Introduction

To call the epoch in Greek history between the end of the great Persian War in 479/8 and the death of Alexander the Great in 323 the ‘Classical Age’ poses a problem. This is, admittedly, not a problem waiting to be solved and then set aside - rather, this problem is provocative, insolubly imprecise and perhaps still a challenge. The use of the term ‘Classical’ for a particular epoch in Greek history and ‘Classics’ for a branch of higher learning, and the term ‘Classical Studies’ for an entire discipline, makes one thing unmistakably clear: modern study of ancient history was at the very outset, for a long time continued to be, and indeed has ever since been inextricably associated with aesthetic, qualitative and normative ideas. When in the middle of the eighteenth century, i. e., long before the major archaeological excavations in Greece, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68) began his study of ancient art, far fewer remains of this art existed or were accessible than is the case today. The relatively few pieces of sculpture which had not become buried - all Roman copies of original Greek masterpieces - were for Winckelmann, however, not only the remains of a bygone era, but above all examples of a consummate artistic view of man. His description of the Apollo Belvedere begins with the sentence: ‘The statue of Apollo represents the highest artistic ideal of all the surviving works of antiquity.’ In his Reflections on Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1755, English trans. 1765), Winckelmann formulated the credo of a new Humanism: ‘The only way for us to become great, or even inimitable if possible, is to imitate the Greeks’ (on all this in general, Marchand 1996).

The rediscovery of Greece, fostered primarily by the drawings and descriptions of buildings in Athens by James Spratt and Nicholas Revett (The Antiquities of Athens, 4 vols, 1762-1808), and the championing of freedom by the Philhellenes increased the feeling of affinity with the ancient Greeks. This was expressed most succinctly in the famous words of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822): ‘We are all

Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their roots in Greece’ (on Shelley, Wallace 1997). When in the wake of the French Revolution in Europe political parties began to take shape, they all sought and found their political and cultural guarantors in the Greeks (Morris 1994: 29-30). From the perspective of conservatives, Greece stood for order, tradition and self-discipline, while for liberals like George Grote, the ancient Athenians in particular were the ideal of the active citizen, whereas for radicals like Shelley, the Hellenes represented the combination of republicanism, liberty and living life to the full. Even kings could attain self-glorification by formal recourse to the Greeks: in 1802, Antonio Canova created a colossal nude marble portrait statue of Napoleon, in a Greek pose, holding Victory on a sphere in his outstretched hand, striking the same pose as Pheidias’ Athena in the Parthenon (Boardman 1993: pl. IV).

This power of the Greek ideal exerted a very significant influence on the study of the Hellenes, atleast at the outset. For instance, Ernst Curtius (1814-96), the excavator of Olympia and author of a widely read History of Greece (English ed. in 5 vols, 1868-73), in a public lecture in 1844 still emphasized completely in this spirit the importance of the Akropolis in Athens: ‘The breath of new life has crossed from there into our art and scholarship [my emphasis].’ To this very day every serious definition of the term ‘classical’ (for a general discussion, Porter 2006, intro., with further bibliography) must place this idea of impulse and dynamics in the foreground. ‘Classical’ means something old, which has stood the test of time and speaks to every generation as if it had been designed for precisely that generation. It is obvious, however, that not all previous eras could be regarded as equally creative in this sense. The Apollo Belvedere, Winckelmann’s model, was produced about 330-320 (Figure 1.1; Boardman 1993: no. 133), and the buildings on the Akropolis in the second half of the fifth century - accordingly, both in the ‘Classical Period’ of Greek art and Greek history. In connection with the structures from the time ofPerikles - not only those on the Akropolis - Plutarch offered the following comment in the second century CE:

For every particular piece of his work was immediately, even at that time, for its beauty and elegance, antique; and yet in its vigour and freshness looks to this day as if it were just executed. There is a sort of bloom of newness upon those works of his, preserving them from the touch of time, as if they had some perennial spirit and undying vitality mingled in the composition of them. (Plutarch Perikles 13.2; trans. J. Dryden)

By contrast, in modern study of classical antiquity, especially in Greek and Roman history, this value-laden affinity between classical Greece and our own time is cited as a mere convention or vigorously denied. A statement by the German ancient historian Christian Meier may suffice for the first position:

In describing the characteristic features of Greek civilization, it is customary to invoke the concept of the ‘classical’ - a model for many, the attraction of which lay in all that had been achieved, experienced and represented, within the narrow confines of the world of the polis, in terms of accomplishments, of intellectual questions and matching up to the questioning, of human greatness and commensurability with events. (Meier 1990: 25)

In opposition to this convention, it is currently fashionable to emphasize precisely the strangeness of the Greeks. According to Cartledge, the object is ‘to defamiliarize

Figure 1.1 The Apollo Belvedere, c. 330-320 bce. Ht. 2.24 m. Roman marble copy of the original bronze. Vatican Museums, Rome. Photo: Hirmer Verlag Miinchen.

Classical Greek civilization, to fracture that beguilingly easy identification with the ancient Greeks which reached a climax in post-Enlightenment Germany, Second Empire France, and Victorian Britain, and which still has its residual adherents today, partly no doubt for political rather than purely academic reasons’ (Cartledge 1993: 175). This historicizing often takes on the character of vigorous iconoclasm, in which exclusion and suppression of slaves, women, foreigners and the underprivileged in everyday life and in the mentality of the Greeks are emphasized (e. g., Cohen 2000; von den Hoff & Schmidt 2001). Moreover, the concerted efforts since the mid-1980s to conduct a ‘more realistic discourse which treats Greek and Eastern Mediterranean history as a continuum and thereby begins to dissolve the intrinsically racist distinction between ‘‘Greek’’ and ‘‘oriental’’ ’ (Davies 2002: 235-6) point in this direction. The relevant specialized studies admittedly concentrate rather on the Archaic Period. More recent general introductions to Greek history, in which the word ‘classical’ appears in the title (e. g., Davies 1993; cf. Osborne 2000), are not, however, essentially different in their conceptual orientation from those studies which avoid the term and indicate their subject by means of simply a neutral date (e. g., Hornblower 2002; CAH2 5 and 6). In the political and ‘realistically’ written grand narrative histories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by George Grote, Karl Julius Beloch and Eduard Meyer, and even in Jacob Burckhardt’s four-volume Griechische Kulturgeschichte (1898-1902; Burckhardt 1998), the term ‘classical’ is not found in either the title or the chapter heading of a single one. For these authors, however, the principal importance of ancient history and culture was still completely self-evident. Then, however, within the context of the new intellectual approach after the First World War, scholars adopted the concept of‘classical’ (see Jaeger 1931; Reinhardt 1941; Borbein 1995).