In this essay, I return to Horkheimer and Adorno’s reading of the Odyssey in the Dialectic of Enlightenment to suggest that Odysseus’s crew comes to figure ‘the Jew’ as a representative of nature in the antisemitic Imaginary—the nature that enlightenment continues to repress. Escape from enlightenment’s deadlock will depend on the ‘remembrance’ of that nature, an operation itself considered ‘Jewish’ and enacted in the epic’s dialectical form.
{"title":"In Search of Lost Haim: Homer and Heimat in the Dialectic of Enlightenment","authors":"David Youd","doi":"10.1093/crj/clad009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clad009","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In this essay, I return to Horkheimer and Adorno’s reading of the Odyssey in the Dialectic of Enlightenment to suggest that Odysseus’s crew comes to figure ‘the Jew’ as a representative of nature in the antisemitic Imaginary—the nature that enlightenment continues to repress. Escape from enlightenment’s deadlock will depend on the ‘remembrance’ of that nature, an operation itself considered ‘Jewish’ and enacted in the epic’s dialectical form.","PeriodicalId":42730,"journal":{"name":"Classical Receptions Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42971130","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Plots in which a woman is raped and left pregnant are common in Roman comedy, but the cultural meaning of unwanted pregnancy and its relationship to women’s personal freedoms and bodily autonomy varies across reception contexts. Antonios Matesis (1794–1875) translated Terence’s Hecyra into vernacular Greek in the 1820s before going on to compose a comedy of his own, The Pot of Basil, which is influenced by Terence’s play. Nevertheless, Matesis refocuses the emotional dynamics of Terence’s plot in order to focus on Garoufalia, the pregnant woman, whose counterpart in Terence never appears onstage. This narrative trajectory situates the play within a local Zakynthian context, with contemporary literary works such as the Autobiography of Elisavet Moutzan-Martinengou (1801–32) also offering a critical examination of women’s life on the island. The influence of Terence places Matesis squarely in a European tradition of Roman comic reception, but reading his play alongside Moutzan-Martinengou’s work demonstrates how closely Matesis is entwined with debates concerning the status of women in the area which was the historical faultline between Venetian and Ottoman spheres of influence.
{"title":"The rape-pregnancy plots of Roman comedy and their reception in nineteenth-century Greece: the case of The Pot of Basil by Antonios Matesis","authors":"Christopher Jotischky","doi":"10.1093/crj/clad008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clad008","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Plots in which a woman is raped and left pregnant are common in Roman comedy, but the cultural meaning of unwanted pregnancy and its relationship to women’s personal freedoms and bodily autonomy varies across reception contexts. Antonios Matesis (1794–1875) translated Terence’s Hecyra into vernacular Greek in the 1820s before going on to compose a comedy of his own, The Pot of Basil, which is influenced by Terence’s play. Nevertheless, Matesis refocuses the emotional dynamics of Terence’s plot in order to focus on Garoufalia, the pregnant woman, whose counterpart in Terence never appears onstage. This narrative trajectory situates the play within a local Zakynthian context, with contemporary literary works such as the Autobiography of Elisavet Moutzan-Martinengou (1801–32) also offering a critical examination of women’s life on the island. The influence of Terence places Matesis squarely in a European tradition of Roman comic reception, but reading his play alongside Moutzan-Martinengou’s work demonstrates how closely Matesis is entwined with debates concerning the status of women in the area which was the historical faultline between Venetian and Ottoman spheres of influence.","PeriodicalId":42730,"journal":{"name":"Classical Receptions Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48498980","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Czech culture and society have abundant experience of repressive regimes and political oppression, as well as censorship and bans on speaking publicly and critically about the political situation. This article focuses on two dramatizations of ancient Greek myth and demonstrates their connection with politics: Phaethon by Otakar Theer (1917) is an expression of rebellion against the bondage of the Czech nation in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, while The Whore from the City of Thebes by Milan Uhde (1967), a paraphrase of Sophocles’ Antigone, is a cynical analysis of the state of civil society in totalitarian communist Czechoslovakia. These plays tried to appeal to the audiences of the time allegorically, using ‘Aesopian language’ and parables. Both reinterpretations of Greek myth are analysed in their historical and cultural context and compared with contemporary adaptations of classical Greek tragedies.
