Pericles, Cincinnatus, and Zombies: Classicizing Nostalgia in The Walking Dead (2010–)
Pericles, Cincinnatus, and Zombies: Classicizing Nostalgia in The Walking Dead (2010–)
In the third of three chapters examining Athens’ golden-age legacy, Gawlinski discusses how the “flu episodes” of The Walking Dead’s fourth season re-animate a highly influential classical plague narrative: when the civic ideals of “golden age” Athens, lauded by Pericles in the famous Funeral Oration featured in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, fall to the lawlessness (anomia) spurred by an outbreak of plague as the walled city is besieged by the Spartans. The series’ dramatization of the community’s failure to live up to its ideals interlaces with the struggle of its protagonist, former sheriff Rick Grimes, to follow an example from the Roman Republican strand of the classical tradition. Cincinnatus, the Roman leader who temporarily left his farm to save the state by taking up emergency powers in wartime, then returned to pastoral life voluntarily, has been invoked as a model for American leaders since George Washington. Grimes tries but fails to follow this Roman model, further undermining the community’s attempt at Athenian-style civic life and abandoning the communal farm. Thus two classical models promoting a turn away from strife are shown as unsustainable, like the golden age itself.
Keywords: The Walking Dead, golden age of Athens, Pericles’ Funeral Oration, civic institutions, Cincinnatus, Roman Republic, plague narrative, pastoral life, authoritarian rule, lawlessness(anomia)
Edinburgh Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
