Many scholars trace the emergence of the Byzantine empire to the moment when Constantine linked Christianity to the success of imperial Rome and gave his empire a new and enduring base in Constantinople. (Byzantine derives from Byzantium, the name of the Greek city on which Constantinople was built.) Others see the reign of Justinian as the turning point. By the late sixth century the transition from the classical to the Byzantine world, one in which a predominantly Christian, Greek culture was precariously maintained by an autocratic state beset by enemies, had been completed. After Justinian’s death Latin gradually became redundant. An important moment came in 629 when Heraclius officially titled himself basileus rather than the traditional imperator. The titles of courtiers were now in Greek. The leading military official is a strategos, the leading civilian a krites.
By now a more intensely Christian atmosphere pervaded the empire. In the cities resources now seem to be targeted almost exclusively at Christian buildings. Jus-tiniana Prima, a city founded by Justinian at his birthplace in Dacia (now close to Skopje) in 535, boasted a cathedral, seven basilica churches, and only one modest bath house. Christian liturgies and the music that accompanied them become an important part of general culture. There is a new emphasis on the unknowability of God, especially in the works of the mystic known as pseudo-Dionysus, first thought to have been those of a follower of Paul but now dated to c. ad 500. There was no longer any place for individual speculation about the divine. ‘The saved and hidden truth about the celestial intelligences should be concealed through the inexpressible and the sacred and be inaccessible to the common masses’ as pseudo-Dionysus put it.
Reason was therefore no longer held to be important in grasping ‘the inexpressible mysteries’ of the Christian faith. Justinian warned the people of Constantinople that the frequent earthquakes in the city were a sign of God’s wrath and needed to be propitiated by more virtuous living. It was to be a thousand years before the possibility that earthquakes might have natural causes was revived. The icon, a picture of Christ, the Virgin Mary, or a saint, normally painted on wood, became increasingly popular at all levels of society. The most venerated were believed to be ‘not made by human hands’ and had the ability to effect miracles. When Constantinople was besieged in 626, the city’s icons were paraded before the enemy and portraits of the Virgin Mary were carried round the walls. The city survived.
The horizons of the state also appear to have become narrower as communications and territories contracted. This was a time of increasing isolation for the empire. The attacks, from both north and east, were unrelenting. The early seventh century saw the crumbling of the Danube borders and the most successful Persian attack ever on the empire with both Jerusalem and Alexandria lost. Asia Minor was ravaged and even Constantinople was nearly captured. Under the usurping emperor Heraclius (610-41) a sensational recovery took place that brought the Sasa-nian empire close to collapse. It was celebrated not by the traditional triumph on the Roman model that Belisarius had enjoyed a century earlier but by the return of a fragment of the True Cross to the recovered Jerusalem. As Heraclius approached in his imperial finery, the city gate swung shut and it was only when he had humbly stripped to his underclothes that it miraculously sprung open. Even emperors must now submit to God.
Hardly had Heraclius’ success been celebrated, however, than an onslaught of a totally unexpected nature came from the south. The deserts of Arabia had long
Been home to wandering nomadic tribes, who shared a rich language spread among them by poets and storytellers, but who had never had the resources to create a settled state. It was their very statelessness that brought the possibility that they could unite if given a common purpose. This was provided by Muhammad, of the Arab tribe of Quraysh, who began preaching in his native town of Mecca on the coast of the Red Sea, 1,600 kilometres south of the Byzantine frontiers, in about 610. Muhammad delivered to the Arab people the summation of God’s message to mankind, in the Koran, that they must surrender to the will of God (this ‘surrender’ provides the word Islam) and maintain the message through jihad.
Jihad is often translated as ‘holy war’ but its connotations are as much of maintaining one’s identity or message as of using violence. In 622 Muhammad moved northwards with his supporters to the oasis of Medina in a hijra, an emigration of a people in search of new land to settle. The hijra marked the starting year of a Muslim calendar and transformed Muhammad and his followers into a nation in arms. They created their own history (in much the same way Christians had by appropriating the Hebrew scriptures) by presenting themselves as the true children of Abraham. To Christians and Jews, both of whom had their own profound reverence for Abraham, they were difficult to place. Heraclius, faced with an Arab delegation, is reported to have remarked that ‘This people is like an evening, between daylight and nightfall, neither sun-lit nor dark. . . so this people is neither illumined by the light of Christ nor is it plunged into the darkness of idolatry.’
