[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]
Since 2021, pop musician Taylor Swift has been trying to wrestle back her intellectual property, undertaking the huge project of re-recording and re-releasing her entire back catalogue after an acrimonious split with her former record label which owns the master copies of the ten ‘original’ albums. Pitched as the ultimate reclamation of a recording artist’s ‘authenticity’ (all four of the revised albums have the parenthesis ‘Taylor’s Version’ appended to their titles), Swift has been able to gain a measure of control back over the copyrights. This undertaking highlights how notions of authenticity and authority, including both legal concepts like personal ownership and intellectual property and philosophical approaches to truth, are playing out in the contemporary public realm and especially in online environments. Juliana Bastos Marques and Federico Santangelo’s timely edited volume which addresses such issues is the fruit of international collaboration, emerging from conferences that took place a few months apart in 2019 in Newcastle, England and in São Paulo, Brazil. The contributions in the first half of the book explore how principles of rhetoric are fundamental to the construction of authority by ancient historians and make the case that the rhetorical tools of historiography are claimed by those who are not traditionally thought of as writers of history. The contributions in the second half take up one of two approaches, either mapping out how individual ancient historians have been used and abused in their online reception or taking a step back to consider the lay of the contemporary cultural land vis-à-vis the reception of the classical more broadly speaking.
Bastos Marques’s succinct introduction sets up the volume by describing an intriguing episode in which Wikipedia editors refused to acknowledge as definitive the intervention of the author Philip Roth when he tried to assert final word over the interpretation of one of his short stories. Bastos Marques notes that the fiction of authorial authority has continued to carry weight via the shared root, auctoritas, before observing that the internet might be operating on the principle of the death of the author and in the wake of the ‘rupture’ (3) of post-modernism. She concludes the introduction by observing that the essays in the volume have in common a ‘shared underlying examination of the strategies for historical discourses built by the ancients which have been accepted by audiences to varying degrees through the ages’ and that ‘contemporary times have offered unprecedented challenges to this authority through the widening of audiences and their expectations’ (4). There is no explicit discussion of the internet, and this final sentence is hard to parse: where and why have the audiences for ancient historical knowledge widened, and in what ways could the broadening of the scope of those who engage with the classical be transformative? Who is challenged by the contemporary shifts and do wider audiences construct historical knowledge in stimulating ways? And ultimately, why are wider audiences framed as a challenge to authority rather than an opening for exciting ways to think more carefully about authoritative knowing?
The opening essay by John Marincola lucidly establishes how the rhetorical construction of persona was the key way by which ancient historiographical authority was fashioned and contested. Marincola explores a fascinating moment in the self-reflexive criticism of ancient history-writing, namely Plutarch’s attack on his predecessor in On the Malice of Herodotus. Where other historiographical texts peg their critical analysis to the personae of the author, Marincola isolates what is surprising about Plutarch’s qualms with Herodotus, namely, that while the latter seems to be a ‘good’ (amiable, trustworthy) person, in fact ‘only a careful reading and examination of what lay beneath the surface could show the inner – that is, real– nature of the historian’ (26). Plutarch’s approach (as Marincola reads it) questions the part played by the (authoritative) knower and their ethical status in the knowledge-making process, and objective historical truth is thus demoted if not tacitly rejected.
Two more chapters in the antiquity-focused half of the book work together to explore the use of ancient rhetorical tools to write history in forms that have not been traditionally filed under historiography. Leni Ribeiro Leite explores how Lucan’s authorial stances in the Bellum Civile and the Pharsalia might generatively constitute interventions into the historiography of the triumviral period – for instance, in his decision to exclude the gods or his preference for a rationalizing explanation to account for the appearance of the shield of Numa. In taking Lucan seriously as a writer of history, Leite helps to shake loose the notion that the tools for making historical authority are bound to a fixed sense of who an author is or the declared generic rubric of a text. The suggestion is that writers such as Lucan, whose purported claims to historiographical authority have had limited purchase, could open up angles on writing the history of Rome that are valuably different from those of poets such as Virgil, who are mobilized without controversy over their status as commentators of and on ancient history writing.
