• We Have Never Been Ancient
• Joseph Farrell (bio)

One of William Faulkner's most famous epigrams tells us that "The past is never dead. It's not even past." But those who repeat or paraphrase Faulkner, and even Faulkner himself, are usually concerned with a past that is not very deep. It's really just a matter of a few generations. On the other hand, "that's ancient history," a tediously common phrase that refers to a deeper antiquity, is used to dismiss something as utterly unimportant and irrelevant. This attitude is in no way exclusive to the uneducated or the anti-intellectual. A shallow view of the past is officially embraced by the history department of my own university, which requires undergraduate majors to take as few as one course that includes some material earlier than the nineteenth century. Nor is it unusual in this. The entire structure of all academic institutions, not to mention many other pillars of our society, seems dedicated to the proposition that the deep past is not very important. To those who study a culture that thrived not two hundred but two thousand years ago and more, it isn't obvious that this is a good thing. That's why it might be surprising to realize that our own discipline is part of the problem.

Classics as an academic discipline was shaped in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by the same forces that reshaped entire universities, promoted the nation-state as the ideal political structure, and distinguished firmly between the categories of "ancient" and "modern." This distinction is fundamental to the way most people today view human history over the longue durée. So familiar is it that it seems almost natural. That is why it is so shocking to realize that it amounts to little more than a rhetorical gambit.

The most daring use of this gambit was by Friedrich Schiller in an influential essay "On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry" (1795–96). Like many contemporaries, Schiller felt vividly aware that he was living in a brave new world, a "modern" one different from any that had existed before. His purpose in this essay was to articulate the aesthetic principles of that world, specifically with reference to its most characteristic form, the novel. But how to accomplish that? Even today the novel continues to resist efforts to define it in terms of [End Page 60] form, essence, or any other quality. Schiller faced the difficulty of defining it as a reflection of the rapidly developing, heterogeneous character of the contemporary world in which the genre was becoming so prominent. But how to define anything that is defined mainly by indeterminacy?

Schiller's great stroke of genius was to define the novel, and modernity itself, not per se but in contrast to some putatively simpler conceptual opposite. This he found in the most characteristic literary genre of antiquity, which is (he said) the epic. Here he made two key moves. First, he drew a parallel between epic and novel as characteristic, respectively, of the ancient and modern worlds. At the same time, he drew a contrast between the two genres and the worlds they represent.

To live in antiquity, according to Schiller, was like living in an epic poem: such a life was simple, obvious, ceremonial, and well ordered. To live in the modern world is, ex hypothesi, the direct opposite of all that. By this brilliant piece of argumentative hocus pocus, the need to define modernity and the novel disappeared at once. Their ineffable complexity and indeterminacy needn't be defined or described. It could merely be suggested by comparison with their much simpler, more easily grasped opposites, antiquity and the epic.

Very few classicists today would recognize Schiller's ideas about antiquity and the epic as being at all adequate. But Schiller's contemporaries who invented the discipline of Classics held very similar views. For men like Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich August Wolf, and August Böckh, the civilizations of Greece and Rome possessed a unity, coherence, and importance that earlier and contemporary civilizations lacked. For generations, classicists would continue to hold such views. But to accept this perspective on...

• 我们从未远古
• 约瑟夫·法雷尔（简介）

威廉·福克纳最著名的警句之一告诉我们，“过去永远不会死。它甚至还没有过去。” 但那些重复或解释福克纳的人，甚至福克纳本人，通常关心的并不是很深刻的过去。这确实只是几代人的问题。另一方面，“那是古代历史”，这是一个乏味的常用短语，指的是更古老的历史，被用来贬低某些完全不重要和无关紧要的东西。这种态度绝不是未受过教育或反知识分子所独有的。我所在大学的历史系正式接受了对过去的浅薄看法，该系要求本科专业的学生至少选修一门包含一些十九世纪之前材料的课程。这也并不罕见。所有学术机构的整个结构，更不用说我们社会的许多其他支柱，似乎都致力于这样一个命题：深刻的过去并不是很重要。对于那些研究一种在两百年前而不是两千多年前繁荣的文化的人来说，这并不是一件好事。这就是为什么当我们意识到我们自己的纪律是问题的一部分时，我们可能会感到惊讶。

古典学作为一门学科在 18 世纪末和 19 世纪初期是由同样的力量塑造的，这些力量重塑了整个大学，将民族国家提升为理想的政治结构，并严格地区分了“古代”和“现代”的范畴。这种区别对于当今大多数人看待人类长期历史的方式至关重要。它如此熟悉，以至于看起来几乎是自然的。这就是为什么当我们意识到这只不过是一种修辞手段时，我们会感到如此震惊。

这一策略最大胆的运用是弗里德里希·席勒在一篇颇具影响力的文章《论天真与感伤的诗歌》（1795-96）中。和许多同时代人一样，席勒清楚地意识到他生活在一个美丽的新世界，一个与以前存在的世界不同的“现代”世界。他在这篇文章中的目的是阐明那个世界的美学原则，特别是其最具特色的形式——小说。但如何实现呢？即使在今天，这部小说仍然在抵制从形式、本质或任何其他品质来定义它的努力[完第 60 页] 。席勒面临着将其定义为当代世界快速发展、异质特征的反映的困难，在当代世界中，这一流派变得如此突出。但如何定义主要由不确定性定义的事物呢？

席勒的伟大天才在于定义了小说和现代性本身，不是定义本身，而是与一些假定的更简单的概念对立面进行对比。他在古代最具特色的文学体裁中发现了这一点，这就是（他说）史诗。在这里他采取了两个关键举措。首先，他将史诗和小说分别作为古代和现代世界的特征进行了比较。同时，他对这两种流派及其所代表的世界进行了对比。

席勒认为，生活在古代就像生活在一首史诗中：这样的生活简单、明显、有仪式感、井然有序。根据假设，生活在现代世界与这一切完全相反。通过这个精彩的争论性骗局，定义现代性和小说的需要立刻消失了。它们难以言喻的复杂性和不确定性无需定义或描述。它只能通过与它们更简单、更容易掌握的对立面——古代和史诗——进行比较来暗示。

今天很少有古典主义者会认为席勒关于古代和史诗的观点是完全足够的。但席勒同时代的发明古典学学科的人也持有非常相似的观点。对于威廉·冯·洪堡、弗里德里希·奥古斯特·沃尔夫和奥古斯特·伯克这样的人来说，希腊和罗马的文明具有早期和当代文明所缺乏的统一性、连贯性和重要性。几代人以来，古典主义者都继续持有这样的观点。但要接受这个观点...