After the death of Muhammad in 632, Islam exploded northwards in a series of lightning military campaigns under his successors Abu Bakr (632-4) and ‘Umar (634-44). Nomadic peoples are used to warfare and moving fast but often fall back when challenged. Islam was different in giving the Arab peoples a cohesive sense of community (umma) that they were able to maintain after their conquests. Nevertheless the collapse of vast tracts of the Byzantine empire was startling. The Byzantine rulers had had no time to successfully restore order to their southern provinces after the Persian invasions and their largely Monophysite population remained resentful over the attempted imposition of religious orthodoxy from Constantinople. The Jews, increasingly persecuted by the Christian state, had no reason for loyalty and may even have welcomed the invaders.
The overrunning of the southern provinces was swift. The defeat of the Byzantine army at the Yarmuk river in 636 left Syria and Palestine open to Islamic conquest. The Sasanians were crushed shortly afterwards. In 642 Alexandria capitulated to Islam and over the next century the Arabs spread inexorably along the coast of north Africa (eliminating Byzantine rule there) and then across the Straits of Gibraltar. Only the victory of Charles Martel at Poitiers in 733 finally halted an advance that had also destroyed Visigothic Spain. The Byzantine empire, meanwhile, had lost 75 per cent of its revenue and was facing challenges of a very different sort; but we must end there.
The Archaeological Museum in Naples has outstanding treasures, many of which are now brightly displayed in renovated galleries. On the ground floor pride of place is given to the Farnese sculptures. This extraordinary collection originated in Rome in the 1540s as part of an aggressive acquisitions policy by Alessandro Farnese, later pope Paul III. Many were found among the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, others dug up at other sites in the city, and still others brought in from other aristocratic collections to make up over 300 original statues in all. They include the Farnese Bull, the largest single sculpture known from antiquity, the only copy known of the fifth-century statue of the ‘liberators’ Harmodius and Aristogei-ton from Athens (see earlier, p. 181), the Farnese Hercules, a particularly erotic Venus, and many busts of emperors.
What makes the collection unique is that unlike most others accumulated in that period it was never broken up. It had stood in the massive Farnese palace in Rome (now the French embassy) until the eighteenth century but Elisabetta Farnese, the last of the Farnese to inherit it, in 1731, was the queen of Philip IV of Spain and it was her son Charles, the Bourbon ruler of the Kingdom of the two Sicilies, who transferred it to his capital, Naples. Many of the statues are second-century AD marble copies of bronzes from the classical period of Greece, some five or six hundred years before, so they show how powerfully this period still resonated with educated Romans. Yet in the sixteenth century they aroused equal enthusiasm.
This enthusiasm had begun in 1506 when the Laocoon, a statue of the Trojan Laocoon and his two sons, who had warned of the threat posed by the Trojan Horse but who had been strangled by two snakes which came across the sea to entangle them, was uncovered on the Esquiline Hill in Rome. Michelangelo was on hand to watch the statue being revealed and the Laocoon was immediately hailed as one of the supreme achievements of classical art, not least because it had the honour of being specifically mentioned by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History. It was immediately snapped up by pope Julius II for the Vatican and is seen as one of the founding sculptures of the Museums there. (It is usually dated to the late first century Bc and is probably a copy of an earlier sculpture.)
Just as the Laocoon was being uncovered on the Esquiline Hill, on the Janiculum, another of Rome’s seven hills, the architect Donato Bramante was perfecting one of the most exquisite classical buildings of the Renaissance. Commissioned by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain to stand on the supposed site of St Peter’s martyrdom, the Tempietto is a sheer delight. Inspired by nearby Roman buildings such as the theatre of Marcellus and the graceful circular temple of Hercules, in the Forum Boarium by the river, its columns are surmounted by an entablature and then a dome. Small though it is, it was instantly recognized as a masterpiece. Seventy years later the architect Andrea Palladio accepted it as equal to the buildings of the ancients and its design, a columned surround surmounted by a dome, was echoed through the western world, from St Paul’s Cathedral in London to the Capitol building in Washington.
So the Farnese collection has to be seen as the creation of an age where scholars were becoming enthused with the aura of classical antiquity to the extent of trying to reproduce it in new forms and clawing ancient ruins for buried treasures. There were other important moments to come. Moving up the great staircase of the Archaeological Museum, one comes to another fabulous collection, from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. The villa takes its name from the library of charred papyrus rolls, some 1,800 of them, that were found in 1752 packed in crates that had been covered with the lava from the eruption of Vesuvius of ad 79. No other library from antiquity survives and the limited decipherment of the charred scrolls shows that at least part of this one was dedicated to philosophy, notably Epicureanism. Several works are by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus of Gadara who came to Rome in about 80 Bc. The full exploration of the library will certainly lead to new understandings of ancient texts and the way they were perceived and cherished by the Roman elite. (The Philodemus Project exists to decipher and publish the texts.)
