Abstract

The paper is aimed at promoting debate and, hopefully, hastening the demise of some tired clichés that still dominate discussions within and beyond classics. The subject is the categories of art, art history, and aesthetics, particularly in their relation to aesthetic experience and its so-called autonomy. Were these available in ancient Greece and Rome? If not, how can talk about "ancient art" be anything but wholly anachronistic? If so, in what form were they available? In a word, were the classical past and modernity divided by a rupture around the very conceivability of art and the aesthetic?

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