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Christopher Allen

When Confucius was asked by his disciples how they should become wise, he would enjoin them to study the classics; over two millennia later and much closer to home, Winckelmann declared that it was only by imitating the supreme masterpieces of the Greeks that we too might one day become inimitable – putting his finger on the paradox that the greatest originality always has deep roots in the past.

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The Classical Tradition by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis

by
March 2011, no. 329

Unlike China, whose history similarly goes back to the Bronze Age, Europe has been shaped by spectacular collapses and profound renewals, first after the Mycenaean Age and then with the fall of the Roman Empire, which severed what we know as Antiquity from the modern world. The new Europe that emerged from half a millennium of turmoil, cultural regression, and repeated invasion by foreign predators was fundamentally transformed. Its centre of gravity had moved from south-east to north-west; its population was largely composed of former Celtic and Germanic barbarians; its new languages were vernaculars emerging from the pidgin Latin spoken by illiterates; and its religion was Christianity. What made it possible for these originally tribal peoples to build Europe was the blueprint of an extraordinary civilisation, which at first they barely understood, but to which they became the unlikely heirs.

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It is easy to be complacent about the Greeks. We know they invented democracy, philosophy, drama, the principle of free speech and other things that we value highly; but how often do we read the works of Homer and Hesiod, of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, of Herodotus and Thucydides, of Plato and Aristotle? How often do we reflect that the Greeks gave the West the very idea of literature? The heritage is so rich that there are whole periods and genres that many readers may never have encountered, except in the most tangential way.

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