The Ancient Sea

Hamish Williams lectures in European Literature and Culture at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He has previously held a Junior Fellowship at the Polish Institute of Advanced Studies in Warsaw and a Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute of English and American Studies, Friedrich Schiller University Jena. His main research area is Classical Reception Studies, particularly post-classical afterlives in modern literature and popular genres, but he is broadly interested in modern literary studies, covering topics such as utopianism, mythmaking, hospitality, and the sublime. His publications include Tolkien and the Classical World (ed., 2021) and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Utopianism and the Classics (2023). His current project focuses on modern receptions of Minoan Crete. Ross Clare is an independent scholar and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool. He specializes in the study of antiquity in popular culture, particularly video games, film and television, and science fiction and fantasy. He is the author of Ancient Greece and Rome in Videogames: Representation, Play, Transmedia (Bloomsbury 2021).

Introduction (Hamish Williams and Ross Clare)
Section 1: Ancient History and Society
From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea: Tsunamis and Coastal Catastrophes in the Ancient Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean (Guy Middleton)
The Greek Notions of Sea Power (Vilius Bartninkas)
Plato Sailing Upstream: The Image of the Ship in the Republic (Gabriele Cornelli)
Sailing to Find Utopia or Sailing to Found Utopia? The Pragmatic and Idealistic Pursuit of Ideal Cities in Greek and Roman Political Philosophy (Aaron L. Beek)
Ruling the Catastrophic Sea: Roman Law and the Gains of a Utopic Mediterranean (Emilia Mataix Ferrándiz)
Section 2: Ancient Literature
The Seas are Full of Monsters: Divine Utopia, Human Catastrophe (Georgia L. Irby)
Order Among Disorder: Poseidon’s Underwater Kingdom and Utopic Marine Environments (Ryan Denson)
The Women and the Sea: The Subjective Seascape in Ovid’s Heroides (Simona Martorana)
The Anti-Tyrannical Adriatic in Lucan’s Civil War (Isaia Crosson)
Section 3: Classical Receptions
How to Detain a Tsunami: Impassable Boundaries against Ocean Chaos in Ancient and Modern Imaginaries (Manuel Álvarez-Martí-Aguilar)
Classical Dimensions of the Robinsonade Pantomime: Neptune, Aphrodite, and the Threat to Civilization (Rhiannon Easterbrook)
Minoan Utopias in British Fiction, after the Thalassocracy: Lawrence Durrell’s The Dark Labyrinth and Robert Graves’ Seven Days in New Crete (Hamish Williams)
Bibliography