The chapters that follow are designed to provide a guide to the study of the impact of the classics on postclassical culture, broadly defined. Each author has been asked to make his or her chapter comprehensible to nonspecialists, from advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students to general readers and professors in other fields. The goal has been to provide as much basic information as possible in one volume along with guidance on how a reader might pursue points of interest elsewhere, but also to convey what is new and exciting about a field that is currently experiencing a real ‘‘renaissance’’ in scholarship and teaching.
To use this book most profitably, one should have some idea of what the classical tradition has been understood to mean. There is, of course, no one moment when antiquity can be said to have ended, and as institutions, values, and cultures moved gradually away from Greece and Rome, it took many years - centuries, actually - for people to see that they were living in a fundamentally different society. This difference was self-consciously articulated in a decisive way in the fourteenth century by Petrarch, whose polemical call for a revival of antiquity led him to define the Middle Ages as the period between ancient Greece and Rome, now seen as definitively past, and a present that could be influenced by the best that had been said and done in that past. For the next several centuries, as the chapters in this volume show, the literature, art, and social structures of antiquity were handed down to successive generations, to be transformed and absorbed into new institutions and cultures.
The idea that the classics could be ‘‘handed down’’ derives from the etymology of the word ‘‘tradition,’’ which comes from the Latin tradere, meaning ‘‘hand down, bequeath.’’ While this is what was understood to be happening for several centuries, however, the idea of a ‘‘classical tradition’’ and a phrase to describe it are actually, as Jan Ziolkowski points out, a modern notion. For many scholars, the seminal studies are the ones by Gilbert Highet (1949) and R. R. Bolgar (1954), which convey their fundamental approach in their titles (The Classical Tradition and The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries, respectively) and trace in great detail this handing
Down of material from the past to the present. If someone wants to know which classical authors Milton knew, for example, a great deal of valuable information can still be found there. Since the 1950s, however, a good many more data have emerged. To take but one example, recent work in book history has led to the discovery of a large number of copies of Greek and Latin texts that were owned and annotated by later authors, helping us to see firsthand how they read and understood the classics. Highet knew that Montaigne had read Lucretius, but the recent discovery of his annotated copy allows us to trace Lucretius’ role in the development of the Essays in ways that were simply not possible until now (Screech 1998).
While there have been significant changes recently in what is known about the classical heritage, the need for this Companion to the Classical Tradition has been driven as much, if not more by the changes in how we know what we know in this area. The last decades of the twentieth century saw the impact of the ‘‘theory revolution’’ in most areas of the humanities, and this field is no exception. As Charles Martindale shows, a key innovation derives from the development of reception theory, especially as practiced since the 1960s at the University of Constance by such critics as Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser. To quote Martindale (ch. 20), reception ‘‘operates with a different temporality’’ from the passive handing down of classical material from the past to the present: it involves ‘‘the active participation of readers (including readers who are themselves creative artists) in a two-way process, backwards as well as forwards, in which the present and the past are in dialogue with each other.’’ This has profound consequences for how Greece and Rome are understood by later ages. Traditional classical philology aims to recover the meanings that ancient texts had in their original contexts. If, however, the reader is an active participant in the making of meaning, then it will be very difficult, indeed perhaps impossible, to recover the original meaning of any text. If interpretation is not simply grounded in original meaning, the different readings of a classical text over time become not misreadings, but the only readings we have, ours being simply the last in the chain of receptions. From this perspective, the chain of receptions moves from the margins to the center, as it has been doing in the works of an increasing number of scholars over the last several decades.
The chapters that follow reflect this shift in perspective in each of the three major sections of the book. After an essay on the role of the classics in education that serves as the first essay in the volume, the next seven chapters trace the transformations of the classical tradition chronologically, from the Middle Ages to the modern period. The period labels are in many ways conventional enough, but the understanding of how classical material was handled in different times is often not. Petrarch’s periodization, for example, rests on the assumption that he could see the past as it had actually been, while those who had lived in the generations before him could not. This assumption remained unchallenged for hundreds of years, with the result that medieval classicism has been approached even by many modern scholars as narrow, primitive, and often simply wrong. By resting in the principles of reception theory, however, Jan Ziolkowski is able to show how ‘‘[m]edieval perspectives on classical texts and their contents are increasingly respected by medievalists and classicists alike, rather than being dismissed for having at best interfered with and at worst corrupted a grand legacy’’ (ch. 2). Another period in which the role of the classics has been thoroughly reevaluated is the romantic. As Bruce Graver shows, ‘‘Highet resisted yoking the terms ‘Romantic’ and ‘classical,’ as if to do so would be an act of violence on both words’’ (ch. 6). Yet even here, when the emphasis on originality, nature, and emotion has seemed to offer little reason to highlight the classics, Greece and Rome remained very much alive. Keats’s classicism was different from Dryden’s, but both meditated deeply on the remnants of antiquity and created great art from those meditations. What emerges from the chapters in this section is that readers of different times have appropriated different fragments of antiquity: as Kenneth Haynes puts it, the ‘‘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’’ (ch. 8).