Elaine Cristine Sartorelli takes a similar approach to the historiography of a non-traditional historiographer when she investigates the ‘arch-heretic career’ (73) of sixteenth century doctor and theologian Michael Servetus, who consistently defied every available authority including Erasmus over the correct interpretation of the Bible until he was burned alive at the stake in Geneva in 1553. That we have made an unexplained jump forward a millennium to Servetus is puzzling, since defining conceptual boundaries of modernity is surely a core issue of history-focused disciplines in the Humanities.[1] Sartorelli is concerned with the internal millenarian logic of Servetus’ monumental work Christianismi Restitutio (The Restitution of Christianity), focusing on how the author locates himself as a protagonist in the events of the end of days when he will fight alongside true believers and the eponymous Archangel Michael against the Antichrist. For Sartorelli, Servetus should be taken seriously because of his commitment elsewhere to scientific inquiry: he anticipated William Harvey by a century in discovering the modern system of blood circulation as understood by Western medicine. Clearly this was a person who could make rational observations and sensible theoretical extrapolations so it is all the more strange to encounter the same mind generating a text whose logic is perfectly self-contained and in which the authority of the author is entirely self-conferred: reality need not apply. That Servetus was executed for his heterodoxy raises questions about how authority is conferred and confirmed; as Sartorelli notes, Servetus’ brand of apocalyptic theology did not make a big impact on the European humanism of this period. Ultimately, the tension in Servetus’ thought is a fascinating by-way in early modern intellectual history but it is frustrating that we are not invited into thinking with and across the chapters in the first half beyond a stand-alone case studies.
The contributions in the second ‘Modern Questions’ half are ambitious in method, concept, or both. The chapters tracking the reception of a particular ancient historian in an online environment are methodologically innovative: Bastos Marques tests the Wiki-admissibility of anonymized sections of Livy’s history with Portuguese language Wikipedia editors, and Neville Morley undertakes an analysis of the Thucydides Bot Twitter account that sends out automatic corrective responses to Thucydides-related mistakes and misattributions. Both chapters demonstrate the profound effect of the halo of authority carried by an ancient author; Thucydides’ name can be used to underwrite any kind of political sentiment from the profound to the banal, whether in books or on bumper stickers. The experiment that Bastos Marques ran illustrates how culturally specific the norms of historiography are and shows that notions of independent verifiability, such as those Wikipedia applies, do not reliably work for ancient historiography. In both chapters, however, the epistemic heft of the ancient author invites a further inquiry into why Greco-Roman antiquity and the notion of the classical itself, as particular slices of the ancient past that pretend to the universal, continue to be invested with authority.
This inquiry about the classical is taken up by the remaining contributions in the second half, most explicitly in Rebecca Futo Kennedy’s essay, which is keyed to the mode of critique from the start: ‘Western civilization is a story’ (87), and goes on to examine how the ideology of civilizational supremacy in the age of modern empire is co-signed and under-written by those who narrate ancient history as part of this story. Kennedy lines up the usual suspects from various historiographical schools – Ian Morris, Victor Davis Hanson, Lucien Febvre, Niall Ferguson – in order to lay bare disguised or blatant Eurocentrisms in the writing of history. What Kennedy does in focusing on the entanglement between ideas of the classical and supremacist notions of race and civilization is to expose how the classical can still circulate in contemporary culture and in contemporary media like the Internet with its authority intact. This essay also asks what kinds of positioning are available to those who do not subscribe to such cultural supremacy. If the emphasis on the personal authority of the knowing subject is less in this essay than in other contributions, it is because the contestation of the classical is highlighted as a deeply political matter. Kennedy’s examination of the work of the classical is lucid and direct, pointing us on to valuable, further lines of inquiry.