The villa could only be approached through shafts and underground tunnels but it was soon shown to be a luxurious establishment, now known to have belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso. Even though only a small part has yet been excavated, its plan is well known from the meticulous plotting of the eighteenth-century discoverers (accurate enough to allow the villa to be re-created in California to house the Paul Getty collection of antiquities). Its terraces and porticos spread along the coastline of the Bay of Naples and were graced with wonderful statuary, much of it in bronze. Again the taste of the first-century BC owner was for the earlier classical Greek and there are busts of philosophers and statesmen from Athens, alongside satyrs and dancing girls from the less formal areas of the villa.
By this time Rome and Florence were on the Grand Tour made by young English aristocrats eager to finish off their education in suitable style through exploring the past glories of Italy. The collection at Naples was jealously guarded by the Bourbon kings who were determined, in the Renaissance tradition of treasure hunting, to keep the finds of Pompeii and Herculaneum for themselves. (This does mean that most finds from the excavations remain to be seen on site or in the Archaeological Museum.) But the discoveries of Herculaneum and Pompeii and the knowledge that large areas of cities and villas buried in 79 were still to be explored (as they still are) aroused a new passion for the Roman world. The excitement was intensified by Johann Winck-elmann’s reports on the excavations that can be seen as among the first attempts to bring a scientific approach to archaeology, although it was over a hundred years before his plea bore fruit. (For Winckelmann, see Interlude 3, and below.)
So the history of the reception of the classical world by later generations is very rich even if it is extremely difficult to unravel all the different influences and reactions that jostle with each other over the centuries. Despite the collapse of the western empire in the fifth century it had always been impossible to escape the Roman past. Roman roads continued to be used, the shells of cities still stood. Rome only slowly fell into ruin, and many of its great buildings, the Pantheon and the Colosseum, stood largely intact, as they still do today. The new rulers of western Europe adapted Roman law to their purposes and some modelled themselves on what they considered to be Roman imperial behaviour. The celebrated nineteenth-century French historian Ernest Renan (1823-92) went so far as to suggest that Italy never experienced the Middle Ages at all. There was simply the fall of the Roman empire and the rebirth of classical civilization in exactly the same places where it had fallen into decay.
This is much too sweeping. The vitality of the Roman economy had gone and living standards were drastically lower in an age where, so far as documentary evidence is concerned, much is still ‘dark’ It was the Church that most benefited from the collapse of the empire. (Having taken Peter Brown’s caveat that we should not use the capital ‘C’ for the varied Christian communities of late antiquity (see earlier, p. 602), ‘Church’ now does seem justified.) Bishops and monasteries gradually extended their wealth and influence so that by the ninth century the Church owned a third of all the land in Europe. The first major secular ruler of the post-Roman world, Charlemagne, crowned Holy Roman emperor by the pope in 800, did, however, take on many of the trappings of a Roman emperor. Charlemagne saw himself as a patron of learning and selected ancient texts were copied and preserved. Understandably when parchment was so expensive in terms of the number of animals that had to be killed to provide it, the monks chose to concentrate on Christian works and these make up the overwhelming majority of texts listed in early monastery catalogues. It is to Charlemagne, rather than the Church, that the survival of classical texts is credited. (See Rosamond McKitterick, Charlemagne: The Formation of a European Identity, Cambridge and New York, 2008, especially chapter 5 ‘Correctio, knowledge and power’.)
The revival of European trade centred on the city-states of northern Italy, at first those that were on the coast, Venice, Pisa, and Genoa, and then those further inland such as Florence (first prominent only from 1200). In order to flourish they had to forge an identity that would allow them to confront the power of the Church and the ambitions of the successors of Charlemagne as Holy Roman emperors. The emperors wished to control northern Italy for themselves. Very gradually there was an awareness that treatises of Aristotle, notably his Politics, and Cicero’s works on republican government gave their citizens models from the past that spoke to their needs. For the new urban middle classes, especially the lawyers, Roman law provided an ideal. The rediscovery of Justinian’s Law Codes in the single surviving copy in 1070 was an important turning point in that they provided guidelines for the preservation of property and the rights of individuals. The Defensor Pacis, ‘Defender of the Peace’ (1324), by Marsilius of Padua set out a sophisticated defence of the sovereignty of the city-state against the pretensions of Church and emperor.
It drew heavily on the Politics of Aristotle. By the 1330s, according to the chronicler Villani, some 500 to 600 boys in Florence were studying a curriculum of Latin. Here the notaries, who carried out the basic legal work of the city, including teaching students, came into their own. They used Roman sources on history, politics, law, rhetoric, and moral philosophy with the aim of producing upright citizens who knew the basics of Roman law, could argue well, and who were, following their study of Cicero, at home with the politics of republicanism.
