Antonio Gramsci and the Ancient World explores the relationship between the work of the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci and the study of classical antiquity.
The collection of essays engages with Greek and Roman history, literature, society, and culture, offering a range of perspectives and approaches building on Gramsci’s theoretical insights, especially from his Prison Notebooks. The volume investigates both Gramsci’s understanding and reception of the ancient world, including his use of ancient sources and modern historiography, and the viability of applying some of his key theoretical insights to the study of Greek and Roman history and literature. The chapters deal with the ideas of hegemony, passive revolution, Caesarism, and the role of intellectuals in society, offering a complex and diverse exploration of this intersection.
With its fascinating mixture of topics, this volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of classics, ancient history, classical reception studies, Marxism and history, and those studying Antonio Gramsci’s works in particular.
Author(s): Emilio Zucchetti, Anna Maria Cimino
Series: Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: xiv+387
Antonio Gramsci and the Ancient World
Table of contents
List of figure and table
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction: The reception of Gramsci’s thought in historical and classical studies
Antonio Gramsci: a biographical sketch
From his death to 1975: the first long phase of Gramsci’s reception
Gramsci’s early reception in the English-speaking context
Gramsci and post-war Italian classical scholarship
The Golden Age and the Gerratana edition (1975)
The Seminario di Antichistica
A philological renaissance and a global re-use
Gramsci and the Classics: hegemony and ideology
The structure of this volume
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
1 Negotiating hegemony in early Greek poetry
Coercion and consent among Hesiodic beasts and men
Maintaining the Homeric hegemony
Navigating hegemony in Archilochean abuse poetry
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
2 Upside-down hegemony? Ideology and power in ancient Athens
Introduction
The ēthos of the politeia and Gramscian hegemony
Whose ‘hegemony’ in Athens?
Honorific practices as a locus of hegemony
Egalitarianism and social differentiation through the honour system
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
3 Gramsci and ancient philosophy: Prelude to a study
Introduction
Gramsci on philosophy and history
History of philosophy as a philosophy of praxis
Conclusions, and a return to Plato
Notes
Bibliography
4 A Gramscian approach to ancient slavery
Modalities of slavery: Artemidorus as a case-study
Modalities, hegemony, and slave agency
Beyond and below slavery: the alternative identities of enslaved persons and their historical consequences
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
5 The Etruscan question: An academic controversy in the Prison Notebook
The debate on the Etruscan language at the beginning of XX century
The Etruscan language between academia and politics
Finale (with a surprise)
Notes
Bibliography
6 Polybios and the rise of Rome: Gramscian hegemony, intellectuals, and passive revolution
Gramsci’s concepts: hegemony, intellectuals, and passive revolution
Polybios and the Greek world in the II century BCE
Roman dominance in the East: minimal hegemony and failed passive revolution
Polybios: a ‘Gramscian’ intellectual in the II century BCE
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
7 Antonio Gramsci between ancient and modern imperialism
Modern and ancient imperialism
Gramsci on colonialism
Gramsci on imperial government
Gramsci’s cosmopolitanism and Rome’s legacy
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
8 Plebeian tribunes and cosmopolitan intellectuals: Gramsci’s approach to the late Roman Republic
The plebeian State
Debating Roman Italy
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
9 Between Caesarism and Cosmopolitanism: Julius Caesar as an Historical Problem in Gramsci
Defining Caesarism
Caesarism in Italian History
Cosmopolitanism and Italian History
Gramsci and the Modern Historiography on the Roman Empire
Notes
Bibliography
10 Gramsci and the Roman Cultural Revolution
Rome’s Cultural Revolution
On Gramsci
Coercion and consent
Propaganda and ideology
Augustan antinomies
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
11 Caesarism as stasis from Gramsci to Lucan: An “Equilibrium with catastrophic prospects”
Caesarism in Gramsci: A + B = AB or C?
The doublethink of Caesarism
Caesarism as stasis in Lucan’s Bellum ciuile
Notes
Bibliography
12 Hegemony in the Roman Principate: Perceptions of power in Gramsci, Tacitus, and Luke
Notes
Bibliography
13 Gramsci’s view of Late Antiquity: Between longue durée and discontinuity
Late Antiquity: a controversial concept
The “Birth” of Late Antiquity
The ‘Optimistic’ turn
Recent developments
Gramsci on Late Antiquity
Crisis
East and West
The beginning of the Middle Ages
The ancient economic structure
Concluding remarks
Notes
Bibliography
14 Cultural hegemonies, ‘NIE-orthodoxy’, and social-development models: Classicists’ ‘organic’ approaches to economic history in the early XXI century
A short history of the first century of cultural hegemonies in the scholarship on the ancient economy
“NIE orthodoxy” and the tropes of modernity
“Be careful what you wish for”: Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel as organic intellectuals
The social development model through Gramsci’s eyes
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Afterthoughts
1 The author as intellectual? Hints and thoughts towards a Gramscian ‘re-reading’ of the ancient literatures
Gramscian categories in Antonio La Penna’s work: a starting point
The Gramscian category of ‘intellectuals’ and the literary production in the Greek and Roman world
Reading Virgil through Gramsci: new questions for a long-standing debate
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
2 Hegemony, coercion and consensus: A Gramscian approach to Greek cultural and political history
Introduction
Greek timē and Gramsci: prerogatives and hegemony in ancient Greece
Greek political systems and Gramsci: hegemony and inequalities within the Greek polis
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
3 Hegemony, ideology, and ancient history: Notes towards the development of an intersectional framework
Two contextual issues: coercion and class
Overcoming class binarism: subject-position and anti-essentialism
Constructing hegemony in a Foucauldian power structure
Notes
Bibliography
General index
Index of the ancient sources
Index of Gramsci’s texts