As with edited volumes in general, this book ‘would have benefitted from a conclusion to draw the wide-ranging discussions to a close’ (Sam Agbamu in a recent BMCR review). The final essay in the volume by Ayelet Haimson Lushkov does some of this drawing together, in synthesizing a ‘reception without classics’ model gleaned from time spent in the classroom with students who engage with antiquity through contemporary media. Lushkov’s model neither disturbs the authority of the classical scholar who has a ‘duty’ (161) to guide more or less interested publics nor interrogates the persistence of the classical itself. Given, however, that many individual chapters, especially those in the second half of the volume, indicate further directions for research (broadly speaking) on the reception of ancient historians in online environments, this volume might have spelled out the paradoxical ramifications of the perceived loss of authority of the expert whilst the classical itself retains its halo of cultural and epistemic authority. For instance, this paradox leaves the scholar operating within the field of the classical with a limited number of choices: to uphold or disavow their own epistemic authority. Moreover, further explicit reflection on the relationship between an ‘ancient model’ and a ‘modern question’ is absolutely required here. Why for instance is antiquity positioned as the place in which models of authority are generated? That the boundaries of these historiographical categories have important ethical and epistemological consequences, and that the positioning of a scholar as modern in relation to an ancient past can be rendered as a position of authority over a past that is held up or held back as ‘ancient’ are fundamental issues for classical reception studies, and a concluding discussion of the volume’s overall aims seems like a missed opportunity to address these issues.
Explicit reflection via critical modes of classical reception is needed in order to break the magic spell of the authority of the classical. A robust conclusion from a media studies scholar reflecting on the operations of the internet and responding to the ‘modern questions’ chapters might have usefully drawn the second half of the volume together. Engagement with the explosion in scholarship in critical classical reception would also have enabled a reader to engage with the chapters thematically. As it stands, a conclusion that homes in on the political, discursive, and historiographical functions of the internet would have served this volume better. The internet devises new means for the construction of and experimentation with alternative means of freedom and circulation of information. It also opens up space for contestations of all kinds of authority. How the authority of the classical is constructed within and reproduced in new media and by these relationships is a topic worth further investigation, and one to which this volume makes a valuable opening contribution.
Authors and Titles
Introduction – Juliana Bastos Marques (Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and Federico Santangelo (Newcastle University, UK)
Part I: Ancient Models
- Authority and Authenticity – John Marincola.
- Poetry as History: The Authority of Lucan as a Historian – Leni Ribeiro Leite.
- Truth and History – Roger Chartier.
- The Time of Restitution of All Things: Past as Future in Michael Servetus– Elaine Cristine Sartorelli.
Part II: Modern Questions
- Classics and Western civilization: The Troubling History of an Authoritative Narrative – Rebecca Futo Kennedy.
- The Society that Separates its Scholars from its Keyboard Warriors…’: Tracking Thucydides on Twitter – Neville Morley.
- Is Livy a Good Wikipedian? Authority and Audience in Ancient Historiography and Contemporary Anonymous Writing – Juliana Bastos Marques.
- The New Agora? Online Communities and a New Rhetoric – Catalina Popescu.
- Classical Literature and Contemporary Classics – Ayelet Haimson Lushkov.
Notes
[1] See for instance Rita Copeland’s interrogation of the politics of periodizing the early modern medieval with respect to an ancient past framed as classical. (‘Introduction: England and the Classics from the Early Middle Ages to Early Humanism’, in Rita Copeland (ed.), The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Volume 1: 800–1558. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016 pp. 1-120).
Taking a more critical approach to the conceptual framing of modernity, Walter Mignolo has examined the inseparability of modernity from the making of Western European empires. (‘Preamble: The Historical Foundation of Modernity/Coloniality and the Emergence of Decolonial Thinking’ in A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture. London, Wiley-Blackwell, 2008, pp. 12-52).