A Tendency towards Melancholy: How Classical Reception Texts Transmit Cheiron through Collective Memory and Embodiment

Cognitive psychology is often applied to classics and ancient history, but less frequently to classical reception, when contemporary works reinterpret ancient material. This article innovatively argues that cognitive approaches can be useful for examining mythological figures and how they have been received in contemporary texts. By focusing on a single mythological figure, specifically Cheiron the centaur, this article examines how his representation within ancient mythological traditions, as an example of ‘canonical memory,’ is transformed into a more individualised figure by authors who appropriate him as a literary character. John Updike’s The Centaur (1963) and Elizabeth Cook’s Achilles (2013) both use embodiment to consider Cheiron’s incurable wound, and collective memory to convey the eternal qualities of the centaur.