{"title":"Mythological heroes on Czech stages and politics: the case of Phaethon and Antigone","authors":"Daniela Čadková","doi":"10.1093/crj/clad005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clad005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Czech culture and society have abundant experience of repressive regimes and political oppression, as well as censorship and bans on speaking publicly and critically about the political situation. This article focuses on two dramatizations of ancient Greek myth and demonstrates their connection with politics: Phaethon by Otakar Theer (1917) is an expression of rebellion against the bondage of the Czech nation in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, while The Whore from the City of Thebes by Milan Uhde (1967), a paraphrase of Sophocles’ Antigone, is a cynical analysis of the state of civil society in totalitarian communist Czechoslovakia. These plays tried to appeal to the audiences of the time allegorically, using ‘Aesopian language’ and parables. Both reinterpretations of Greek myth are analysed in their historical and cultural context and compared with contemporary adaptations of classical Greek tragedies.","PeriodicalId":42730,"journal":{"name":"Classical Receptions Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136091461","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Although it is one of his lesser known and performed plays, Henrik Ibsen considered Emperor and Galilean to be his Hovedverk—his ‘main’ or ‘pivotal’ work—in which he finally presented his positive worldview. It remains comparatively little studied in scholarship, though one scholar has recently argued that it is the key to unlocking his entire corpus. The present study builds upon past scholarship uncovering the works Ibsen drew upon in writing the play but goes beyond the mere question of its historical sources and accuracy to consider Ibsen’s purpose for including the specific and precise pieces of historical texture he chose in the particular order and configuration he devised. In short, we aim to identify the creative purposes for his curating of the historical details he took from his sources. What emerges from our analysis is that, even when Ibsen is following the sources, his protagonist stands out as a strikingly modern figure, more at home in the nineteenth century than the fourth. Ibsen portrays his Julian struggling with doubt and uncertainty of a distinctly modern caste; he puts in his mouth criticisms of Christianity that stem from modernity rather than the historical figure; and he suggests that, just as Christianity had to prove victorious over paganism in late antiquity, so Christianity itself must be superseded in the modern era, though perhaps some aspects of it are worth preserving in the yet-to-arrive third empire.
{"title":"Henrik Ibsen, Emperor Julian, and the crisis of faith in modernity","authors":"Brad Boswell, M. Crawford, Anna Stavrakopoulou","doi":"10.1093/crj/clad002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clad002","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Although it is one of his lesser known and performed plays, Henrik Ibsen considered Emperor and Galilean to be his Hovedverk—his ‘main’ or ‘pivotal’ work—in which he finally presented his positive worldview. It remains comparatively little studied in scholarship, though one scholar has recently argued that it is the key to unlocking his entire corpus. The present study builds upon past scholarship uncovering the works Ibsen drew upon in writing the play but goes beyond the mere question of its historical sources and accuracy to consider Ibsen’s purpose for including the specific and precise pieces of historical texture he chose in the particular order and configuration he devised. In short, we aim to identify the creative purposes for his curating of the historical details he took from his sources. What emerges from our analysis is that, even when Ibsen is following the sources, his protagonist stands out as a strikingly modern figure, more at home in the nineteenth century than the fourth. Ibsen portrays his Julian struggling with doubt and uncertainty of a distinctly modern caste; he puts in his mouth criticisms of Christianity that stem from modernity rather than the historical figure; and he suggests that, just as Christianity had to prove victorious over paganism in late antiquity, so Christianity itself must be superseded in the modern era, though perhaps some aspects of it are worth preserving in the yet-to-arrive third empire.","PeriodicalId":42730,"journal":{"name":"Classical Receptions Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46332295","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract By the mode of representation of human life processes, theatre from its very beginning has contributed to maintaining or confronting a given social order, so as to complete its ethico-political function. One of the genuinely politically involved issues to discuss in theatre has become the past. However, on stage, history is recalled to serve both the present and the future in order to construct and develop cultural memory. Classical reception provides a comprehensive method of coping with the past, empowering the performance of the political. This article ponders the development of the ethico-political function of contemporary theatre in Poland by providing three case studies of productions that perform history and cultural memory in a specifically chosen location: Orestes by Michał Zadara, Ajax. The Machine by Natalia Korczakowska, and Wałęsa at Colonus by Bartosz Szydłowski. The conceptual framework of the analysis is constructed from the idea of the political, adapted to the specificity of the Romantic paradigm that furnishes the ground for the study of performing history and cultural memory in Polish theatre. The issue in focus is to observe how the classical reception of ancient dramas can be a performance of the political through an indirect recalling of the historical past.
