Antiquity and Its Reception - Modern Expressions of the Past

Book Abstract

This Book ?Antiquity and Its Reception - Modern Expressions of the Past?contains about What do we talk about when we talk about antiquity? For the majority of the population, the term immediately transports us to the notion of an ancient age or ancient world (the Parthenon, Athens, and the Coliseum of Rome), which condenses in itself the Greco-Roman world. This reduces antiquity to antiquity that was structurally essential for the construction and emergence of the civilization called occidental.For others, because of their religious backgrounds, antiquity goes back in time and enlarges, in part, its space of action, allowing the emergence of Palestine as a primordial territory.But these two visions (old and supported by a scienti?c ignorance of the ancient geographies and chronologies) enclose the history in a limited time and space. As if there would never have been a world before that time. As if the civilization that we comfortably call ourselves as inheritors, the so-called?Occidental Civilization? was the ?rst step in the history of man on earth. If we think about the pre-modern and modern western history, it becomes easy to identify this use of elements produced in antiquity as legitimation tools for those contexts. Take theRenascence, for instance, where there was an obvious reception of ancient Greek and Roman cultural and artistic traits, or the eighteenth centuryEnlightenment,profoundly marked by considerations on ancient literature, philosophy, and art. And more closely, let us not forget the nineteenth and twentieth century western imperialisms and colonialisms,where political, social, and military practices were justi?ed through allusions to ancient Greek and Roman imperialisms. Given these multiple cases, one can say that recent western history is, in a way, a history of reception of classical antiquity.