Authors:
Irene F. de Jong Amsterdam

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Miguel John Versluys Leiden

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The Dutch research programme Anchoring Innovation investigates the ways in which people make sense of innovation by connecting the new to the old, the traditional, and the already known. Spolia, ‘new’ objects coming in from the outside to be incorporated in the ‘old’, own society, where they from then on start to function, are an excellent subject, therefore, to illustrate and explore practices and theories of anchoring. This is what this book sets out to do, focusing on the Greek and Hellenistic-Roman worlds.

In order to produce a coherent volume that adds to the theory-building around the concept of Anchoring Innovation, we decided to put central the notion of appropriation. Together with related concepts pertaining to the question what role spolia play, what they do in ancient societies, this concept will be extensively elaborated upon in the theoretical introductions that form Part 1 of this book. In Part 2 a number of significant spolia scenes from Greek and Latin literature are presented. Each text is discussed by a set of two specialists from different backgrounds (historians, archaeologists, literary critics and linguists) – in one case two specialists have even, between them, produced one single chapter. Part 3 consists of a critical conclusion that looks back on all earlier chapters and, this way, may inspire readers to do the same.

The double focus employed in this volume, texts being looked at from both a literary/linguistic and a material/historical perspective, has been applied before, for instance in a recent volume on the battles of Thermopylae and Cannae (L. van Gils, I.J.F. de Jong, C.H.M. Kroon (eds.), Textual Strategies in Ancient War Narrative. Thermopylae, Cannae and Beyond, Leiden 2019). This multidisciplinary approach is the happy result of specialists from the whole ‘Altertumswissenschaftliche’ spectrum working together, for more than two decades now, in the Dutch Research School in Classical Studies OIKOS. It is our sincere conviction that such a cooperation can be of great benefit to all involved. Literary specialists may see their textual analyses enriched when these are embedded in or confronted with the historical and material context. Historians and archaeologists may become more alert to the fact that the texts which they use as sources have a rhetoric and ideology of their own.

The planning of this book started in 2020 through informal discussions between the two editors, both senior board-members within the Anchoring Innovation programme. They decided to explore the topic in more depth by bringing together a group of specialists. The first meeting took place online on January 22, 2021. The second meeting, in which drafts of all the individual chapters were (briefly) presented and (extensively) discussed, took place on October 1 of the same year in the Vondelzaal of the library of the University of Amsterdam. These meetings and the compilation of this volume were supported by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) through the Dutch Research Council (NWO), as part of the Anchoring Innovation Gravitation Grant research agenda of OIKOS, the National Research School in Classical Studies, the Netherlands (project number 024.003.012). We would like to thank the authors of the book for their commitment to this project and its rich debates. We thank Caroline van den Oever for her help at the final editorial stage.

Irene F. de Jong (Amsterdam) & Miguel John Versluys (Leiden)

November 2022

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