Sunday, April 06, 2025
Subversiveness
William Arrowsmith (1924-1992), "Luxury and Death in the Satyricon,"
Arion 5.3 (Autumn, 1966) 304-331 (at 305):
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Any attempt to revise our estimate of a classic will inevitably seem an impertinence. A reasonable economy, it will be said, supports the notion that sixty or seventy generations cannot have been wholly mistaken about a classic. On the other hand the classics, simply because they are classics, are particularly susceptible to distortion and stultification. They constantly serve, after all, extraliterary purposes, and these other, "cultural" uses of the classic frequently interfere with critical judgment, preventing the reassessment, or even the assessment, of the work. Many classics—I think of Sophocles—are far more subversive of Christian culture than we suppose, and for this reason interpretations that reveal subversiveness are particularly resisted.
