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With his novel Marius the Epicurean (1885), Walter Pater moved the focus of his interest from Greek to Roman antiquity. In his reflections on historiography, his ideal of the hero as a man of feeling and his exploration of the sentimental register, Pater made use of an extensive range of English and European Romantic sources, from Wordsworth to Goethe, Rousseau, and Madame de Staël. His portrayal of Imperial Rome was likewise based on early nineteenth-century representations of the city as, at the same time, museum and cosmopolitan stage. By means of these intertextualities, the historical novel in Pater's hands becomes a vehicle for the study of the relationship between Romanticism and Classicism, providing us at the same time with an important document of the legacy of Romanticism in late nineteenth-century England.

This chapter examines Peter Ernst von Mansfeld’s appropriation of local antiquities in his suburban residence and garden at Clausen, in Luxemburg. Mansfield, who would become the longest-serving governor of Luxemburg, built up an impressive collection of Gallo-Roman antiquities from Trier, Arlon and Metz. Mansfield constructed this complex, called La Fontaine, between 1563 and 1590 as a properly ‘antique’ setting, with a vaulted grotto and cryptoporticus. In this essays Mansfield’s antiquarian efforts are considered in the context of the broader search by Netherlandish humanists for archaeological evidence confirming their Roman roots. The Southern Low Countries, called Belgica after Julius Caesar’s Commentarii de bello Gallico, were known to have been once part of Roman Gaul, and even while it was still under construction, La Fontaine was visited by knowledgeable travellers hunting for the material remains of Belgica Romana. Later on, early accounts of the history of Gallo-Roman Luxemburg were greatly indebted to Mansfeld’s La Fontaine and its early chroniclers.

This chapter explores how the French discovery of Roman ruins in Algeria was used to legitimate its annexation of the territory. Intellectuals and politicians argued that the Ottoman Empire was illegitimate; France was the true heir of the shared Latinate civilization created by the Roman Empire. The new French Empire would simply reunite the Mediterranean world. These efforts were, however, thwarted by both human and material actors. Parisian museum administrators thought that the North African finds were of low quality and not of much interest. French colonists argued, by contrast, that the Roman artifacts should stay in Algeria, to help build a French imperial identity. And the things themselves resisted; they broke when soldiers tried to extract them and their weight sank the ships used to transport them. The chapter then suggests that nineteenth-century campaigns to steal, export, and re-signify art and antiquities sometimes fell short of their ambitions.

On November 12, 1902, eighty-eight cases of antiquities and plaster casts of ancient sculpture arrived in San Francisco. Case 186, contained an inscribed portrait herm of Plato, which is now in the Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum of Anthropology (PAHMA) on the Berkeley campus. Mrs. Hearst had employed Alfred Emerson, a classical scholar and friend of Benjamin Ide Wheeler, to acquire Greek and Roman antiquities in Rome as part of her plan for a museum that would bring together characteristic artifacts of ancient cultures for the edification of the citizens of northern California. The Plato hermwas purchased by Emerson from the Fratelli Iandolo, a well-known firm of antiquities dealers in Rome. The inventory catalogue entry for the piece includes this statement, handwritten at an unknown time: “Pertinence of head is not certain.”. This portrait herm has been left in total obscurity for more than a century.

Arabian authors incorporated the knowledge of Greco-Roman antiquity, organized it, and added a few of their own thoughts. The view of the organism they found in new medicine had no counterpart in their living environment. This medicine was so foreign to the thinking and worldview of the Muslims that the guardians of the faith soon advised abandoning it and returning to the nonmedical therapeutics oriented toward the sayings of the prophet. It was individual scholars who felt attracted by the variety and the depth of thought in the innumerable writings of ancient authors. But they still remained mere individual scholars, who would never be able to convince their native culture, especially those scholars who represented the original, religious Muslim worldview of this culture. The clinical practice was simply too primitive compared to the procedures they already knew themselves. Arabs again disappeared from the stage of European medicine.