Yet, while these texts may have had a functional purpose, there was also a revived admiration for the ancient world in itself. Already in his the Divine Comedy (published by 1317), Dante Alighieri, the foremost poet of the Middle Ages, had chosen Virgil as his mentor for his exploration of the underworld. The most influential guide was Petrarch (1304-74). Petrarch was originally from Arezzo in Tuscany but became an inveterate wanderer around monastic libraries and the ruins of cities, especially those of Rome. Among his greatest discoveries were the letters of Cicero to Atticus (see earlier, p. 423). Cicero’s prose soon became the model for the correct use of Latin. More than this, Petrarch proclaimed that the Roman world was the home of moral truths that were worthy forerunners of Christianity. Here was the birth of European Humanism. Petrarch, and his scholarly successors in the fifteenth century, argued that in almost every field, including statecraft, the waging of war, the creation of art, and the search for the ‘good life’, the classical world had provided exemplars to follow. By the end of the fifteenth century, no one in Italy could call themselves educated unless they had steeped themselves in the major Roman authors and could write Latin in a style of which Cicero would have approved. Remarkably Renaissance Humanism was able to coexist with Christianity, with ancient values such as pietas being linked to their Christian equivalents. Some great figures of the Roman world, the emperor Trajan, for instance, were even given the accolade of honorary Christians, while there were popes, notably Pius II (pope 1458-64), who were themselves enthusiasts for classical learning.
It was not until 1397 that Colluccio Salutati, the chancellor of Florence and another sophisticated Humanist, expanded the world of classical scholarship by asking the Greek scholar Manuel Chysoloras to come to Florence to teach Greek. Knowledge of Greek had vanished in western Europe by 700 but many Greek texts had filtered through to the west in translations from the Arabic. After their sweep of conquests, the Arabs had ruled as an elite for whom conversion was not an immediate priority. They had used Greek administrators, and inscriptions in Greek had persisted long after the conquest. Many educated Arabs enthused over the surviving Greek texts. In the words of the ninth-century scholar Abu al-Hasan Tabith the ‘heathens’ (i. e. the Greeks) had contributed much. ‘Who made the world to be inhabited and flooded it with cities except the good men and kings of heathenism? Who has constructed harbours and conserved the rivers? Who has made manifest the hidden sciences. . . and it is they who have also made to arise the medicine for bodies. And they have filled the world with the correctness of modes of life and with the wisdom which is the head of excellence.’ Arab philosophy included science and medicine built on Greek texts in a way that was not possible in the Christian world.
674 | legacies
The Arabs had rediscovered Aristotle’s surviving works in the ninth century and the extraordinary breadth and coherence of his ideas proved compelling. In the eleventh century the brilliant philosopher Ibn Sina (Avicenna, as he became known to the Latin west) had created an influential synthesis of Aristotle’s ideas and this was added to by another major commentator, Ibn Rushd (in Latin Averroes, 1126-98). Aristotle was treated almost as if he were divine. Averroes credited him with the foundation of three major academic disciplines, logic, natural philosophy (the study of the natural world), and metaphysics, the study of the fundamental questions of existence. Aristotle’s influence was partly due to his being taken up by these intellectuals but, as the historian of science David Lindberg notes, also ‘from the extraordinary explanatory power of Aristotle’s philosophical and scientific system’. He was so obviously superior to anything else on offer and the sophisticated Arabs grasped this.
Christian philosophy had long absorbed Platonism but the Timaeus was the only one of Plato’s works known in the west. (They were only studied and translated from the originals in the later fifteenth century when, in Florence, Cosimo de’Medici sponsored translations by Marsilio Ficino.) So, when Aristotle’s works were rediscovered by Latin scholars in the thirteenth century, he had no contenders and he quickly became known as ‘The Philosopher’. Yet his works were much more problematic to the Christian theologians than those of Plato. Aristotle’s emphasis on empirical observation of the material world contrasted with the spiritual approach to life supported by the Church. In specific areas, such as the creation of the universe, the nature of the soul, and the supremacy of reason over faith, Aristotle confronted Christian orthodoxy head on. In the university of Paris where his works were first appreciated, the church authorities worked hard to ban him.
It took a brilliant Dominican, Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), to reconcile Aristotle with Catholic theology and establish him as the most respected source of knowledge, the arbiter of correct thinking about the natural world. While, by the sixteenth century, criticisms of Aristotle had appeared, he remained the authority for many areas of learning well into the seventeenth century. The Aristotle scholar Jonathan Barnes has even suggested that ‘an account of Aristotle’s intellectual afterlife would be little less than a history of European thought. In biology he remained influential as late as the nineteenth century.
