François Hartog's weighty yet slim volume of just 54 pages, Ancient Greece is the most beautiful invention of modern times. Hartog's book (2021), published as the third installment of the Gunnar Hering Lectures, invites a critical re-examination of Greece's conventional role in Western culture. Explicitly referencing Paul Valéry's famous dictum, the work poses the central question of how ancient Greece attained its prominent position in Western intellectual history. Hartog's investigation is less a classic historiography than a far-reaching study of reception, aiming to transcend the "river" that separates classical antiquity from its modern appropriations, thereby "building bridges and identifying ruptures." The corpus comprises texts and concepts from ancient, German, and French thinkers—from Horace and Virgil through Winckelmann and Humboldt to Perrault, Constant, Taine, Renan, and finally Arendt, Vernant, and Castoriadis. The guiding concepts with which Hartog analyzes this extensive material include the oppositional pairs Greeks–barbarians, pagans–Christians, and, most importantly, ancients–moderns, as well as the idea of imitation. The method is primarily comparative and historical-analytical, meticulously tracing the divergent paths of France and Germany in their respective engagements with Greece.
The book's conclusion returns to the initial question: where do we stand today, now that the "modernity" of which Valéry spoke is itself a thing of the past? Hartog examines the current relationship with Greece, which is often reduced to cultural consumption and tourist stereotypes, as symbolized by Roy Lichtenstein's postcard image of the Temple of Apollo. He poses the provocative question of whether Greece's "debts" are now purely financial, thereby erasing Europe's intellectual debt to antiquity. This is a critical reflection on the danger of Greece's rich heritage becoming a mere surface, emptied of its former transformative power as a model for thought.
Content
The Transformations of the Greek Ideal
Hartog begins his analysis with the Roman conceptions of Greece that were fundamental to its Western appropriation. The Romans initially defined themselves in contrast to the Greeks in order to answer the question, "Who are we?" They resolved the dilemma of whether they were barbarians or Hellenized Greeks through Virgil's ingenious answer that they were Trojans—a return to their origins. The Roman elite practiced an "inclusive otherness" by adopting Greek idioms and customs and transforming them into Roman ones, thereby positioning themselves as the dominant element between Greeks and barbarians. This original difference was the driving force behind the development of Roman culture.
A decisive break in the perception of antiquity occurred with the emergence of the concept of "modernus" in the early 6th century. This new term introduced a temporality that defined the modern person as someone of the present and drew a fluid line to the "ancients"—a period that could encompass both pagan and Christian pasts. With the humanists, a new stage was reached: the ancients were equated with the pagan Greeks and Romans, thereby defining a long period of "dark" centuries, the Middle Ages, as a barrier to be overcome between the moderns and antiquity. The "renovatio" aimed to revive antiquity, but at the same time, the final separation from it became apparent.
The “Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes” and the French Revolution
The "Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes" at the end of the 17th century marks a turning point in France's relationship with antiquity. Charles Perrault postulated the superiority of moderns in almost all fields of knowledge and broke with the classical theory of imitation on a political level. Louis XIV was no longer imitated by Augustus, but was himself considered the "most perfect model." This model now came from the present, leading France to understand perfection as something temporal and attainable. The distance between the ancients and the moderns had widened in France over two centuries, meaning that "becoming truly modern" meant recognizing the limits of the ancients' achievements.
The French Revolution and its excesses drastically intensified this development. After the overthrow of Robespierre (9 Thermidor, 1794), France decisively distanced itself from the old order. The "dark illusions of the Jacobins," who confused the freedom of the ancients with that of the moderns and sought to transform France into a new Sparta, were denounced. Benjamin Constant, as a theoretical pioneer of this liberal thesis, explicitly demanded that politics abandon the dichotomy of old versus modern. The failure of the Revolution definitively blocked the path of imitation and made drawing parallels impossible. For France, being modern meant breaking with the old republics.
Aestheticization and critical repoliticization
After the defeat of the Commune in 1870, Hippolyte Taine criticized in The emergence of modern France The French approach focused on the "ill-adjustedness of the classical mind" and attempted to shatter illusions about Spartan equality or the freedom of Athenian citizens. It concentrated on cultivating taste, discovering timeless beauty, and learning the art of thinking and speaking, particularly rhetoric. This is expressed in the work of Ernest Renan. Prayer on the Acropolis (1876), which placed Greece under the sign of beauty and "miracle." Renan experienced there an almost mystical revelation of eternal beauty, comparable to the "Jewish miracle." This aestheticized Greece, removed from the revolutionary era, profoundly influenced the relationship of French Hellenists.
The period after 1945 brought another turning point: a repoliticization of the relationship with Greece, which can be understood as a response to totalitarian movements and in the context of decolonization. Figures such as Hannah Arendt, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and Cornelius Castoriadis saw the Greek polis as a model for a else, conceivable politics. This was not about imitation or the juxtaposition of old and modern, but about questioning the present and developing models for thought. Momigliano even considered Vernant the best "decolonizer" of Jaeger's theories on Greek paideia. This "anthropologization" of the Greek context did not seek the modernity of the Greeks, but rather their "strangeness" and "otherness."
Overview and implications for French literary studies
Hartog's overall perspective makes it clear that "ancient Greece" was not a fixed entity, but a dynamic and constantly "reinvented" projection surface. The contrasting view of Germany, which sought a direct, idealized, and imitative path to German identity via Greece (as "homeland and ideal" and as a path to...) EducationThis sharpens our understanding of France's divergent path. After the Querelle and the Revolution, France's relationship with Greece was characterized less by direct imitation than by a conscious demarcation and intellectual distancing. Modernity here meant recognizing the limitations of the old order and breaking with the republican ideal of antiquity in order to define its own, contemporary perfection. Later French perceptions of Greece shifted the focus to aesthetics and critical thinking, rather than political blueprints.
For French literary studies, this analysis yields important insights regarding political classicism. First, literary references to antiquity, especially after the Revolution, should not be interpreted indiscriminately as an expression of a desire for political imitation. The distancing from the "gloomy illusions of the Jacobins" (Chateaubriand) and Constant's warning against confusing ancient and modern freedoms suggest that classicism in French literature often represented a critical engagement with the dangers of an unreflective reception of antiquity. Second, the shift toward aestheticization in the works of Taine and Renan suggests that the function of references to antiquity in literature mutated from a political lesson to an expression of timeless beauty, a training of taste, and a cultivation of rhetorical and philosophical modes of thought. Classical forms could thus nurture a "lay culture" that celebrated the marvelous and the aesthetic, detached from direct political programs. Thirdly: The repoliticization that occurred after 1945 in the works of Arendt, Vernant, and Castoriadis demonstrates that the Greek polis could function in literature not as a nostalgic ideal, but as a critical model for thought. Literary texts that evoke classical Greece could, during this period, utilize the "strangeness" and "otherness" of antiquity to question the present and imagine new political possibilities without falling into the trap of mere imitation.
In summary, Hartog's work reveals the complexity of the French reception of antiquity and encourages scholars to move beyond superficial categorizations. Examining France's image of Greece, in contrast to Germany, exposes the notion of a static, imitative classicism as inadequate. Instead, it reveals a dynamic field in which antiquity was constantly "reinvented" and instrumentalized for specific contemporary needs—be it to distinguish itself from revolutionary excesses, for aesthetic glorification, or for critical self-examination. Literary studies can learn from this to situate the respective function of historical classicisms more precisely within their historical and national contexts, thereby recognizing their transformative and often critical power.
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
