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This chapter explores the religious experience through the power of music, in particular classical music. It begins with a detailed discussion of the sort of reservations that generated Christian resistance to instrumental music. It then considers the neglected features of the biblical witness that, in fact, strongly support a more positive approach, not least in the book of Chronicles. It is argued that as in the Temple's worship envisaged in Chronicles, so elsewhere music can help break down the barriers between the invisible world of the divine and our own. In other words, certain features of music help an already present God to be perceived. The works of some key composers in the classical tradition are examined, including Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Mahler, and Bruckner.

This epilogue glances at the further estrangement between ‘serious’ and popular music during the remainder of the 20th century. It concludes that the future of the classical tradition is unpredictable, but that if it is to survive it will need popular roots.

The chapter focuses on the commemoration of the individual in ancient and modern cultures. It argues that the attitude to individual commemoration adopted by the War Graves Commission in the First World War in Britain can be linked to the commemorative practices of ancient Greece, emphasising the importance of the part played by Sir Frederic Kenyon. The chapter draws on examples of commemoration from classical Athens, twentieth-century Britain and the Soviet Union in order to explore the different roles that the commemoration of the individual has played in ancient and modern forms of war commemoration.

From antiquity, to the Middle Ages, to the Renaissance, and to the early modern period, a genre of poetry flourished in the West that has fallen out of favour in the recent times. This is didactic poetry, poetry of instruction in astronomy, hunting, farming, philosophy, and in all fields of sciences, arts, and recreational activities. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jesuits produced a great quantity of Latin didactic poems. These poems revealed of the early modern Jesuits, local literary fashions, classical traditions, contemporary events and inventions, scientific developments, cultural knowledge, and social mores. Didactic poetry was the best literary genre for the cultivation of the Jesuits, the modern teaching order par excellence. The majority of Jesuit didactic poems were written by teachers, most of whom were writing in a radically transformed world of print and science, and in the scholarly language of Latin that was facing its gradual decline in the eighteenth century. Most of these poems were initially written for their fellow Jesuits and not for the proper literary classes of humanities and rhetoric. By the turn of the eighteenth century, didactic poems began to take a special place among the Jesuits, and a consciousness of contributions to the Jesuit tradition and microtradition ensued wherein the didactic poems took a special part.

This chapter outlines the many receptions of Seneca's death in written and visual form, from late antiquity to the twenty-first century. It revisits the occasional allusions to the death in pagan and early Christian writings, the creative retellings in the literature and manuscript culture of the middle ages, the rediscovery (and reelaboration) of the Tacitean death description in the fourteenth century as well as the reshaping of Seneca's dying libation into a self-baptism, the clarifying and stylizing effects respectively of seventeenth-century philology and baroque aesthetics, the aversion to Seneca in the nineteenth century, and the renewed interest especially within the literature of postwar Germany. Although the focus is on the heterogeneous meanings of Seneca's death in distinct interpretive moments, attention is given to the process of “Senecanization,” as Seneca's death narrative is brought into ever new contact with other elements of Senecan discourse.

Building on recent scholarly interest in Toni Morrison’s engagement with the classical tradition, this chapter demonstrates that her interest in the Africanness of classicism is a significant feature of novels she published both before and after the appearance of Bernal’s Black Athena in 1987. It examines key vignettes in Sula, The Bluest Eye and Paradise, showing that though repeated engagement with Ovid’s Metamorphoses the author asserts the confluence of African, Greek, and Roman cultures. Exploring her interest in the Nag Hammadi texts; in African-American strategic appropriations of a performed ‘Egyptianness’; in Aesop; in the Antiquities collections at the Louvre; and in the work of other ‘diasporic classicists’ such as Wole Soyinka, it concludes that the Morrisonian oeuvre forms a significant contribution to recent reconceptualization of classical culture, and of the implications of this for modernity.

This chapter investigates the overlaps between the ‘cultural memory’ of the distant past and the memory of the Great War in Britain and Germany between 1914 and 1939, looking in particular at the use of medieval(ist) images in war memorials. There was a certain tension between advocates of medievalism and supporters of classicist images, but often, they reached a compromise. The chapter combines a discussion of the concept of ‘cultural memory’ with case studies on the reception of antiquity and the Middle Ages in the era of the Great War.