By the sixteenth century classical Humanism had spread through the educated classes of Europe, notably through such fine scholars as the Dutch Erasmus (14661536), who championed new approaches to learning and understanding the classics, both Greek and Latin. (It is extraordinary to realize that no one in western Europe had read Paul’s Letters in the original Greek until now—their vigour had been concealed by the decorous Latin of Jerome and their rough urgency was an immense shock.) It brought with it a thoughtful but critical approach to living. An important breakthrough came with the realization that the classical authors had not always got it right. So Copernicus, while admiring the achievements of Ptolemy (see p. 550), grasped that it was the sun, not the earth, that was the centre of the solar system and so revolutionized astronomy. Leonardo da Vinci pioneered the
Accurate observation of human anatomy and soon followers such as Vesalius (On the Fabric of the Human Body of 1543) were showing that the Greek authorities such as Galen had often given inaccurate descriptions of the human body that had been accepted uncritically by physicians. Natural history took a great leap forward when it was realized that Pliny’s Natural History was full of misconceptions and that the ‘authoritative’ works of Theophrastus and Dioscorides on plants (see earlier, p. 291) could be corrected by the collection and examination of new samples. It was not necessarily that the scholars of the sixteenth century were more brilliant than their forebears. With the rediscovery of the Sceptics (see earlier, p. 353) in the late sixteenth century, they were using tools from the ancient philosophy to challenge conventional ways of thinking whether the sources for these were ancient authorities or not. The approach of the philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650) was well within the tradition of the Sceptics as he dug down to find a basis for knowing anything at all.
By the end of the century there was a more mature and settled approach to the study of the ancient world. The Essais of Montaigne (1580) were full of classical allusions and showed how well an educated mind could digest and use the ancient authors creatively. He was an enthusiast for Lucretius. Shakespeare too drew freely on classical models and events from Roman history (the plays Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra). By Shakespeare’s time, English had absorbed contributions from Latin and Greek so completely that 50 per cent of everyday English words have a Greek or Latin origin, expressed, of course, in a sequence of symbols (the alphabet) which, from its origins in the Near East, reached its final form in the Latin world. The debt of the Romance languages to Latin is even greater.
The sixteenth century was the age of the great collectors, although England did not know much of classical art until the ‘collector earl’ of Arundel brought back his own purchases from the Mediterranean in the early 1600s. (The collection was soon broken up but the core of his Greek and Roman statuary remains in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.) On his forays to the Mediterranean Arundel took with him a young architect by the name of Inigo Jones and they soon came across the works of an earlier architectural genius, Andrea Palladio (1508-80). Palladio had begun life as a stonecutter in Padua but his talents had been spotted by Gian Giorgio Trissino, a Humanist scholar from nearby Vicenza, who initiated him into ancient Roman architecture. Soon Palladio was applying his fertile and innovative mind to the buildings around him, first the decaying town hall in Vicenza (now the Basilica Pal-ladiana) which he encased in a classical shell, and then a series of villas and palaces and later, in Venice, two major churches. His inspiration came from the Roman architect Vitruvius (c.80 to 15 Bc) whose De Architectura, the only surviving treatise on architecture from the ancient world, had been championed a hundred years before by the Florentine Humanist Leon Battista Alberti. Palladio’s own reworking of the ideals of fine building, his I quattro libri dellarchitettura, was enormously influential in spreading classical styles through Europe. Inigo Jones, who had brought back a large cache of Palladio’s drawings, was one of the pioneers of Palladianism in England.
By the eighteenth century classicism was supreme as an architectural form. In Britain the literati termed themselves the ‘Augustans’ as they claimed that new styles of literature echoed those that had characterized the age of Augustus. The poet Horace was especially suited to the lives of the English aristocracy with their mix of leisure and politics. Some went further. Haunted by the collapse of the Roman empire as he surveyed the ruins of ancient Rome, Edward Gibbon conceived his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published in six volumes, 1776-89). Gibbon showed how a mastery of the original sources could be enlivened in a narrative that saw Christianity as the corrupter of earlier Roman ideals. It was the supreme achievement of Enlightenment history. (Even as late as the 1960s, I was advised to read Gibbon to improve my style!)
Although the Parthenon had been visited as early as the fourteenth century, Greece, now ruled by the Ottoman empire, was virtually inaccessible. In the eighteenth century the first travellers began to record what they had found there. For the British reader, James Athenian’ Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s well-illustrated Antiquities of Athens (1762) initiated a craze for Greek architecture. (Edinburgh was a noted beneficiary of the enthusiasm, so much so that it became known as ‘the Athens of the North.) This was just at the same time that Johann Winckelmann was idealizing the Greek classical period as a pinnacle in the history of art (see earlier, p. 245) although in his case the only models he had were usually Roman copies of Greek originals. In Italy, there was the first appreciation of the Etruscans. At a time when knowledge of classical Greece was still limited, the enormous numbers of fine Greek vases coming from Etruscan tombs were assumed to have been made by the Etruscans themselves. The English potter Josiah Wedgwood was so carried away with the excitement of the finds that he named the factory that reproduced them ‘Etruria’. A more measured approach to the study of Etruscan civilization came from Mario Guarnacci of the ancient Etruscan site of Volterra whose large collection of Etruscan and other antiquities was opened in 1761 in Volterra as one of the earliest public museums in Europe.
