John Davidson lives in Wellington, having retired as Professor of Classics at Victoria University of Wellington in 2010. He has published extensively on ancient Greek literature and mythology and was co-author (with Geoff Miles and Paul Millar) of The Snake-Haired Muse: James K. Baxter and Classical Myth (2011). John has been at the forefront of New Zealand Classical Reception Studies, promoting the discipline since the 1970s and shining a light on numerous New Zealand artists, poets, and dramatists working with the myths, legends and historical events of the ancient Mediterranean. Classical Illusions (Steele Roberts Aotearoa, 2019) is John’s seventh collection of poetry.
In his new book Classicist, and Classical Reception scholar John Davidson becomes a reception poet, and in the process reshapes the landscape of Greek and Roman literature and history. In his illusory world, Agamemnon returns from Troy to the site of Mycenae as it now looks, Socrates’ last offering is his cell phone, Philoctetes is abandoned by mistake on Lesbos where there is a refugee overcrowding problem, Alcmene confesses that all the stories about Heracles are fiction, Livia Drusilla reflects on what it was like being married to Augustus for fifty-one years, the 9th Legion disappears into the mists of Caledonia with the last copies of Ovid’s Medea and the Twelve Tables (or did they?), and more.
Past and present are interlocked, often hilariously. But there is also much that is deadly serious and tragically topical, such as the poem ‘The Rape of Lucretia’. Always challenging and provocative, the ancient world viewed through a multifaceted modern lens.
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SOCRATES’ CELL PHONE
By asking awkward questions,
he showed up the muddled thinking
of his contemporaries.
It was an irony that he was accused
of corrupting young minds
through the dialogues
he initiated on social media,
but he made no apology,
leaving that task to others.
A groundswell of prejudice
against him turned toxic
and he died among a few friends
and with only a cell phone
to serve as the offering
he owed to Asclepius.
John Davidson, 2019.
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THE RAPE OF LUCRETIA
Regardless of your virtue, Lucretia,
you are constantly being raped.
Tarquin lurks everywhere – on city streets,
by roadsides, in bush and forest tracks,
day and night, in your own home,
even in the marital bed.
He has the face of relative, family friend,
total stranger: wearing toga, blue collar,
white collar, dog collar, imperial purple,
the variety of service uniforms.
When you have the courage and chance
to speak, though sometimes believed, your story
will often be brushed aside as exaggeration
or invention, and you may be re-victimised at trial.
You may of course be strangled or stabbed
at the time, or your shame and agony may drive you
to use the Roman dagger on yourself, or an overdose.
More commonly, you will survive for years
of scarring and shadow.
Collatinus may be your comfort, if you’re lucky,
or Lucretius, who may even instigate revolution,
but monarchy, dictatorship, oligarchy or democracy
makes little difference in the end.
Tarquin, even if banished, vilified, imprisoned,
will always reappear, rising from cloacae
or lording it in the Senate, to haunt your dreams
after he’s left you lying traumatised, bleeding,
violated.
John Davidson, 2019.