Sean Connery's reading of the same poem, set to music by Vangelis (Chariots of Fire, Bladerunner)

Help in how to approach posters or presentations about things inspired by the Trojan War:

Some helpful terms:

Reception studies: the study of the 'afterlife' of something: where and how they appear and influence and inspire later things. In this case, we are talking about how the Homeric epics appear in, influence, and inspire later works.

Presentism: using the standards of today and the knowledge available to us today to interpret things in the past, particularly when that interpretation imposes ideas on the past that people in the past would have rejected as inappropriate, incorrect, or otherwise problematic. This is a kind of anachronistic interpretation, one that is objectionable if one is trying to figure out something in the past, but important, because we need to decide how we ourselves view things in the past.

Anachronism: a broader term than 'presentism.' Any instance where something from one time (let's call it the source time) is brought to bear on or in another time (let's call it the target time) in a way that is inappropriate, incorrect, or otherwise problematic. Something that does not fit in the time into which it is put is 'anachronistic.'

NOTE WELL: neither anachronism nor presentism are 'wrong' in any simple way. It is, for our purposes, useful and interesting to identify them when they occur.
To some degree, we cannot help but be presentist and anachronistic, because we are not ancient Greeks, but we can notice these things when we see them in others and try to avoid having our own interpretations be presentist or anachronistic: the important thing is to be aware of what various times in history were like on their own terms and to make efforts to avoid distorting them. This is, of course, impossible to do perfectly, and yet there are clear ways that it is possible to do so.

A helpful list of phenomena associated with 'reception studies', taken directly from Lorna Hardwick, Reception Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 9-11.

Acculturation assimilation into a cultural context (through nurturing or education or domestication or sometimes by force)

Adaptation a version of the source developed for a different purpose or insufficiently close to count as a translation

Analogue a comparable aspect of source and reception

Appropriation taking an ancient image or text and using it to sanction subsequent ideas or practices (explicitly or implicitly)

Authentic close approximation to the supposed form and meaning of the source. At the opposite end of the spectrum from invention (i.e. a new work)

Correspondences aspects of a new work which directly relate to a characteristic of the source

Dialogue mutual relevance of source and receiving texts and contexts

Equivalent fulfilling an analogous role in source and reception but not necessarily identical in form or content

Foreignization translating or representing in such a way that difference between source and reception is emphasized

Hybrid a fusion of material from classical and other cultures

Intervention reworking the source to create a political, social or aesthetic critique of the receiving society

Migration movement through time or across place; may involve dispersal and diaspora and acquisition of new characteristics

Refiguration selecting and reworking material from a previous or contrasting tradition

Translation literally from one language to another. Literal, close, words used to pin down the relationship to the source are free, as are phrases like in the spirit rather than the letter.

Translation can also be used metaphorically as in 'translation to the stage' or 'translation across cultures'.
 
Free translations sometimes merge into adaptations or versions

Transplant to take a text or image into another context and allow it to develop

Version a refiguration of a source (usually literary or dramatic) which is too free and selective to rank as a translation

Key assumptions:

1. Receptions do in practice affect perceptions of and judgements about the ancient world and therefore need to be analysed.
2. Receptions within antiquity need to be considered within the same framework of enquiry as subsequent receptions so that the diversity of ancient culture is more fully recognized and the impact of ancient reception approaches on intervening interpretations is investigated.
3. Reception studies require us to look closely at the source text and context as well as at the receiving ones. This does not imply that the source is a yardstick of value but rather that a 'critical distance between source and reception illuminates both. The traditional practices of classical philology have an important part to play in developing the broader cultural philology that reception studies needs.
4. The concept of cultural horizon (with its ancient analogue paideia) provides a useful but not constraining framework for reception studies. How cultural horizons, with their assumptions, expectations, aspirations and transformations, relate to classical material is a crucial area in modern reception studies which also have to take into account the impact of new technologies and art forms (such as film).
5. Reception practice and its analysis reveals both commonalities and differences between ancient and modern. The shifting balance between commonalities and differences undermines the crudely polarized positions that classical texts either address universal and unchanging aspects of human nature or that they are remote and alien with nothing of value to offer to post-classical experience.
6. Reception of classical material is an index of cultural continuity and change and therefore has a value beyond its role in classical studies.
7. Reception is and always has been a field for the practice and study of contest about values and their relationship to knowledge and power.

A case study for the above:

Keats' sonnet 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer'