like Gracchus and claimed the inheritance of the tyrannicide Brutus and the Roman Republic. A German
revolutionary movement named itself after the rebellious slave Spartacus; a left-wing magazine in Britain is still
called Tribune. The Roman Church, of course, re-enacted the claims of the Empire on a different plane.
In the period of Charlemagne the study of the ancient texts aimed to produce churchmen and state servants who
could write intelligible Latin. Later in the Middle Ages those texts were devoured as the best books available on
logic, or architecture, or medicine. The Renaissance found their literary form, its shapeliness and concision, a
delightful relief from mediaeval formlessness; and many tried to emulate the lofty spirit, magnanimous and
pagan, which they depicted in ancient men. The Augustans of the eighteenth century were impressed by the
urbanity and correctness of Horace and Cicero. Romantic poets, such as Keats and Shelley and Holderlin, turned
from Latin literature to Greek: 'We are all Greeks,' said the painter Delacroix. The last hundred years have seen a
great anthropological interest in antiquity, from Frazer and Jane Harrison to Louis Gernet and Jean-Pierre
Vernant, and impassioned performances of Attic tragedies. This brief and exaggeratedly pointed survey brings
out the Protean character of the ancient world, which in every period has had different things to offer, and which
has been exploited with extraordinary thoroughness over the centuries.
For the arts the influence of antiquity had three aspects: subject matter, form, and spirit. The myths of Greece
were the other great subject of Renaissance art, along "with Christian themes; the myths of Ovid were painted by
Titian and Correggio, Rubens and Poussin; Mantegna and Piranesi and David created visual images of Rome;
Michelangelo began his career as a sculptor by creating works so closely modeled on ancient models that they
passed as genuine antiques. The genres of ancient literature, too, lived on. Pastorals and epics, elegies and satires
sprang up in every European language; the Italian musicians and patrons who created the first operas were trying
to reconstruct the musical drama of antiquity; before Greek tragedy was understood, the rhetorical melodramas of
Seneca were a formative influence on the tragedy which blossomed with Marlowe and Shakespeare. In another
art the triumphal arch, the Doric and Ionic and Corinthian capitals, the fountains with marble nymphs and river
gods, the ornamental urns, all proliferated through the cities. The spirit is even more pervasive. David's Marat
stabbed in his bath recalls the philosophical suicides of Rome; the grand manner of Raphael and Milton is
inseparable from their classical studies; Dante claimed Virgil as his master, and for all the enormous difference
of their styles the claim clearly expresses an important truth.
The philosophical legacy is also vast and various. Greek thought penetrated Christian doctrine from the first: 'In
the beginning was the Word' is intelligible only in the light of Greek theories of the Logos. St Augustine was
much influenced by Plato, and many theologians attempted to reconcile Platonism and Christianity, both in the
Middle Ages and, like Sir Thomas More, in the Renaissance. Aristotelian logic laid the basis of scholasticism and
was finally reconciled with orthodox belief by Aquinas. The brilliant guess of the atomic theory was remembered
in the Renaissance, when also the proud virtue of the Stoics provided a model for generals and dynasts.
Platonism, increasingly freed from Christian colouring, was the dominant school of philosophy in England in the
nineteenth century.
The idea of a university goes back to Plato's school at Athens, which lasted for nearly a thousand years. From
Greece it passed to Europe by way of the Arabs, like the text of Aristotle; Universities spread north from Salerno,
where contact with the Muslim East had planted the seed. Textual criticism began with the study of corrupt texts
of classical authors. Such words as 'museum', 'inspiration', 'poet laureate', reveal their ancient connections: a
temple of the Muses, the 'breathing into' a poet of his inexplicably splendid verse by some supernatural force, the
crowning of a successful poet with laurel. The modern cult of athletics and the revival of the Olympic games are
of course strongly Greek.