Classics Colloquium

According to Strabo, Posidonius came to observe the tides at Gadir in southwestern Iberia, where he noted that the tides moved “sympathetically” with the moon. The tides’ “sympathy” with the moon is soon invoked in Stoic arguments for the idea that the cosmos is a unified body whose parts “sympathize.” I read this scene, on the one hand, as Posidonius’ reception of earlier texts and authors who had focused his attention on cyclical oceanic fluctuation through an encounter with the ocean at the temple of Melqart–Herakles–Hercules in Gadir.  On the other hand, I read it as an opening towards theorizing the diasporic reception of a Greek-identified cosmo-anthropologies of nature within differently scaled communities that are at once transgenerational, culturally hybrid, and more-than-human.  Drawing on the work of modern and contemporary artists and theorists, I reread Posidonius’ tides to make space in classical reception studies for densities of affective relation that invite us to conceptualize reception, and “antiquity” itself, in terms of turbulence.

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