to the influence of Winckelmann, this was the age of neo-classicism, a revival of a fascination with Greek and Roman styles. The supreme exponent of the new mood was Antonio Canova (1757-1822), the son of a Venetian stonecutter who became engrossed by both sculpture and the classical world. He soon found patrons who supported his move to Rome, the cultural capital of revived classicism, in 1780. His memorials to the popes Clement XIII and Clement XIV earned him his reputation and allowed him to branch out into classical themes. His best works combined a wonderful simplicity with tenderness as in Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss (1786), a work inspired by the story of Psyche and Cupid in Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, and now in the Louvre, Paris.
Yet while neo-classicist styles were being integrated into every form of art, there were political challenges. The fledgling United States needed a constitution after it had broken free from the British monarchy. The leading figures of the American Revolution were, like their contemporaries in Europe, steeped in classical learning (Thomas Jefferson was perhaps the most accomplished) and it was natural that they should turn to the Roman republic for inspiration. Cicero once again took the stage as the most urbane commentator on political matters from the period. It was the combination of republican ethical ideals, notably the service of the state being seen as the acme of civic virtue, that attracted but there was also the model of a constitution that had checks and balances, a model that both Aristotle and Cicero had endorsed. So President, Congress, and Supreme Court were each given their own powers and it seemed only right to call the senior house of the House of Representatives the Senate. Washington emerged as essentially a ‘classical’ city.
Shortly after the Constitution had been promulgated another monarchy collapsed. The French had been among the most sophisticated of the classical scholars and there was no shortage of models to draw on as they came to terms with the overthrow and execution of king Louis XVI in 1793. The Altar of Liberty that replaced the altars of the church was graced by a statue of the Brutus who had killed the last king of Rome. In Jacques-Louis David’s drawing The Triumph of the French People, ‘the people’ are personified by a nude warrior aloft on a ponderous triumphal chariot that rolls over the insignia of the clergy. A fallen king lies further ahead on the route. Robespierre, who had had a traditional classical education, spoke in terms of a Platonic republic in which ‘liberty’ would be imposed by an elite. When a new model of education was searched for, that of Sparta seemed to contain the right mixture of intense patriotic pride with rigorous training. Throughout the festivals of the nascent republican state, classical allusions predominated. (Simon Schama’s Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, London and New York, 1989, is especially good on this aspect.)
Within ten years, however, the versatility of the classical tradition as an inspiration had become apparent. Napoleon Bonaparte idealized himself as a world conqueror on the model of Julius Caesar and his first official political position was as First Consul of France. Where Caesar had hesitated about endorsing autocracy, Napoleon had no such inhibitions. The Consul soon becomes transformed into Emperor, crowned in a sumptuous ceremony that echoed both classical and medieval precedents in 1804.
Napoleon revelled in Paris as ‘the new Rome’. A triumphal arch, the Arc du Carrousel, was topped by the last surviving classical quadriga, the four horses of St Mark’s that Napoleon had looted from Venice. Even the sewers of Paris were modelled on the Cloaca Maxima that ran beneath the Forum. Canova was summoned to Paris to re-create Napoleon as nude classical hero, although in a statue that aroused only ridicule when it was completed. (It can now be found in the entrance hall of Apsley House in London, where it was taken by the Duke of Wellington after Napoleon’s defeat.)
One major intellectual achievement did survive from Napoleon’s megalomania and this was the fruits of the exploration of ancient Egypt that he commissioned when he was campaigning there in 1798. As a child of the Enlightenment, Napoleon had assembled a team of 167 experts, including historians, artists, botanists, and engineers, and he set them to work surveying and plotting what remained. A first intimation of what was to come appeared in Voyage in Lower and Upper Egypt by the artist and diplomat Dominique-Vivant Denon in 1802. It enthralled its readers and set off a mania for all things Egyptian that soon could be seen in the French furniture of the period. The ground was laid for the official account of the expedition, La Description de I’Egypte, that was published between 1809 and 1828. As the final volumes appeared there was another major breakthrough, the decipherment of hieroglyphics by Jean-Franqois Champollion. Champollion had used the Rosetta stone with its three texts as a source (so had others but it took Champollion’s erudite command of languages to succeed). After his own expedition to Egypt in 1828 Champollion had gathered enough new inscriptions to be able to publish the first Egyptian grammar.
