We Have Never Been Ancient

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• We Have Never Been Ancient
• Joseph Farrell (bio)

One of William Faulkner's most famous epigrams tells us that "The past is never dead. It's not even past." But those who repeat or paraphrase Faulkner, and even Faulkner himself, are usually concerned with a past that is not very deep. It's really just a matter of a few generations. On the other hand, "that's ancient history," a tediously common phrase that refers to a deeper antiquity, is used to dismiss something as utterly unimportant and irrelevant. This attitude is in no way exclusive to the uneducated or the anti-intellectual. A shallow view of the past is officially embraced by the history department of my own university, which requires undergraduate majors to take as few as one course that includes some material earlier than the nineteenth century. Nor is it unusual in this. The entire structure of all academic institutions, not to mention many other pillars of our society, seems dedicated to the proposition that the deep past is not very important. To those who study a culture that thrived not two hundred but two thousand years ago and more, it isn't obvious that this is a good thing. That's why it might be surprising to realize that our own discipline is part of the problem.

Classics as an academic discipline was shaped in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by the same forces that reshaped entire universities, promoted the nation-state as the ideal political structure, and distinguished firmly between the categories of "ancient" and "modern." This distinction is fundamental to the way most people today view human history over the longue durée. So familiar is it that it seems almost natural. That is why it is so shocking to realize that it amounts to little more than a rhetorical gambit.

The most daring use of this gambit was by Friedrich Schiller in an influential essay "On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry" (1795–96). Like many contemporaries, Schiller felt vividly aware that he was living in a brave new world, a "modern" one different from any that had existed before. His purpose in this essay was to articulate the aesthetic principles of that world, specifically with reference to its most characteristic form, the novel. But how to accomplish that? Even today the novel continues to resist efforts to define it in terms of [End Page 60] form, essence, or any other quality. Schiller faced the difficulty of defining it as a reflection of the rapidly developing, heterogeneous character of the contemporary world in which the genre was becoming so prominent. But how to define anything that is defined mainly by indeterminacy?

Schiller's great stroke of genius was to define the novel, and modernity itself, not per se but in contrast to some putatively simpler conceptual opposite. This he found in the most characteristic literary genre of antiquity, which is (he said) the epic. Here he made two key moves. First, he drew a parallel between epic and novel as characteristic, respectively, of the ancient and modern worlds. At the same time, he drew a contrast between the two genres and the worlds they represent.

To live in antiquity, according to Schiller, was like living in an epic poem: such a life was simple, obvious, ceremonial, and well ordered. To live in the modern world is, ex hypothesi, the direct opposite of all that. By this brilliant piece of argumentative hocus pocus, the need to define modernity and the novel disappeared at once. Their ineffable complexity and indeterminacy needn't be defined or described. It could merely be suggested by comparison with their much simpler, more easily grasped opposites, antiquity and the epic.

Very few classicists today would recognize Schiller's ideas about antiquity and the epic as being at all adequate. But Schiller's contemporaries who invented the discipline of Classics held very similar views. For men like Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich August Wolf, and August Böckh, the civilizations of Greece and Rome possessed a unity, coherence, and importance that earlier and contemporary civilizations lacked. For generations, classicists would continue to hold such views. But to accept this perspective on...