Tea at Trianon: Classics Before the Enlightenment

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, July 18, 2021

Classics Before the Enlightenment

From Heterodox Academy:

Some historians argue that the term “Western civilization” wasn’t common before the 19th and 20 th centuries. As Stanley Kurtz has pointed out, though, just because that particular term wasn’t yet standard doesn’t mean that there was no concept of a Western tradition before the modern period. Still less does it entail that no Western intellectual tradition with a debt to ancient Greece and Rome can be delineated.

The Enlightenment mania that Poser describes was certainly real, but it wasn’t the only craze for all things Greco-Roman in European history. After all, the Renaissance (so-called because it represented a “rebirth” of ancient culture) represented a similar mania, one that was arguably even more significant than its Enlightenment successor.

Was the Renaissance the real starting point of our idealization of the Classics, then? Even this would be too simple. Because even in the absence of “manias” for antiquity, the influence of the ancients on subsequent European culture was pervasive. It’s so pervasive and familiar, in fact, that it’s easy to miss. For most of post-antique European history, Latin was the dominant mode of literate discourse, and Christianity provided the default religious and moral framework. And both Latin and Christianity had their origins in antiquity.

If we bear these facts in mind, engagement with the classics emerges as an almost natural activity that the societies that followed on from the Greek and Romans engaged in more or less as a matter of course, just as Chinese cultures maintained a relationship with their classics.

Indeed, some scholars would even place the beginnings of Western classical scholarship in antiquity itself, in Hellenistic (3rd- and 2nd-century BC) Alexandria, where older Greek texts (especially Homer) were already being studied. That tradition of scholarship continued for centuries in Byzantium, and the way that Renaissance humanists like Politian engaged with classical texts wasn’t too dissimilar. (Read more.)