In The Mirror of Antiquity, Caroline Winterer uncovers the lost world of American women's classicism during its glory days from the eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Overturning the widely held belief that classical learning and political ideals were relevant only to men, she follows the lives of four generations of American women through their diaries, letters, books, needlework, and drawings, demonstrating how classicism was at the center of their experience as mothers, daughters, and wives. Importantly, she pays equal attention to women from the North and from the South, and to the ways that classicism shaped the lives of black women in slavery and freedom.In a strikingly innovative use of both texts and material culture, Winterer exposes the neoclassical world of furnishings, art, and fashion created in part through networks dominated by elite women. Many of these women were at the center of the national experience. Here readers will find Abigail Adams, teaching her children Latin and signing her letters as Portia, the wife of the Roman senator Brutus; the Massachusetts slave Phillis Wheatley, writing poems in imitation of her favorite books, Alexander Pope's Iliad and Odyssey; Dolley Madison, giving advice on Greek taste and style to the U.S. Capitol's architect, Benjamin Latrobe; and the abolitionist and feminist Lydia Maria Child, who showed Americans that modern slavery had its roots in the slave societies of Greece and Rome. Thoroughly embedded in the major ideas and events of the time—the American Revolution, slavery and abolitionism, the rise of a consumer society—this original book is a major contribution to American cultural and intellectual history.

During the last century, writers as diverse as William Golding, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolf, and Laurie Lee, were captivated by Greece. They were joined in their production of travel accounts by hundreds of lesser-known authors. This book exposes how the responses of travellers were conditioned by much more than their own opinions and personalities. The British education system, classical scholarship, and the heroism demonstrated by the Greeks during the Nazi invasion of their country, all contributed to shaping travel narratives. The author analyses the way in which all of the major archaeological sites were described—including the Athenian Acropolis, Delphi, Olympia, Heinrich Schliemann’s Mycenae, and Sir Arthur Evans’ Knossos in Crete. The representation of the modern Greek people, particularly in the period after the Second World War, is also explored at length. Viewed as relics of the past, the Greeks in literature were given the qualities and appearance of their ancestors. David Wills shows how in the hands of twentieth century travel writers, Greece became less a modern country, and more a mirror of antiquity. This book is essential reading for all who are interested in the history of travel and tourism, reception of the classical past, and recent Greek history.

A comprehensive survey of mirror-imagery in English literature from the thirteenth to the end of the seventeenth century.

In the eyes of posterity, ancient Rome is deeply flawed. The list of censures is long and varied, from political corruption and the practice of slavery, to religious intolerance and sexual immorality, yet for centuries the Romans' "errors" have not only provoked opprobrium, but also inspired wayward and novel forms of thought and representation, themselves errant in the broad sense of the Latin verb. This volume is the first to examine this phenomenon in depth, treating examples from history, philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, and art history, from antiquity to the present, to examine how the Romans' faults have become the basis for creative experimentation, for rejections of prevailing ideology, even for comedy and delight. In demonstrating that the reception of Rome's missteps and mistakes has been far more complex than simply denouncing them as an exemplum malum to be shunned and avoided, it argues compellingly that these "alternative" receptions are historically important and enduringly relevant in their own right. "Roman error" comes to signify both ancient misstep and something that we may commit when engaging with Roman antiquity, whereby reception may even be conceived as "error" of a kind: while the volume ably addresses popular fascination with a wide range of Roman vices, including violence, imperial domination, and decadence, it also asks us to consider what makes certain receptions matter, how they matter, and why.