Ancient and Modern: A Critical Reflection

i want to begin by expressing my gratitude to you and to all of our fellow SCS members for the opportunity to serve the Society as president over the past year. One of the final duties of this office is to give an address at the annual meeting, and in doing so, I am all too conscious of the many great scholars who have preceded me. I do not pretend that I can match them in learning or eloquence, but I can promise you one thing, and that is to give what may not be the best presidential address on record, but what I hope will be the shortest—if not ever, then at least in recent memory.

The brevity of my remarks will be appropriate to my theme, in two ways. First, my point is very simple and straightforward, as you will see. Second, these remarks complement the presidential panel organized this year at the SCS annual meeting. Its title was “Global Classics,” and it had to do with the spatial dimension, with the various ways our field is practiced throughout the world. The complementary focus and theme of this presidential address is time. We all know that time is commonly divided into two very broad periods, the “ancient” and the “modern”; but how does this division of time structure, potentiate, and limit our work? Above all, does it continue to serve our purposes as well today as it did when it was first articulated?

That last question may seem puzzling. The dichotomy between “ancient” and “modern” is so familiar that it seems to involve natural categories that never had to be first articulated. But in fact, however familiar these categories had been previously, they were defined in two very specific ways in the period when our discipline was given its characteristic shape, at the end of the eighteenth century; and even if both these definitions have been beneficial to our field, there are ways in which they have been so. I believe that a major anniversary like the one we are celebrating is an excellent occasion for revisiting and reexamining the assumptions on which our discipline is based.

The first definition I want to mention is from Friedrich Schiller’s foundational essay “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” which first appeared in 1795.¹ In this essay, Schiller posits the existence of one kind of literature that offers a faithful and uncomplicated picture of nature, which he calls the naïve, and a second kind that offers not an objective imitation but an author’s subjective ideas about the world that his work represents; and this he calls the sentimental. Schiller further identifies the naïve mode as characteristic of ancient literature, and the sentimental as characteristically modern. In making this distinction, a certain esteem is reserved for the naïve, ancient literature precisely because it is, ex hypothesi, such a faithful reflection of nature, so simple and direct as to seem almost unmediated. Modern, sentimental literature, in contrast, by virtue of its subjectivity, necessarily offers a less faithful reflection of nature, one that is not simple, is quite indirect, and is anything but unmediated. Schiller offers with this distinction an account of why he thinks classical literature is and always will be classical, something that modern literature can never be. On the other hand, it is obvious already in Schiller’s essay, and still more so in the work of his many followers, that this distinction does more justice to modernity than to antiquity. If I were to create a poll and ask how many agree that the really distinctive and valuable thing about classical literature is that it simply lacks any significant element of authorial perspective and that it consequently presents an image of nature that is in no way distorted, I suspect that a substantial number of classicists would find it hard to endorse such an idea.

Now, someone might object that Schiller is talking specifically about literature, and not about antiquity as a whole; but, as I have hinted, Schiller’s followers were quick to develop the implications of his position. The Marxist...