From the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, antiquity was reinterpreted in Europe in historical, political, and aesthetic terms. The enthusiasm for ‘‘classical’’ Greek art and literature - a marked development in Germany toward the end of the eighteenth century - hastened a tendency to separate pagan from Christian antiquity. The idealization of Greece had already acquired a contemporary political dimension: in accordance with the liberating traditions of the Enlightenment, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68) and his contemporaries saw Athens as not only a center of artistic and humane ideals, but also a seat of political freedom. By restoring to the center of inquiry this more loosely structured history of ancient Greece, the German Biirgertum discovered a welcome alternative to the cultural hegemony of the French.
But German neohumanism did not by any means lead inevitably to a diminution of interest in Late Antiquity. On the contrary: from the French Revolution on, a positive view of this epoch spread throughout Europe. The decline of the Roman Empire, it was believed, affected only paganism, which had outlived its use and had to make way for Christianity and the Germanic kingdoms. The experience of political and social revolutions in Europe between 1789 and 1848 established Late Antiquity as an epoch in its own right, characterized by changes and reassessments that were, in turn, compared to phenomena of the present. The present, in other words, was histor-icized, and the past acquired a controlling authority in contemporary debate (Herzog 1987b). In the previous generation Gibbon had never harnessed Late Antiquity in this way to a new view of the European future, since he had never envisaged that a catastrophe comparable to the decline of the ancient world would happen in his own time. During the first half of the nineteenth century, however, a range of scholars and litterateurs in France (Herzog 1987a) and England (DeLaura 1969), as well as Germany - liberals, absolutists, and ultramontanists - projected their respective political expectations (and disappointments) onto Late Antiquity. The Left celebrated a ‘‘radical’’ early Christianity, welcomed the industrial workers as new ‘‘invaders,’’ and condemned the ‘‘bourgeois’’ conformity of the Constantinian era. The failure of the Revolution of 1848 inspired yet another interpretation that transformed the positive political manipulation of Late Antiquity and relegated it once more to the past. The barbarians were now no longer seen as bearers of an ancient legacy but as founders of early nationalism. Authors inspired by neohumanism (not only in Germany) once more idealized Greco-Roman antiquity, while clearly distinguishing it from the late empire.
After the mid-nineteenth century, the Rome of Late Antiquity was rediscovered by the literary avant-garde. European intellectuals like Flaubert and Mallarme, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde transformed a decadent Late Antiquity without future prospects into a model epoch for the fin de si'cle. They claimed to have recognized there (although they distorted it in many ways) what they thought of as the predecessor of the ‘‘modern’’ author. The experience of living themselves in what they saw as a ‘‘late’’ period distanced them from at least some of the realities of that past, and fostered a melancholic modernity that took pleasure in death and decline. This nineteenth-century aesthetic pessimism favored in particular the use of subjects relating to Late Antiquity. Thus, the first stanza of the sonnet Langueur by Paul Verlaine (1844-96), published in 1883, reads:
Je suis l’Empire a la fin de la d{icadence,
Qui regarde passer les grands Barbares blancs En composant des acrostiches indolents D’un style d’or oh la langueur du soleil danse.
And the English literary critic Arthur Symons (1865-1945) ascribed to the literature of Late Antiquity ‘‘an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an oversubtilising refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity’’ (Fletcher 1979: 24).
World History
