Given the findings of the Pharos Project and other anti-racist scholarly endeavors, it is perhaps not surprising that Lovecraft, a man as famous for his white supremacy as he is for his weird fiction, cites Mediterranean antiquity as a personal touchstone. “Few students of mankind, if truly impartial,” he opines, “can fail to select as the greatest of human institutions that mighty and enduring civilisation which, first [appeared] on the banks of the Tiber… If to Greece is due the existence of all modern thought, so to Rome is due its survival and our possession of it” (Lovecraft 2004: 23). So begins Lovecraft’s 1918 essay “The Literature of Rome,” and his interest in and dedicated beliefs regarding the superiority of Greco-Roman antiquity threads throughout his work, from the lengthy excursus into the Magna Mater and her rites during “The Rats in the Walls” (1923) to Lovecraft’s collaboration with Sonia Greene on an adaptation of Euripides’ Alcestis (see Jenzen-Jones and Romano 2024 on the Alcestis and, e. g., Joshi 2010, Quinn 2011, Salonia 2011, Norris 2016, Norris 2017, and Krämer 2017 on Lovecraft’s greater engagement with Mediterranean antiquity). This is not to say that Lovecraft limited himself to Greece and Rome within the ancient Mediterranean, however, as even the single example of his short story “Under the Pyramids” (1924) attests, or the realm of writing; as he once recorded: “I have in literal truth built altars to Pan, Apollo, Diana, and Athena, and have watched for dryads and satyrs in the woods and fields at dusk” (cited in Krämer 2017: 94).

Contributions to this conference aim to elucidate the multifarious ways that Lovecraft manipulates the ancient Mediterranean in his criticism and fiction, and particularly, how he maneuvers ancient Greece, Rome, and/or other civilizations in support of his bigotry. Lovecraft’s fascination with Mediterranean antiquity persisted from childhood, and so informed his development as a writer and thinker. Further still, the uses to which he put that fascination, as Robinson Peter Krämer (2017: 116) observes, don’t cohere to “a specific order or system.” This diversity of engagement raises important questions regarding how Lovecraft makes use of different cultures of Mediterranean antiquity at different moments within his philosophy and literature, and how consistent these uses are with each other.