If the reader participates in shaping the understanding of antiquity, it becomes important to take into account readers on the margins of scholarship on the classical tradition as well as readers in the center. The second section does this by surveying the geographical presence of the classical heritage. The length and level of detail in the treatments of Italy (David Marsh, ch. 14) and Germany (Volker Riedel, ch. 12), for example, confirm the importance of Greece and Rome in two countries whose creative engagement with the classical past has long been known. A quick look at Highet’s table of contents, however, suggests that much remained to be done when he was writing. When his book appeared it was severely taken to task for virtually ignoring Spain, an omission corrected by Luisa Ldpez Grigera’s chapter (ch. 13) in this volume. Rather surprisingly for someone writing at Columbia University, Highet also gave short shrift to the United States - the impact of the classics on the Founding Fathers is limited to a two-page addendum to the discussion of the French Revolution - a picture that is filled out by Ward Briggs’s chapter (ch. 19) here. Virtually nothing has been available in any western language on the classical tradition in central and eastern Europe; Jerzy Axer (ch. 10) corrects this oversight by exploring systematically what it meant to interact with the classical past on the borders of what had been the classical world. Moving further afield, Andrew Laird’s chapter on Latin America (ch. 15) and William Dominik’s on Africa (ch. 9) show that the classical tradition was alive and well outside Europe and North America.
In the classics, as in other areas, scholarship has taken some novel turns since, say, the 1980s, and the chapters in the final section suggest some of the transformations of the classical tradition that have taken place even since the publication of The Legacy of Greece: A New Appraisal (Finley 1981) and The Legacy of Rome: A New Appraisal (Jenkyns 1992). Alastair Blanshard, for example, shows how our ideas of what ‘‘masculine’’ and ‘‘feminine’’ mean go back to antiquity (ch. 22), and Lorna Hardwick illustrates some of the ways in which the classics have continued to provide cultural capital even after countries that were colonized by Europe achieved their independence (ch. 21). Christopher Stray’s chapter suggests that by all rights, classical themes should be difficult to find in contemporary art, since Greek and Latin no longer play the central role they once did in western education (ch. 1), but Gail Levin shows that, rather surprisingly, this is simply not the case (ch. 25). Indeed, as Karl Galinsky explains, the fascination with antiquity continues to inspire film and television production into the twenty-first century (ch. 26).
Each contributor was asked to write a coherent narrative on his or her subject and given the freedom initially to develop it as she or he saw fit. In the absence of a template, somewhat different approaches emerged - a quick glance at the chapters on the classical tradition in various countries, for example, shows that most are developed chronologically, but a couple unfold more thematically, while some of the period chapters give greater emphasis to belles-lettres, some to art, and some to broader social and political forces. These differences are instructive, suggesting that as a concept, the classical tradition has not always been interpreted in precisely the same way. Some overlap is theoretically possible - Lope de Vega, for example, could potentially play as great a role in a chapter on the classical tradition in the Iberian peninsula as in one on the Baroque - but in fact the chapters as the authors have developed them present relatively few cases in which the same material is treated at length in more than one place. Readers interested in where, precisely, the treatment of a particular person or subject has ended up are referred to the index.
This, then, is the classical tradition as we find it in 2007, robust, widely dispersed in time and place, and continuing to be transformed anew as it is appropriated by new generations. I would like to thank each of our contributors both for their hard work and for rearranging their schedules so that the volume could be finished on time. My student assistants, Robert Scott Garbacz and Joe Salvaggio, got more than they bargained for when they agreed to help, and I am grateful to them; the bibliography in particular is largely their work. Ward Briggs, Julia Gaisser, and Charles Martindale, the advisory board for the volume, provided invaluable assistance, helping to define the scope and nature of the project and providing expert commentary and advice on each of the chapters. Finally, I would like to thank Al Bertrand at Blackwell for asking me to do this project in the first place; Sophie Gibson, Angela Cohen, and Janey Fisher for putting up with all of us along the way; and Eldo Barkhuizen for a truly superb copy-editing job.
A Companion to the Classical Tradition Edited by Craig W. Kallendorf Copyright © 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
World History
