Event

Speaker: Evan Jewell, Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University-Camden

Abstract: Pompeii and its extensive excavation history has often figured as a crucible for the creation of later, non-Roman, modern identities and ideologies. In this talk, I explore how the notional ancient Roman youth (collective and singular) was appropriated in two overlapping periods of engagement with the site of Pompeii and how these open windows onto thorny ethical issues of classical reception which the ancient historian cannot and should not ignore. First I examine the photography of Guglielmo Plüschow (1852-1930; cousin of Wilhelm von Gloeden) and his staging of local Italian children and youths in different parts of the site and how they figured in a larger project of northern European colonialism that leveraged the classical past and its veneer of romanticized respectability to cast pedophilia as an “ancient” practice (“pederasty”). The second part of the talk then turns to the movement which outlawed the activities of photographers such as Plüschow: Italian Fascism. Here I focus in particular on the Fascist epigrapher and archaeologist, Matteo Della Corte (1875-1962), whose book Iuventus (1924) and related scholarship, has had an outsized influence on our understanding of youth at Pompeii. Drawing on a host of unpublished material for the first time from his archive at the Getty––including speeches, letters, pamphlets, manuscripts, photographs and excavation notebooks––my analysis of Della Corte’s politicization of youth at Pompeii complements the recent interventions of scholarship on the ways the fascist regime of Mussolini appropriated the Roman past for the propagation of its ideology of romanità. Ultimately, I assess how these two overlapping appropriations of youth at Pompeii not only expose two dark moments of classical reception, but how they force us as ancient historians and classicists to grapple with the ethics of the subject matter we study explicitly in terms of its later and still ongoing legacies.