The Ancient Sea: The Utopian and Catastrophic in Classical Narratives and Their Reception

In the ancient Mediterranean world, the sea was an essential domain for trade, cultural exchange, communication, exploration, and colonisation. In tandem with the lived reality of this maritime space, a parallel experience of the sea emerged in narrative representations from ancient Greece and Rome, of the sea as a cultural imaginary. This imaginary seems often to oscillate between two extremes: the utopian and the catastrophic; such representations can be found in narratives from ancient history, philosophy, society, and literature, as well as in their post-classical receptions.

Utopia can be found in some imaginary island paradise far away and across the distant sea; the sea can hold an unknown, mysterious, divine wealth below its surface; and the sea itself as a powerful watery body can hold a liberating potential. The utopian quality of the sea and seafaring can become a powerful metaphor for articulating political notions of the ideal state or for expressing an individual’s sense of hope and subjectivity. Yet the catastrophic sea balances any perfective imaginings: the sea threatens coastal inhabitants with floods, tsunamis, and earthquakes and sailors with storms and the accompanying monsters. From symbolic perspectives, the catastrophic sea represents violence, instability, the savage, and even cosmological chaos.

The twelve papers in this volume explore the themes of utopia and catastrophe in the liminal environment of the sea, through the lens of history, philosophy, literature and classical reception.

Contributors: Manuel Álvarez-Martí-Aguilar, Vilius Bartninkas, Aaron L. Beek, Ross Clare, Gabriele Cornelli, Isaia Crosson, Ryan Denson, Rhiannon Easterbrook, Emilia Mataix Ferrándiz, Georgia L. Irby, Simona Martorana, Guy Middleton, Hamish Williams.

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).