Abstract: A brief precis of the Robert Graves Society panel, ‘Classical Reception and the Work of Robert Graves and Laura Riding’, convened for the 2025 Conference of the Classical Association (CA) and the Classical Association of Scotland (CAS), at the University of St Andrews.

Keywords: ancient world, Classical reception, Classical elements in modern fiction, modern poetry, historical fiction

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In July 2025, the Robert Graves Society was represented by a panel at the 2025 Conference of the Classical Association (CA) and the Classical Association of Scotland (CAS), at the University of St Andrews. The Conference is the largest annual Classics Conference in the UK and brings together everyone with an interest in the ancient world, from across the globe. In recent years, the conference has paid increasing attention to the flourishing field of classical reception, and so it seemed an excellent idea to draw attention to the hugely significant role RG has played in the reception of ancient Greek and Roman culture in modern and contemporary culture. There has always been interest in Graves as a Classicist. For instance, the 10th international Graves conference, in Mallorca in 2010, had a focus on Graves and the Mediterranean, while a 2016 volume titled Robert Graves and the Classical Tradition contained essays on the historical novels, on Graves’s translations of classical text and on Graves the mythographer and the poet. But almost ten years later, and with interest in Classical reception burgeoning, we thought it was time to take another look at Graves and his relationship with Greece and Rome within the context of a Classical studies conference.

Our panel, ‘Classical Reception and the Work of Robert Graves and Laura Riding’ drew together four scholars from the US and Italy. The panel met with an enthusiastic audience, eager to know more about Graves as a war poet, about Graves’s notion of the White Goddess, about his collaboration with Laura Riding, and about his classically inspired poetry. It was particularly exciting to have a panel that included one of the North American Vice Presidents of the RGS, as well as one of its newest and youngest members, early career researcher Adriana Marinelli. We welcomed two new Italian members too, Marco Canani and Enrichetta Soccio, both specialists in Victorian and Edwardian literature and culture. We hope that the panel attracted new members to the Society from the audience of Classicists at St Andrews.

We anticipate that the papers will be published in due course, and report here just a brief account of them in the order in which they were delivered.

Marco Canani, from the University of Milan, specialises in Romantic poetry and Anglo-Italian studies. Titled ‘The Classical/Romantic Debate on Poetry: Robert Graves’s “Rappel au Romantisme” in the 1920s’ Professor Canani’s presentation focussed on Graves’s 1922 collection of essays On English Poetry. Anna Enrichetta Soccio, from the University of Chieti Pescara, is the director of its University Centre for Edwardian and Victorian Studies. The title of her presentation was ‘Back to the Victorians: Robert Graves, the Reception of the Classics and the Victorian Education System’, and her primary focus was on the influence of Graves’s Classical education on his poetry.

Adriana Marinelli, a PhD candidate at the Parthenope University at Naples, specialises in classical reception in Graves’s poetry, and she gave a paper titled ‘Robert Graves: Classical Poet or Poet of the Classics?’ in which she provided illuminating readings of Graves’s poem ‘Theseus and Ariadne’ as well as of a very entertaining example of his talent for Latin verse composition. Anett Jessop, of the University of Texas at Tyler, and a member of our journal’s editorial board, gave a presentation titled ‘Historiography as Story: Robert Graves and Laura Riding’s “Greeks and Trojans”’, in which she introduced her recovery of the Graves/Riding collaboration ‘Greeks and Trojans: A Play in Six Scenes’.

Marco Canani, Anna Enrichetta Soccio, Adriana Marinelli,
Anett K. Jessop, Elena Theodorakopoulos

Elena Theodorakopoulos is Associate Professor in Classics at the University of Birmingham, where she specialises in Latin poetry and in classical reception.