An Introduction to Classical Receptions in Videogames

Pedagogical Problems: Classical Reception of Videogames

Undergraduate courses looking at aspects of the reception of the classical world in modern popular culture are becoming increasingly more attractive to both lecturers and students. However, this can lead to the situation where non-experts are teaching students on topics which, while on the surface may seem relatively simple, are in fact much more complicated. Further issues arise when one is teaching what has been referred to as "new media", where the knowledge of those in the class can vary widely.


One such new media is videogames. While a medium since the 1970s, it has only really been with the explosion of heavily advertised consoles and certain games from the late 1990s onwards that the way in which videogames have appropriated aspects of the ancient world has started to be looked at by classical scholars. This almost lack of scholarly interest leads to the first problem of any course which includes videogames - a near complete lack of relevant secondary literature. But this is perhaps the least of our problems as lecturers, classicists, and (for me, anyway) gamers.

This paper will draw on my recent experience of lecturing about the classical reception within videogames, advising dissertation students, and general conversations with undergraduate Classics students. I will briefly identify the problems associated with the inclusion of new media in undergraduate courses, and, more specifically, introduce some of the particular problems associated with the inclusion of videogames on such Classical Reception courses.

Texts and Intratexuality in Martial's 'Epigarms'

Gaps, Blanks and Martial: Reading Through the Themes of the 'Epigrams' with Reader Response.

Aspects of critical theory have long been used within scholarship on classical literature, and within scholarship on Martial’s Epigrams, aspects of Reader-Response theory, in particular, have been used to look at the ways in which Martial writes for two types of readers: his first-time reader (Naïve Reader) and his experienced reader (Model Reader), as shown by Fowler (1995). In this paper I will look at a way in which another aspect of Reader Response theory can be used to add further understanding within an interpretation of the Epigrams of Martial.

The following of one theme through the twelve books of Martial, shows not only how the twelve books of epigrams can be seen as a literary whole, but by using the suggestion of Iser (1980), among others, of the use of the ‘gaps’ and diversions within novels to add to the reader’s experience, we can see how Martial’s use of poems within this one theme draws the reader ‘into the events and [is] made to supply what is meant from what is not said.’ This complex use of the theme and the emphasis of the role of the reader within the books also highlights the ‘gaps’ between the poems of the theme and stresses the importance of what happens between the different poems of the theme within the books. Through this we can begin to understand how the books of the Epigrams are structured in order to encourage the reader to read each book as a connected literary product, as well as connecting the twelve books as an interconnected series.

Martial's 'mala lingua': 'os impurum' and oral sex in the 'Epigrams'