Rettig Lecture 2023

Jeremy Swist - From Hellenism to Heavy Metal: The Emperor Julian’s Contemporary Reception

4:00, Saturday October 14, 2023 - Conaton Board Room, Schmidt Hall

The emperor Julian (r. 361–363 CE) was viewed by many as attempting to radically renovate Greco-Roman paganism, and from the moment he died all the way to the present day, the struggle to define his legacy has likewise tended to extremes. Christian polemicists blackened him as an “apostate” who threatened to supplant the church. To pagan apologists, he was a hero whose battle against the forces of darkness earned him the status of godhood. Even modern scholarship is not immune to strong biases and contention. This presentation explores the emperor’s reception beyond academia, in places where pretenses of historical rigor, accuracy, and objectivity do not necessarily apply. I first examine the emperor’s role as a veritable saint of Hellenism—both a founding father, and object of worship, in the revival of Hellenic polytheism in its various manifestations globally and online. Second, I investigate a number of Heavy Metal artists who celebrate Julian amid the prolific reception of Greco-Roman antiquity in that musical genre. Metal artists appropriate and invert Christian polemic to glorify Julian as a Promethean and positive Satanic figure: a tragic hero and warrior striving to rescue the fire of knowledge, tradition, and freedom from Metal’s symbolic nemesis of Christianity.  

Biography

Jeremy Swist is Visiting Assistant Professor of Classical Studies in the Department of French, Italian, and Classical Studies at Miami University. Prior to this he served as Instructor in the Department of Classics and Modern Languages at Xavier University, and Lecturer in the Department of Classical and Early Mediterranean Studies at Brandeis University outside his native Boston. He earned his PhD. in Classics from the University of Iowa in 2018, and has published on both Greek and Latin historiography, rhetoric, philosophy, and medicine under the Roman Empire, with a special focus on the emperor Julian and his pagan contemporaries. Jeremy’s first monograph in progress is titled Julian Augustus: Platonism, Myth, and the Refounding of Rome. He has written extensively on the reception of ancient Greece, Rome, and Byzantium in Heavy Metal music as well, including the chapter “Sparta and Metal’s Reception of Ancient History” in the just-published Cambridge Companion to Metal Music. He also co-organizes the biennial Heavy Metal & Global Premodernity online conference, which will be held on the Ides of March through St. Patrick’s Day next year.