Carlos Noreña at Aeon Magazine:
When most of us think of ‘ancient history’ – when we think about it at all – we tend to think first of these ancient Mediterranean monuments, monarchs and generals. Today, the classical tradition is kept alive by splashy cover stories in National Geographic, a steady stream of ‘sword-and-sandal’ movies and cable series, casual references to the ‘Thucydides trap’ or the ‘Socratic method’, memes of men daydreaming about the Roman Empire and, perhaps above all, the omnipresence of neoclassical architectural forms in the public sphere. Greco-Roman monumentality anchors a robust set of associations and values. To pass through virtually any Western capital is to encounter an urban maze of marble columns, pediments, relief sculptures and domes, all of it, in its shared and easily legible idiom derived from Greece and Rome, conveying an unmistakable message of tradition, legitimacy and authority. ‘[T]he glory that was Greece,/And the grandeur that was Rome,’ evoked by Edgar Allan Poe in the revised version of his short poem ‘To Helen’ (1845), remains an animating ideal in our collective consciousness.
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.