The antiquity still carries on to our time. For example in TV series like The Sopranos and a recent speech by politician Thierry Baudet in the House of Representatives, university lecturer David Rijser said during an evening lecture about the power of myths. According to him, classical texts still offer interesting insights.
Why should we still read texts written thousands of years ago? “They still offer something new. That is why we still cannot leave the classic stories alone," says David Rijser of the University of Amsterdam during his lecture From Ovid to The Sopranos. “You always take yourself with you when studying classical myths, because you can't completely ignore yourself. That is why it is possible to extract new interpretations from texts that are two thousand years old:no one has ever looked at them with your eyes.”
On a weekday evening, the hall is packed with young people who come for a relaxing night out. A night out for their brains that is, because in the evening lectures of the College-Club, increasing general knowledge is central. It is the second of a two-part series entitled:The Power of Myths, which addresses the question of why we should still read works from classical antiquity.
Nowadays, when analyzing texts, the way in which they are received is much more central than the texts themselves, says Rijser. That is the core of the reception theory:texts and images can have multiple meanings, but how does the public receive them? And how did people view it in the past? According to Rijser, cultural heritage, such as the classical texts, often changes as soon as it is passed on. This means that an interpretation of a text is often an interpretation of an interpretation.
Cicero everywhere
Rijser's story is based on the Catilinarian speeches of the Roman politician and orator Cicero. “Almost nothing from that time has been preserved as well as the works of Cicero, and there are a lot of them. That is of course very nice, but also somewhat problematic. Because that gives a distorted picture.”
Much of what Rijser says in his presentation is also reflected in his book 'An ever new Antiquity', which has just been published in paperback. In this, Rijser investigates various aspects of contemporary culture and their connection with the classical past.
The Catiline Speeches are a series of indictments by Cicero against Catiline. Cicero was at that time one of the two consuls of Rome, the highest office of the city. He claimed that Catiline wanted to stage a coup. But Catiline's reactions have not survived and therefore you can say that he can no longer defend himself. There are some Italian texts from much later times that place Catiline in a positive light, but they are not so well known and hardly accessible. In general, the Latin texts, and thus the point of view of Cicero, have prevailed.
You can clearly see that classical texts have an impact on other times if you know where to look, according to Rijser. For example, the mafia family's authority structures in the TV series The Sopranos clear similarities with those from the Roman Empire, in the form of so-called patronage-client structures. A well-to-do person acted as a kind of 'protector' for his hierarchically lower-ranking client. The client provided a variety of services for this.
Rijser enthusiastically points out how the Catilinarian orations can also be found in other times. He talks about the conflict between the Pazzi family and the Medici family in Renaissance Florence and how it surprisingly corresponds to the disagreement between Catiline and Cicero much earlier. Catiline and Cicero were once partisans in Roman politics, and the Pazzi and the Medici were once good friends. But both Catiline and the Pazzi family were later charged with the attempted murder of Cicero and the Medici respectively.
Latin for the elite
The most recent example comes from the House of Representatives where politician Thierry Baudet recently gave his speech in Latin. Baudet based the beginning on Cicero's first speech to Catiline. Rijser puts Baudet's speech next to Cicero's original and goes through it step by step with the audience. He points out some grammatical errors, but his main objection is that Baudet uses Cicero so superficially.
The situations are completely different. Rijser portrays it:he walks back and forth, makes busy arm movements, raises his voice and imitates Cicero. Cicero did not give quiet speeches as are customary in the House of Representatives. “Having the crowd behind him, he addressed the lone outsider Catiline in his speech. Baudet, however, stands here calmly, as an outsider, and addresses the crowd of the Chamber, his colleagues. If Baudet had read even a few sentences further, he could have seen that his chosen passage does not actually fit well with what he wants to convey," says Rijser. Where Cicero made a complaint against one person, Baudet tells a story to impress his audience.
Thierry Baudet addresses the House of Representatives in Latin during his maiden speech. NPO Politics Live
“Baudet is probably of the opinion that Latin belongs in the House of Representatives”, Rijser suggests, “as it were to raise the intellectual level. This is of course very authoritarian, because Latin has always been something of the elite. That may well be different by now.”