and assign original authorship to one of the Efi-Richard beings, but we have lost track.When words were scribed by one hand, the idea may have originated with the other.In that dream of writing, the fluidity of personality Acknowledgments xiii a C k n o w l e d g M e n t s xiv and the complexity of the relationship of the author with the text became very real for us.Along this journey, we have reassessed, rethought, and re-engaged with our subject matter, both on the local scale of the literature and society of the early Roman Empire, but also our overall connection with classical studies.We found, somewhat to our surprise, that we were continually returning to the issue of the purpose of classical studies and that we kept arguing for a closer and more disciplined engagement with the classical past, that what happened in antiquity matters, not because of some general commitment to the history of other cultures nor because of the continuous reception of the classical past (both of which are important), but because the classical gives us a new/old perspective on the problems of our society and of being human.Although this engagement has often been uncomfortable, and we have at times faced incomprehension in an academia which is fond of genres and categories, our intellectual lives have been immensely enriched by this experience and we have emerged from this project invigorated and convinced of the value of classical research.Our hope is that our readers take this project for what it is, an engagement, an intervention, that is a jumping off point for discussion and not 'the last word.'Our need is for more conversations, more words and new debates, not conclusions.We have become convinced that in Rome of the early imperial period, there is a past that is worth listening to, struggling with, and understanding, a past that offers radical challenges to the present.Research is a voyage of discovery, and we are very grateful that almost ten years ago we bought the ticket, and embarked on this trip into the unknown.We owe much to the enthusiastic support of our friends and colleagues.We carried this project into classrooms, seminars, meetings over coffee, or on the fringes of a conference.Several of these conversations were not even about our project per se.The regular seminars of the Humanities and Arts Research Centre (HARC) at Royal Holloway, University of London, especially in the period 2003-7, gave us an invaluable comparative literature forum and were vital in encouraging a radical approach.Ewan Fernie engaged with our ideas from a very early stage, helped us think through problems, and encouraged us to look towards unfamiliar sources of inspiration.Ruud Nauta and Onno van Nijf drummed up an audience of staff and students for a seminar at the University of Groningen, and their supportive responses at a crucial stage in the evolution of our ideas were more important than they can possibly have realized.Jim Samson read the whole manuscript for us and suggested many improvements, remaining positive and supportive all the way.We would also like to thank our students both at BA at Royal Holloway, and at MA in the University of London, on whom we have tried out our ideas over a number a C k n o w l e d g M e n t s xv of years.Sometimes baffled, sometimes inspired, but always engaged, their responses and contributions have been entertaining and inspiring, demonstrating repeatedly the advantages of the link between teaching and research.So often their fresh eyes would see things in the texts that we had missed, and their responses would suggest different ways in which we could work through the problems that we were posing.Their openness to disciplinary diversity and their unwillingness to accept 'authoritative voices' enlivened seminars, and made teaching a reinvigorating experience.We also thank the Leverhulme Trust, who funded our research at a very early stage, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, who provided Efi with a research leave extension that enabled us to complete a draft of the book of sufficient coherence that we could show it to publishers.The process of bringing this volume to publication has not been straightforward.We would like to thank Eugene O'Connor and The Ohio State University Press for their willingness to see this project for what it is and for their continuing support.The series editors, Richard Armstrong and Paul Allen Miller, who read the manuscript at a relatively early stage, demonstrated remarkable acuity in their comments and have, as a result, made this a much better book.Their commitment to the project was unwaivering, and we are enormously grateful.Of course we stand up, and take full responsibility, for the ideas, suggestions, and any pitfalls of the book.finally, the cover.We fell in love with this painting: the painting of an exile; color, fluidity, vibrancy.It tries to capture water in movement.Somehow that seemed entirely appropriate.
Authors: Richard Alston, Efrossini Spentzou
Language: English
Topic: Classical Antiquity Studies
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W261430122