Presentation of the dossier "Ancient History in Iberian-America"

Abstract

The Classics—understood as the set of disciplines that study ancient societies of the Mediterranean world and the Near East—are no longer a field focused exclusively on the scholarly reconstruction of the past; rather, since the second half of the last century, they have also become a well-established arena for reflection on the present.

Central to this shift has been what is now known as the reception studies of classical (or Greco-Roman) antiquity, which constitute a field of research that is not limited to reconstructing or asking what Greece and Rome were like, but rather analyzes how they have been received, read, interpreted, appropriated, reinterpreted, and contested in later historical periods and in diverse cultural and geographical contexts, including in regions far removed from or entirely outside the Hellenic and Latin legacy.