{"title":"Performing history and cultural memory through ancient drama: the case of contemporary Polish theatre","authors":"Małgorzata Budzowska","doi":"10.1093/crj/clad003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clad003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract By the mode of representation of human life processes, theatre from its very beginning has contributed to maintaining or confronting a given social order, so as to complete its ethico-political function. One of the genuinely politically involved issues to discuss in theatre has become the past. However, on stage, history is recalled to serve both the present and the future in order to construct and develop cultural memory. Classical reception provides a comprehensive method of coping with the past, empowering the performance of the political. This article ponders the development of the ethico-political function of contemporary theatre in Poland by providing three case studies of productions that perform history and cultural memory in a specifically chosen location: Orestes by Michał Zadara, Ajax. The Machine by Natalia Korczakowska, and Wałęsa at Colonus by Bartosz Szydłowski. The conceptual framework of the analysis is constructed from the idea of the political, adapted to the specificity of the Romantic paradigm that furnishes the ground for the study of performing history and cultural memory in Polish theatre. The issue in focus is to observe how the classical reception of ancient dramas can be a performance of the political through an indirect recalling of the historical past.","PeriodicalId":42730,"journal":{"name":"Classical Receptions Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135349877","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Correction to: ‘Beginning wherever you wish’: Sappho, Homer and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée","authors":"","doi":"10.1093/crj/clad006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clad006","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42730,"journal":{"name":"Classical Receptions Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46099019","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract In Wesley Enoch’s 2000 play Black Medea, Seneca’s Medea is reworked for settler-colonial Australia: Enoch’s Medea is an Indigenous woman from an unnamed Land who falls in love with Jason, an Indigenous man from the city with ambitions to succeed by settler-colonial standards. Against the will of her family, Medea reveals to Jason the natural resources lying underneath her Land and allows him to overturn the sacred earth in pursuit of profit for a Western corporation. The tragedy chronicles the subsequent demise of Jason and Medea’s relationship in the settler city and Medea’s filicidal retaliation for Jason’s crimes. Despite the radically different setting of Black Medea from its Roman antecedent, the two plays share numerous thematic concerns as well as several key moments in which the Senecan text is quoted verbatim. This essay contends that in Black Medea, Enoch apprehends topoi of displacement and temporal normativity from Seneca’s Medea and mobilizes them to elucidate the conditions of Indigenous Australians under settler colonialism. By doing so, he offers critical insight towards the use of Indigeneity as an analytic for Medea myths ancient and modern.
