ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a critical commentary on the entire volume, reflecting upon both its general themes and the individual engagements it addresses in the context of current approaches in material culture studies that stress the role of sensorial, and affective, engagement with material antiquity and the longer history of the tension between literary imagination of and material encounter with the Hellenic past. It also examines Hellenomaniac discourses emerging in Greece today, especially in the aftermath of the recent ‘Greek Crisis’, closing with a review and criticism of ‘Learning From Athens’, the latest exhibition of the International Contemporary Art Exhibition, documenta. The analysis highlights the reuse of well-known tropes of Hellenism (e.g. Athens as birthplace of democracy), as well as the emergence of new, rather different uses of the Greek past (Athens as site of reflection on the precarity of democracy in relation to globalisation, migration, and the refugee crisis).