Building on recent scholarly interest in Toni Morrison's engagement with the classical tradition, this chapter demonstrates that her interest in the Africanness of classicism is a significant feature of novels she published both before and after the appearance of Bernal's Black Athena in 1987. It examines key vignettes in Sula, The Bluest Eye and Paradise, showing that though repeated engagement with Ovid's Metamorphoses the author asserts the confluence of African, Greek, and Roman cultures. Exploring her interest in the Nag Hammadi texts; in African‐American strategic appropriations of a performed ‘Egyptianness’; in Aesop; in the Antiquities collections at the Louvre; and in the work of other ‘diasporic classicists’ such as Wole Soyinka, it concludes that the Morrisonian oeuvre forms a significant contribution to recent reconceptualization of classical culture, and of the implications of this for modernity.

This introductory chapter positions the argument of this book in relation to recent scholarship in the field of ‘black classicism’. It posits the ‘strategic ambivalence’ of Morrison's classicism, outlining the dominant cultural uses of the classical tradition in definitions of American history and identity with which the text takes issue, and suggesting that the novelist's allusiveness is fundamental to the critical intervention in the politics of race and gender that her oeuvre constitutes. The chapter discusses prior scholarship on Morrison's classicism and presents an overview of the role of classics in Morrison's intellectual formation, and of her own discussion of the classical tradition in essays, interviews, and speeches. Finally, it outlines the book's argument regarding the key narratives of American history that Morrison's classicism transforms.

This chapter considers the biographical, historical, and theological context of Augustine’s early works (386-96). It outlines the way in which these works have been read in scholarly debates over the last hundred years, demonstrating that they have generally been marginalised as the rather obsolete philosophical investigatons of a new, somewhat naïve, over-optimistic convert, still entrenched in the classical tradition of belief in human free will and perfectibility. These have generally been contrasted with the later, mature works of Augustine — the pessimistic theologian of the Fall, original sin, and human dependence upon divine grace. It considers Peter Brown’s analysis of the revolutionary transformation of the early into the later Augustine following his reading of Paul in the 390s, and sets out the argument of the book: that there is no discontinuity or revolutionary transformation of the early into the later Augustine, but rather a fundamental continuity between the two.

This chapter considers Milman Parry's contribution to Homeric scholarship and uses this to investigate shifts in conceptions of epic and its place in the Western literary tradition in the 20th century. It points to unresolved tensions in approaches to Homer in the 20th century, with scholars and other receivers of Homer equivocating between the idea that Homeric epic belonged to the world of traditional, oral-derived poetry, and the view that Homer is the starting point of a linear history of Western literature. It suggests that notions of tradition and reception need to be investigated in relation to one another. Recent scholarship on oral traditions now accommodates many phenomena that Parry associated exclusively with the great authors of the Western literary canon, such as Apollonius and Virgil, so the relationship between oral traditions and the canon needs to be revised. Meanwhile creative receptions of Homer have found ways of embracing the traditional Homer and the canonical Homer at the same time.

This chapter examines a Latin motto in Song of Solomon and the transformed version of Atlas in The Bluest Eye to discuss Morrison's reclamation or reinvention of the classical tradition, and of tradition itself, as transnational and potentially radical processes.

“Touchstones of Tradition and Innovation: Pas de Deux by Petipa, Balanchine and Forsythe” closely juxtaposes three duets from different centuries and styles, though each is located within the ballet idiom. A comparative analysis forces inquiries into the codes and values of the balletic form itself, with a consideration of those values as they emerge through the steps and choreographic structures of the dances, the identities of the choreographers and the sociopolitical climate surrounding the creation of each work. The three examples are signposts by which to see the effects of time upon a classical tradition, and they demonstrate how both individual artists and collective choices have shaped that tradition.

Michèle Roberts's reputation rests upon her subversive feminism, often manifest in her expansion and reworking of fairy tales and biblical legends to accommodate the female perspective. This rewriting of the patriarchal canon, exemplified most clearly by the story of Mary Magdalen in The Wild Girl (1984) or the fantastical Impossible Saints (1997), is symptomatic of Roberts's need to find her home within the Western tradition. Her relationship with the Classical Tradition has been less recognized than her recreation of fairy tales or biblical stories, and yet she frequently engages with and rewrites episodes from classical mythology in her short stories, poetry, and novels.

Music in India has always formed an important part in everyday life of Indians. This interview looks at the changes that occurred in the way Indians listen to music and whether Indian classical tradition of music is still based on the guru–shishya method of training. Madhup Mudgal also discusses the different Western influence on classical music and highlights the risk of losing Indian folk music due to cable television and cassette-based popular music.