The Classical Tradition

§1

The Classical Tradition and the Scope of Our Book

The classical tradition covers a millennium and a half of cultural achievements, historical developments, facts, fictions, and phenomena on many levels. It subsumes the many ways in which, since the end of classical antiquity, the world of ancient Greece and Rome has inspired and influenced, has been constructed and reconstructed, has left innumerable traces (sometimes unregarded), and has, repeatedly, been appealed to, and contested, as a point of reference, and rehearsed and reconstituted (with or without direct reference) as an archetype.

Interest in aspects of the classical tradition is currently as active as it is widespread. The classical canon may no longer dominate the modern mind, as it once determined the responses of elite circles in the past, but we live in a time when Hollywood blockbusters about ‘three hundred’ Spartans or the tale of ‘Troy’ attract enthusiastic audiences around the world, when innovative stagings of Greek drama are a familiar presence in many countries, when idealistic notions of, or anxieties about, ‘democracy’ continue to engender debate, and when the enduring tussle between Britain and Greece over the ownership of the Elgin (or Parthenon) marbles shows how cultural goods tied up with the classical tradition can still be a matter of high politics and national interest. These and countless other achievements, developments, and debates, past and present, are increasingly the focus of a miniature explosion in publishing and what is almost a new academic discipline in its own right.1 Various, often controversial, factors may have played a part here, not least the switch, within classical education in the English-speaking world, from language skills to ‘classics in translation’ (§§4, 15), but the level of interest in the classical tradition, both among the classically trained and across the arts and humanities, is beyond dispute.

What is ‘the classical tradition’? In contemporary usage, ‘classical’ and ‘the classics’ may mean a Beethoven symphony, the novels of Tolstoy, the films of René Clair – or a range of notable entities, from permanently-in-fashion dress designs to pre-quantum mechanics.2 For our purposes, ‘the classical’ means the world of ancient Greece and Rome, and ‘the classical tradition’ means reflexes of,3 uses of, reconstitutions of, or responses to, the ancient world from the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire to our own day. But – given that ‘classical’ has always had strongly positive connotations, and ‘tradition’, arguably, too (§2) – this entire domain is inevitably caught up in implications of value. For a start, it is not just any aspect of the Greco-Roman world that inspires and influences, but, overwhelmingly, the special and the privileged – Homer's Iliad, Plato's dialogues, the ruined glories of Phidias' marbles – even if the process of inspiring and influencing can sometimes seem to make the whole of antiquity special and privileged anew.

The classical tradition overlaps with the reception (or receptions) of Greece and Rome. They are not the same thing, and for several reasons.4 First, because the reception of Greece and Rome includes readings and rereadings from within the ancient world itself.5 There will be all manner of particular differences, but there is no necessary difference in kind or in hermeneutic status, between a response to Virgil's Aeneid from Virgil's own time, one from later antiquity, and one from a later age – say, T. S. Eliot's response, in a pair of provoking essays (§35). Yet though these are all instances of the reception of Virgil, only Eliot's essays can meaningfully be referred to the classical tradition. Conversely, the classical tradition is wider in scope. Many of its embodiments are not classical receptions in any meaningful sense. Post-classical versions of classical archetypes sometimes involve reception, sometimes not (§19). Equally, the Romance and Modern Greek languages are momentous post-classical reflexes of Latin and Ancient Greek, and as such clearly belong to the classical tradition, but they are not, in themselves, ‘receptions’ of anything. Whether the same should be said of Medieval Latin, and of Renaissance Latin too, is another matter; both, in any event, belong straightforwardly to the tradition.

Then again, the classical tradition, as a continuum, subsumes not only direct engagements with antiquity, but engagements with earlier engagements. Like Eliot, the poet Milton responds to Virgil's poetry; unlike Eliot, he responds not as critic, but by and within his own poetry, which – from Lycidas to Paradise Lost – creates (among much else) an idiosyncratic classicizing idiom that looks back to classical Latinity in general and Virgil's Latin among others. In this sense, Milton's poetic language represents a distinctive embodiment of the classical tradition; it is also the object of an Eliotian critique in a notable essay, which, however, makes virtually no reference to antiquity at all. That essay is eminently discussible as itself a critical contribution to the tradition and as significant evidence for Eliot's sense of his own distinctive place within it6 – but there is nothing in the essay to invite talk of ‘reception’ of antiquity, nor indeed is the essay commonly discussed as such.

Above all, though, whereas ‘classical’ and ‘tradition’ tend to prompt consideration of value, ‘reception’ does not. In a nutshell, the ‘classical’ of ‘the classical tradition’ tends to imply canonicity, even when the post-antique engagement with the antique is anti-canonical (as is the case, most obviously, with engagements within popular culture: §12). Indeed, notwithstanding the fact that it is precisely the value associated with the classical over hundreds of years that has brought its multiple receptions into being, reception studies tend to operate in a relativistic spirit, generally preferring cultural-historical engagement with such issues to critical engagement. All in all: reception studies have helped to make what was once the preoccupation of a minority of classicists, and others, fashionable – while reception theory has helped to generate better understandings of various aspects of the field – but in no sense has ‘reception’ itself been shown to redefine, let alone to replace, ‘the classical tradition’ itself.7

The scope of the classical tradition is vast. Its many continuities (and discontinuities) range from high culture to low, from politics to sport, from law to urban planning, from the Romance languages, and the Modern Greek language, to the international, largely Greek-derived terminology of modern science and the continuing use of botanical Latin names for plants – and not just by professional botanists, but by ordinary gardeners too.8 And if the scope is vast, the variety of usage that arises from particular points of reference is no less so.

Take Augustus and his age. Often regarded as (and seemingly regarding itself as) a ‘classical’ age in its own right, on the model of fifth-century Athens, with its sublimely assured art and architecture and public poetry, the Augustan age has in turn inspired classicizing revivals, along with other responses, in great profusion. It has bequeathed to the Western world the concepts of urban renewal in the grand manner9 and of ‘the classic of all Europe’ (Eliot on Virgil again: §35). And the ideals it has been taken to embody have been acclaimed and denied and reinvented, from Charlemagne and Alcuin (who relived the relationship between Augustus and his poets) to the Holy Roman Emperors (who retained ‘Imperator Augustus’ in their titles), from Cosimo I of Florence (who promoted himself as a Renaissance version of Augustus the autocrat, saving the state from the instabilities of republicanism) to John Dryden (founding father of the English ‘Augustan’ poets, who reconfig­ured the same historical schema in his youthful ‘Astraea Redux’, composed to celebrate the restoration of Charles II), from Joachim Du Bellay (who invoked ‘that most happy age of Augustus’ as a model for the emergent French aspiration towards a great language and a high culture) to Benito Mussolini (who commemorated his hero's 2000th birthday with a grandiose Fascist exhibition in 1937–8)10 to W. H. Auden (whose poem ‘Secondary Epic’ sniped from below at Virgil's lofty vision of Augustus as a carrier of destiny). In this example, and a host of others, it is hard to overstate the rich complexity of a tradition that has Greco-Roman antiquity as its unifying point of reference, but comprehends such a variety of forms and figures, social settings and relations, themes, media, and conflicting ideologies.

The range of our book, and the diversity of its connections and appraisals, reflects this ‘infinite variety’, but (we repeat) the book makes no attempt to take account of all possible points of reference, in topical, chronological, or geographical terms. While it contains its proper share of facts and figures, attested origins and unmistakable developments, our overall aim is an...