On 26 November 1940 prof. Rudolph Cleveringa, professor of law at Leiden University, gave a famous protest speech against the measure taken by the invading Germans of removing all Jewish professors from their posts. Cleveringa was arrested and imprisoned. Two years earlier, the German professor Harald Fuchs, professor of Latin philology at Basel, published his book Der geistige Widerstand gegen Rom in der antiken Welt (Berlin 1938). Fuchs was strongly opposed against the political developments in Nazi Germany. His book examines the ancient resistance against the rule of Rome and the Roman emperors, but it can also be read as an (indirect) indictment against Nazi Germany.
Inspired by Cleveringa and Fuchs, this lecture will examine how Greek intellectuals of the early empire used different literary techniques to criticize Rome and the first emperors. We will interpret the oppositional voices of authors like Timagenes of Alexandria, Diodorus of Sardes, and Pseudo-Longinus, the author of On the Sublime. While explicit criticism of Rome could be dangerous, these writers adopt subtle literary techniques to formulate their aversion to the empire.
About the speaker
Casper de Jonge is a professor of Greek language and literature at Leiden University. His research concentrates on Greek literature in the Roman world, narratives of migration, rhetoric, literary theory and the sublime. Casper de Jonge received Veni and Vidi grants from the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (NWO). He is program director of the Bachelor Greek and Latin Languages and Cultures (Leiden), coordinator of the OIKOS research group ancient rhetoric and aesthetics, member of the editorial board of Mnemosyne and the Mnemosyne Supplements.
© image: ‘Reading the Death Sentence to Thrasea Paetus’ painting by Fyodor Bronnikov (Radishchev Art Museum); Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
