Athens to Aotearoa: Greece and Rome in New Zealand Literature and Society

November 2017

What do ancient Greece and Rome have to do with New Zealand? More than you might think. Athens to Aotearoa collects essays from some of New Zealand’s most important artistic and critical voices reflecting on their engagement with Greece and Rome and taking aim at New Zealand’s ongoing, sometimes fraught, and always complicated take on its classical heritage.

Athens to Aotearoa is an illuminating and provocative collection for any reader interested in the various relationships between classics, art, literature and New Zealand identity.

Contents

What if Cyclops was Alive and Well and Living in a Cave in Invercargill?
Witi Ihimaera

Girls Going Underground: Navigating Mythologies in Aotearoa’s Literary Landscape
Karen Healey

‘I, Clodia’: I had a Dream I was a Ghost
Anna Jackson

A Fabricated History of Graeco-New Zealand Interaction
Marian Maguire

Discussions with Mountains in Marian Maguire’s A Taranaki Dialogue
Greta Hawes

Julius Caesar in Xena: Warrior Princess
Tom Stevenson

Orpheus, Māui and the Underworld in New Zealand Literature
Simon Perris

‘The Darkly Recurrent and Improbable Dream’: James K. Baxter and the Venus/Anchises Story
Geoff Miles

Dionysus, Christ and the Publican: Ambiguous Gods in The Day That Flanagan Died
Sharon Matthews

Anna Seward’s Elegy on Captain Cook
Peter Whiteford

C.K. Stead Writes Catullus: Persona, Intention, Intratext and Allusion
Maxine Lewis

Horace, Catullus, Lucretius and Mason
John Davidson

The Reception of the Classical Tradition in New Zealand War Reporting and Memory in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries
Matthew Trundle

Classical Subjects in Schools: A Comparative Study of New Zealand and the United Kingdom
Arlene Holmes-Henderson

Diana Burton, Simon Perris and Jeff Tatum are members of the Classics programme at Victoria University of Wellington. Diana works on Greek religion and material culture. Her recent publications have examined the iconography of Zeus at Olympia and the nature and cults of Hades throughout the ancient Greek world, the subject of a monograph she is currently writing. Simon works on Greek tragedy and the classical tradition; he recently published The Gentle, Jealous God: Reading Euripides’ Bacchae in English (2016) and is currently writing a book on classical themes in Māori literature. Jeff concentrates on Roman history, Latin literature and Greek literature during the Roman Empire. His books include The Patrician Tribune: Publius Clodius Pulcher (1999), Always I Am Caesar (2008), A Caesar Reader (2012) and Plutarch: The Rise of Rome (2013). He is writing a biography of Mark Antony.