The enthusiasm for all things Egyptian led to extensive looting of the ancient sites. Eventually another Frenchman, Auguste Marriette, who had himself been involved in smuggling Egyptian antiquities to Paris, was appointed Director of Ancient Monuments in Egypt in 1858. He soon transformed himself from poacher to gamekeeper, dealing ruthlessly with looters and assembling treasures for the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo that he had founded. The new mood of study of Egypt for its own sake, rather than for what could be seized for European museums, was embodied in the work of the English archaeologist Flinders Petrie (1853-1942). Petrie was a brilliant and meticulous excavator. He recognized the importance of describing everything that was found, however humble, and establishing a sequence of layers and styles so any new find could be classified within it. The contrast of his painstaking accumulation of pottery with the most dramatic find of all, the tomb of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings by Howard Carter in November 1922, was immense. ‘Everywhere the glitter of gold, Carter announced as he caught his first glimpse of its treasures and ‘Tutmania’ swept the world.
While ancient Egypt was capturing the imagination of many, the Prussians had set up their own pedestal for the Greeks. The shock of defeat by Napoleon had led to an urge to re-create the nation on new enduring principles. ‘In the Greeks alone we find the ideal of what we should like to be and produce, enthused the scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Education Minister. His views were supported by another scholar, Friedrich August Wolf (1759-1824). For Wolf the Greeks were the embodiment ‘of true humanity’. However, he insisted that studying the Greeks should be an intense experience. Students had not only to immerse themselves in the texts but in every other aspect of Greek society so that they could understand the content and detail of what they had read. There was a moral purpose to all this. The Greeks would teach self-discipline, idealism, and nobility of character. German scholarship soon led Europe. It is telling that in George Eliot’s Middle-march, the introverted scholar Casaubon spends years on his great work of classical mythology but never realizes that the Germans have progressed far beyond him. This austere Germanic approach to the Greeks gradually came to overlay the romantic philhellenism (love of ancient Greece) which had greeted the arrival of the Parthenon marbles, bought by the British government in 1816 and which had caught the imagination of Lord Byron and his supporters when the Greeks declared independence from the Ottoman empire in 1821.
There were important scholars in England too, George Grote’s History of Greece (twelve volumes, 1846-56) was one of the most influential books of the age, but the pace of academic life at Oxford and Cambridge was more relaxed than it was in Berlin. Attention remained focused on the texts. It was not until 1890 that one could study archaeology at Oxford and then only as an option. Those with pure minds were not expected to lower themselves far enough to be able to take up a spade (or later, in more scientific times, a trowel) even if nineteenth-century excavations usually, in fact, involved the management of large groups of native workmen. Meanwhile upper-class Englishmen could be expected to take Rome as a model for their own control of empire. Athenian democracy presented more of a challenge but Plato’s Republic, a key text in the university curriculum, could be relied on to show its dangers. Grote simply ignored the reality of slavery and presented the Athenian Assembly as a forerunner of the British House of Commons (of which he had been a member).
The pervasiveness of the classical experience spread everywhere. By the end of the century English artists such as Lawrence Alma-Tadema were breathing sensuality into what had been cold marble nudes. It was quite respectable to gaze on voluptuous female bodies if they were presented in the context of long dead civilizations. The Roman bath house provided a wonderful setting for languor in a state of undress. In contrast, Baron Pierre de Coubertin looked back to a more energetic classical past when he refounded the Olympic Games in 1896. Taking place every four years as their ancient equivalent had done, they have perhaps proved the most successful legacy of all.
Then came the First World War. The classically educated combatants began by identifying themselves with Homeric heroes, but there had been no mud and machine guns in Troy and the slaughter took place on a different scale. Most ‘heroes’ died an anonymous death and the shock to all forms of authority, including education in the hallowed classics, was profound. In his influential The Decline of the West, published (in German) in July 1918, just before the war ended, the historian Oswald Spengler challenged the whole idea that world history should be centred on the achievements of the ancient Greeks. He questioned the greatness of Socrates, Thucydides, and even Plato.
The Roman empire was, however, soon to find new champions. The Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, coming to power in Italy in 1922, was determined to re-create an empire based on a revived Italian manliness. He clawed his way through the medieval layers of the history of Rome to find the authentic monuments of empire that still lay beneath and exposed them to view along the grand Via dei Fori Imperiali. There was much that was harmless, even farcical, in the uniforms and insignia of the new ‘Roman’ shocktroops, but Mussolini’s subjects refused to be fitted into heroic stereotypes. When he actually tried to re-create a territorial Roman empire through the brutal conquest of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1936, the crudity of his ambitions was revealed. (There is an excellent study of Roman attitudes to the past, including the Roman empire, in Richard Bosworth’s Rome: The Whispering City, New Haven and London, 2011. See also Catharine Edwards (ed.), Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789-1945, Cambridge and New York,
1999.)