{"title":"Indigenous Medea: space, time, and resistance in Wesley Enoch’s <i>Black Medea</i>","authors":"Clare Kearns","doi":"10.1093/crj/clad004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clad004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In Wesley Enoch’s 2000 play Black Medea, Seneca’s Medea is reworked for settler-colonial Australia: Enoch’s Medea is an Indigenous woman from an unnamed Land who falls in love with Jason, an Indigenous man from the city with ambitions to succeed by settler-colonial standards. Against the will of her family, Medea reveals to Jason the natural resources lying underneath her Land and allows him to overturn the sacred earth in pursuit of profit for a Western corporation. The tragedy chronicles the subsequent demise of Jason and Medea’s relationship in the settler city and Medea’s filicidal retaliation for Jason’s crimes. Despite the radically different setting of Black Medea from its Roman antecedent, the two plays share numerous thematic concerns as well as several key moments in which the Senecan text is quoted verbatim. This essay contends that in Black Medea, Enoch apprehends topoi of displacement and temporal normativity from Seneca’s Medea and mobilizes them to elucidate the conditions of Indigenous Australians under settler colonialism. By doing so, he offers critical insight towards the use of Indigeneity as an analytic for Medea myths ancient and modern.","PeriodicalId":42730,"journal":{"name":"Classical Receptions Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134983445","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article sets Euripides’ Bacchae in dialogue with Goran Stefanovski’s Bahanalii, a play that was performed in the immediate aftermath of Yugoslavia’s break-up. Contrapuntal reading shows how the two plays problematize conservative epistemologies by imagining their borderlands as privileged sites of knowledge production. Euripides’ Bacchae opens with a Dionysus who arrives on stage from a faraway land where Greeks and non-Greeks live mixed together. My reading of this passage challenges Edward Said’s interpretation of the Bacchae as a play about the dangers of ‘what lies beyond familiar borders’. Instead, the Bacchae performs an exercise in literary imagination in which a border-minded worldview responds to Athens’ dwindling geopolitical prestige, resists narratives of Greek exceptionalism inherited in the aftermath of the Persian wars, and foresees a return to a kind of Hellenic balkanization avant la lettre. In Bahanalii, Stefanovski resists idealizing mindsets by staging a contradictory Dionis, one that focalizes the epistemological power of the border, while also embodying the uncanny poltergeist of the violence that plagued Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In juxtaposing the narratives of Yugoslav and ancient Athenian exceptionalism, this comparison unlocks a ‘balkanizing’ paradigm of classical reception which complements and complicates existing theoretical accounts of classical reception.
{"title":"Between Bacchae and Bahanalii—balkanizing classical reception","authors":"N. Todorović","doi":"10.1093/crj/clac023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clac023","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article sets Euripides’ Bacchae in dialogue with Goran Stefanovski’s Bahanalii, a play that was performed in the immediate aftermath of Yugoslavia’s break-up. Contrapuntal reading shows how the two plays problematize conservative epistemologies by imagining their borderlands as privileged sites of knowledge production. Euripides’ Bacchae opens with a Dionysus who arrives on stage from a faraway land where Greeks and non-Greeks live mixed together. My reading of this passage challenges Edward Said’s interpretation of the Bacchae as a play about the dangers of ‘what lies beyond familiar borders’. Instead, the Bacchae performs an exercise in literary imagination in which a border-minded worldview responds to Athens’ dwindling geopolitical prestige, resists narratives of Greek exceptionalism inherited in the aftermath of the Persian wars, and foresees a return to a kind of Hellenic balkanization avant la lettre. In Bahanalii, Stefanovski resists idealizing mindsets by staging a contradictory Dionis, one that focalizes the epistemological power of the border, while also embodying the uncanny poltergeist of the violence that plagued Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In juxtaposing the narratives of Yugoslav and ancient Athenian exceptionalism, this comparison unlocks a ‘balkanizing’ paradigm of classical reception which complements and complicates existing theoretical accounts of classical reception.","PeriodicalId":42730,"journal":{"name":"Classical Receptions Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45708447","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
After her depiction in Catullus 64, Ariadne became a model for the relicta, the abandoned woman. The tapestry that ornamented the wedding of Peleus and Thetis told exactly of her dismay and anger upon learning that Theseus left her. As far as the myth goes, following her abandonment, Dionysus took her as a wife. Modernist Brazilian author Hilda Hilst (1930–2004) revisits this portion of the tale in her cycle of ten poems Discontinuous and Remote Ode for Flute and Oboe. From Ariadne to Dionysus (1969). This introduces the poems as works of reception vis-à-vis the ancient figurations of Ariadne, as well as the context of Hilst’s biography, it analyses them as reimaginations of the Roman elegy, and presents their first complete English translation, all original endeavours. On the surface, Hilst’s Ariadne fashions herself as a learned poet who reads Catullus and rejoices in her abandonment. I argue that upon a closer look, however, this endlessly unrequited woman desires instead union and permanence. Hilst, herself an underappreciated and disreputable figure, unveils Ariadne’s labyrinthic mind as she negotiates her devotion to poetry and her desire for the man she loves, revealing the afterlife of the myth of a heroine who found her own voice.