This chapter asserts the significance of the attainment of a renewed familiarity with the intellectual legacy of Greek, Roman, and Christian antiquity to the vigorous development of political thinking that took place during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Similarly important was the intellectual stance that medieval thinkers themselves adopted when they sought to come to terms with that legacy. In the study of the political thinking of the era, one must come to terms with both factors and, accordingly, take them into consideration. Although both factors are of equal import, the following sections of the chapter first discuss the second factor—which is the one easily underestimated or often overlooked.

This chapter focuses on servitudes. In many civilian systems, servitudes include both praedial and personal servitudes. In Scotland the position is different. Although older authorities maintain the distinction, Bell had already stated that ‘the only servitudes in Scotland are praedial’. It admits of no doubt that this is also the modern view, and the traditional personal servitude of liferent are not considered in this chapter. The word ‘servitude’ can be traced back to the Latin term servitus. Servitus is derived from the verb servire, which means ‘to be of service’. This, very literally, was the meaning attached to the legal concept of a servitude in the Roman law of antiquity. The lawyers of this early age did not feel the need, nor indeed did they possess the ability, to define the concept in formal jurisprudential terms.

This discussion considers how classicists ‘expand their circle’ and connect their research in different areas of classical reception with the work of scholars in other disciplines who are not necessarily trained in the field of classics, or even sympathetic to classical reception. The communications strategies suggested draw on personal research experience on the influential and yet insufficiently valued role played by American women, from the eighteenth century onward, not only in the academic study of Greek, Latin, and Greco-Roman antiquity but also in the fostering of ‘classicism’, efforts that promoted the appreciation of the classical past among a wider public. Case studies focus on recent biographical projects on two American female educators: M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr College from 1885 to 1922, and her student Edith Hamilton, headmistress of the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore founded by Thomas from 1896 to 1922, and later a best-selling author of popular books about the classical world.

This chapter surveys pagan texts of the second, third, and early fourth centuries C.E. A speech by Dio of Prusa contrasts the pure and simple life of Euboean hunters to the moral corruption of city life. A quasi-philosophical dialogue by Plutarch depicts his grown son Autobulus telling a friend about a debate on love at which Plutarch himself was present. Polemon's epitome of his treatise on physiognomy has been preserved through the Arabic tradition. Lucian's Dialogues of the Courtesans and True History, and Apuleius' Apology and Metamorphoses are described. Leucippe and Clitophon features a more “sophistic” style and greater engagement with intellectual issues than that which is seen in Xenophon's novel. Longus is probably from the island of Lesbos, where his novel is set. Artemidorus of Ephesus collected for the instruction of his son a book of dreams and their interpretation. Mathesis showed signs of Stoic influence.

This introductory chapter discusses Demosthenes, who was one of the most influential authors of Greek and Roman antiquity. It reveals that Demosthenes was one of the orators included in the canon of ten Attic orators, which was a list of recommended authors that may have reached its final form in the second century C.E. The discussion then identifies the challenges that face postclassical readers of Demosthenes and studies the ancient commentaries on Demosthenes. The three working hypotheses that are used in the book are then enumerated.

This chapter sketches out some of the features of the encounter between media theory and Greco-Roman antiquity in two complementary ways: as a field of knowledge awaiting further systematic exploration and analysis, but also as a set of methods that under the banner of ‘cultural transmission’ brings together practices for producing and processing knowledge that are fundamental to the way in which ancient cultures become ‘classical’. The discussion begins with the concept of the medium and the promise it holds for analytical work in the study of the past. It then moves on to the role of mediation in thinking about the cultural significance of communication across time and perception. It continues with a consideration of classical studies and media studies as disciplines, focusing on the kinds of research that can be pursued at their intersection. The chapter concludes with an overview of the contributions that follow.

This concluding chapter summarizes the previous chapters in order to reconstruct the Nazi myth—a myth of death that was nevertheless intended to impregnate others, to awaken the future race and urge new generations of Aryans to rise up once more, out of sacred respect for their ancestors. From the beginning, the leaders of the Third Reich abandoned the realm of history to live in the realm of myth, where everything was sign or symbol and where all chance was perceived as being of necessity. Hitler and his associates responsible for the regime were haunted by myths, obsessed with imitating the acts of their predecessors, possessed by visions of reliving the great ancient epics. From here, the chapter turns to the historian's role to snuff out the myth, and thus to overturn the Nazis' manipulation of time and history.