The ancient world also resonated within Hitler’s Germany. In his Germania, which has survived only in a single copy, the Roman historian Tacitus had written ‘that the peoples of Germany had never contaminated themselves by intermarriage with foreigners but remain of pure blood, distinct and unlike any other nation’. This was music to the Nazis’ ears and the text was given honorary status, with a foreword by Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the Nazi SS, in an edition published in 1943. The propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl evoked the nude heroism and perfect bodies of the Greeks. Hitler himself warmed to the combination of military prowess and patriotic virtue of the Spartans. As in 1918, the defeat of the fascist dictators simply made all the monumental buildings and serried ranks of marching men redundant as ideals.
Since the end of the Second World War there have been new and shifting enthusiasms for the ancient world. The study of Greek, and, to a large but lesser extent, Latin, has dropped dramatically, but the interest in the past has grown through mass travel, novels, and cinema. Often the ancient world is presented in an as idealized form today as it ever was, especially as the demand for audience attention has preoccupied the film-makers. (There is a good summary in the entry on ‘Cinema’ in Anthony Grafton et al. (eds.), The Classical Tradition, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2010.) The great civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean continue to challenge our imaginations at many different levels. Yet, alongside this, sophisticated scholarship, especially in the application of science to the varied remains of the Mediterranean world, have added a more precise understanding of these cultures. Imagination and scholarship are perhaps uneasy bedfellows but the tension between them is part of the tradition of ‘reception’ and will continue to be so.
There remain many challenges ahead. One is the simple problem of maintaining what has been excavated. The collapse of the House of the Gladiators in Pompeii in November 2010 was a symbolic warning of the deterioration of a site where no serious maintenance appears to have been carried out for half a century. I was in Pompeii myself a month before writing this and was frustrated by the number of houses that I had wanted to see that are now closed off. Meanwhile in Rome the uncovering of the opulent mausoleum of Marcus Nonius Macrinus, a successful general and confidant of the emperor of Marcus Aurelius (and a good example of how Hollywood transformed a historical character into something different in the film Gladiator), was one of the most important discoveries of recent years. It appears to be only one of a rich set of tombs on the ancient Via Flaminia leading north out of Rome and was beautifully preserved as a result of the silt from the Tiber. Now it looks as if it will have to be covered up again. Between 2011 and 2012, the maintenance budget for Italy’s ruins has been slashed by 20 per cent and over 40 per cent of Italy’s archaeological sites are now closed to the public for lack of paid staff.
At least there is the will, if not the money, to preserve in a country where there are enthusiastic heritage groups such as Italia Nostra and an educated awareness of the importance of the past. In many other parts of the world, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria at the time of writing, the heritage is acutely vulnerable as a result of the breakdown of order. Sites are neglected, museums looted, sites dug over for treasures, on occasion there is deliberate destruction for religious reasons. The high prices antiquities command on the world market mean that there are always incentives to steal and smuggle.
The great museums of Europe and the United States have benefited from their earlier access to the sites of the classical Mediterranean and the Ancient Near East. Their acquisitions were made easier in the nineteenth century by imperial arrogance, the weakness of the Ottoman empire, and the immense buying power of wealthy individuals. Many of their treasures have lost their original context and it would be impossible to create any systematic way of restoring them. So there are good reasons for maintaining a conservative approach to any demands for restoration so long as the museums themselves continue to conserve, display, and explain their collections.
Yet I do feel that the marbles of the Parthenon frieze are an exception. I have known them in situ in the Duveen Gallery for some fifty years and often look in on them when I am in the British Museum. It is hard to imagine them not there. So what is the case for restoration to Athens? Part of it is personal, a growing appreciation over the years of the sophistication and value of ancient Greek culture. In ancient Greece are to be found the chromosomes of western intellectual life as much in drama as in philosophy and aesthetics. These achievements are symbolized by the Parthenon, the quality of its sculptures and the extraordinarily advanced concepts behind its construction. I feel a quiet excitement at any prospect that the frieze be returned to take its place in the new Acropolis Museum in Athens.
A more pragmatic reason is that everything should be done to maintain the Parthenon as a whole, not in the mutilated state it is in now with the marbles in London. The world’s cultural heritage would be enormously enhanced if these fragments were brought back together. There could be compensations. Without the marbles there would be a wonderful new exhibition space in the British Museum and one might hope that the Greek government would be generous in helping fill the Gallery with a series of stunning exhibitions that would provide London audiences with a greater understanding of the ancient Greek world. This hope seems to provide a fitting point with which to conclude.
World History
