Is this Sparta?: Reception of the Ancient World in Contemporary Media
In early 2017, Berkeley, CA was witness to a series of demonstrations by right-wing protestors over the cancellation of a talk by Milo Yiannopoulous, some of whom incorporated Spartan-style armor into their outfits. Likewise, the Plutarch quotation “μολὼν λαβέ” has been adopted by the American gun rights community as a rallying call for Second Amendment defense. Scholars have increasingly recognized the power of contemporary reception to color modern views of the ancient world. In this case, Zack Snyder’s 2006 film 300 has become a cultural monolith that promotes a hyper-militaristic version of Sparta that is inconsistent with current scholarship. Gillen Kelly’s and Bellaire Cowles’ graphic novel Three is a notable step towards accuracy, along with Ubisoft’s 2018 video game Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, yet both are indebted to the long train of reception that brought Snyder’s film into being. With such dissonance between public and academic “fact,” what, then, is Sparta?
This panel will address how the reception of classical antiquity in modern media (broadly defined as visual arts post-1800) either counteracts or informs public opinion and knowledge. To that end papers explore how reception can spawn self-reinforcing narrative traditions, be leveraged in teaching, inspire public interest or, at worst, advance harmful and exclusionary modern agendas. We hope to spur discussion on how to engage with this inter- and multidisciplinary phenomenon in teaching, publication, and scholarship, and what our responsibility is as scholars to the larger public conversation.
Join the discussion: #IsThisSparta
Field of Study:
United States of America
Europe
Southern Europe and Mediterranean
Modern (1800-present)
500 BCE to Fifth Century
Chairs:
Kira Jones, - kkjone3@emory.edu
and
Steven Matthew Burges,Boston University - sburges@bu.edu