Introduction

One major current of European and North American modernism was a new attention to archaic, preclassical, and primitive aspects of classical antiquity.1 As a visual icon, the archaic kouros was to the first half of the twentieth century what the Laococln group was to the late Renaissance and Baroque or the Elgin marbles to the Romantic period. This orientation toward an ever-more-remote antiquity - from Hellenistic sculpture to the marbles of classical Athens to preclassical Greek figures - parallels a broad feature of the classical tradition in western Europe since the Renaissance, where in successive periods the dominant focus of attention moved from the Rome of seventeenth-century classicism to the Athens of nineteenth-century Hellenism to the preclassical Greece of the modernists.

The archaic art and literature exploited by modernists encompassed much more than the Mediterranean world. Primitive art of all sorts, stimulated especially by African and Pacific works but also by pre-Columbian figures, Paleolithic cave painting, and folk art, was a major influence on painters and sculptors for the 30 years or so from Picasso (with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907) to the artists of Die Briicke to surrealists and others (on modernist primitivism, see in general Rubin 1984; Barkan and Bush 1995; Cardinal 1996; Flam 2003). This wide influence contrasts with previous, more isolated instances of primitivism, such as Gauguin’s. Often it is not possible to distinguish Mediterranean sources from other primitive influences. Brancusi, for example, turned equally to Cycladic art, Romanian folk culture, and African or African-influenced work. In this mingling of primitive sources the differences among particular primitive societies were usually ignored, and a similar aesthetic (and sometimes mythology or spirituality) was found in or imposed on very diverse groups; the basis for such similarity was most often no more than an opposition to certain features of the modern age. This, too, has a precedent in earlier periods of the classical reception. Romantic Hellenism, for example, merged with Romantic

Medievalism, although they had no more in common than their distance from the Augustan classicism of the eighteenth century. In both cases, the scholarly corrections that ensued to place works in fuller historical and anthropological contexts were themselves dependent and consequent on the initial enthusiasm and attention.

If the primitivist current within modernism was not limited to Greek and Roman works, neither was the classical tradition within modernism limited to the archaic. Poetry ranging from Ezra Pound’s ‘‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’’ (1919) and Constantine Cavafy’s poems of Alexandria, and prose such as Hermann Broch’s Death of Virgil (1945) and Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), are obvious reminders that modernist writers could be inspired by any period of classical antiquity.

Such inspiration was partly a matter of the particular affinities of a writer, but the national context was also involved. What the ancient classical world meant in the early twentieth century in countries like Great Britain and Germany, with their strong nineteenth-century traditions of Hellenic enthusiasms and education, differed from what it meant in the more Latin-based culture of Italy and France, and it had yet another range of meanings for Orthodox countries like Greece and Russia.

Finally, a number of modernists had little interest in the classical world, and some were actively hostile to it; the futurists, for example, vehemently espoused the modern experience of speed and technology over the deadening weight of tradition.

This chapter will be organized by period of the classical world: the archaic first and at greatest length, followed by classical and postclassical Greek, and then by classical and postclassical Latin. Most of the examples discussed will be written works, and the discussion will involve both literary history and literary criticism. Foreign titles will usually be given in English, and references to secondary literature will mostly be restricted to works in English.