{"title":"‘If Clodia despised Catullus, you can very well, Dionysus, despise Ariadne’: classical receptions and Roman elegy in Hilda Hilst’s Discontinuous and Remote Ode for Flute and Oboe. From Ariadne to Dionysus (1969)","authors":"Fernando Gorab Leme","doi":"10.1093/crj/clad001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clad001","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 After her depiction in Catullus 64, Ariadne became a model for the relicta, the abandoned woman. The tapestry that ornamented the wedding of Peleus and Thetis told exactly of her dismay and anger upon learning that Theseus left her. As far as the myth goes, following her abandonment, Dionysus took her as a wife. Modernist Brazilian author Hilda Hilst (1930–2004) revisits this portion of the tale in her cycle of ten poems Discontinuous and Remote Ode for Flute and Oboe. From Ariadne to Dionysus (1969). This introduces the poems as works of reception vis-à-vis the ancient figurations of Ariadne, as well as the context of Hilst’s biography, it analyses them as reimaginations of the Roman elegy, and presents their first complete English translation, all original endeavours. On the surface, Hilst’s Ariadne fashions herself as a learned poet who reads Catullus and rejoices in her abandonment. I argue that upon a closer look, however, this endlessly unrequited woman desires instead union and permanence. Hilst, herself an underappreciated and disreputable figure, unveils Ariadne’s labyrinthic mind as she negotiates her devotion to poetry and her desire for the man she loves, revealing the afterlife of the myth of a heroine who found her own voice.","PeriodicalId":42730,"journal":{"name":"Classical Receptions Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41327132","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In his essay ‘Of Miracles’, published separately and as the final chapter of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume enlists Lucian’s Alexander, or the False Prophet as evidence for his claim that miracle narratives first take root among gullible rural populations before spreading to cultured city-dwelling elites. This essay reads Lucian’s Alexander and On the Death of Peregrinus against the Humean grain to suggest that miracle stories emerge as a consequence of the forms of commerce and circulation enabled by empires. In light of this, I recharacterize Hume’s geography of gullibility as an aspirational but unsustainable ideal engendered by the emergence of an eighteenth-century ‘Republic of Letters’.
{"title":"The Humed Serpent: Lucian, miracles, enlightenment, and empire","authors":"Martin Devecka","doi":"10.1093/crj/clac018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clac018","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In his essay ‘Of Miracles’, published separately and as the final chapter of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume enlists Lucian’s Alexander, or the False Prophet as evidence for his claim that miracle narratives first take root among gullible rural populations before spreading to cultured city-dwelling elites. This essay reads Lucian’s Alexander and On the Death of Peregrinus against the Humean grain to suggest that miracle stories emerge as a consequence of the forms of commerce and circulation enabled by empires. In light of this, I recharacterize Hume’s geography of gullibility as an aspirational but unsustainable ideal engendered by the emergence of an eighteenth-century ‘Republic of Letters’.","PeriodicalId":42730,"journal":{"name":"Classical Receptions Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47832521","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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