Compact, inquisitive, and useful, this book surveys the use of Greek and Roman antiquity by modern (particularly nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German) thinkers. Morley has read his sources carefully, sometimes providing his own translations, and he uses them in fresh and interesting ways.
‘Interesting’ is the operative word. M.'s six chapters summarize ‘modern’ views of antiquity, covering ancient economics, sociology, aesthetics, history, and rhetoric. The book's richness and vivacity grows out of its lattice-like structure, which in each chapter examines the same more or less unchanging group of modern thinkers: Schiller, Marx, Weber, Hegel, Mill, Nietzsche, Adam Smith, Richard Wagner(!) and others. Thus in the first chapter we see Hegel insisting, against the grain of his time, that modernity appears ‘lively and free’, and antiquity ‘insipid’: ‘Modern times … have worn out the Greek and Roman garments of their childhood.’ In subsequent chapters, Hegel's views about historical stages, ancient art and drama, the historical irrelevance of non-European cultures, the anxieties produced by historical study, ‘the limits of empiricism’, and ‘reason’ in history are taken up and aligned or contrasted with contemporary opinion. M. deftly alludes to several Hegelian writings. The analysis then deepens and broadens as each additional thinker enters.
The book opens with a start, by quoting Gramsci, for whom its very lack of connection with the present made Latin worthwhile: Latin will ‘accustom children to studying, to analyzing a body of history that can be treated as a cadaver but returns continually to life’. M. then poses Finley against Rostovtzeff, as ‘primitivist’ and ‘modernist’ historians. Finley had firmly criticized ‘primitivism’, and ‘pre-modernist’, though less catchy, serves better: but M. summarizes the issues succinctly and well. The chapter concludes with Nietzsche, as always a perceptive outlier, insisting ‘that “antiquity” was as unstable a concept as “modernity”’. (In chapter after chapter, it will be Nietzsche who provides the provocative, often productive, insight.) The next chapter turns to economics, beginning with Marx's demonstration of the power of modern capitalism, then showing, intriguingly, how long it took other thinkers to realize that modernity was economically superior to ‘ancient times’. Max Weber, overlapping with Marx in some respects, noted the increased modern emphasis on technology, free labour, state policy, the rule of law, rationalized production, and a ‘mentality’ that demanded ‘forgoing immediate gratification for the sake of future returns’.
Turning to the ‘Classical Critique of Modern Society’, M. mentions thinkers who viewed antiquity as free from ‘alienation’. Here and elsewhere, M.'s brevity is tempered by citations of his own earlier studies in ancient economics. Whether Marx ‘intended’ ‘class’ to be ‘almost universal’ is a contested topic, though many agree. M. has clearly read and thought about Marx. Economic differentiation could certainly be severe in antiquity, but whether that differentiation led to class-based historical change is another question. M.'s comments on social complexity in Weber are likewise brief but well-informed. Both Durkheim and Weber doubted that modernity brings happiness, and Durkheim's analysis of social complexity was more pessimistic and sceptical than others': ‘almost invariably, the basis for such arguments was comparison with the awesome and fully rounded humanity of the Greeks’, who had, it was thought, a Gemeinschaft not a Gesellschaft. A near consensus held that we have declined from that ‘organic community’. Hegel demurred. Nietzsche, in Götzen-Dämmerung, presented a perhaps deliberately ‘incoherent account’ that refused to idealize the Greeks: M. agrees with James Porter that the incoherence was ‘deliberate’. Did Greek art embody ‘eternal beauty’? So many Germans insisted, even if they otherwise favoured modernity. Sometimes, they argued that ancient art was uniquely embedded in the society of its time. On this score (and others), Nietzsche perhaps influenced Weber's conclusion that modernity is ‘disenchanted’ — a word that haunted Daniel Bell — and its art ‘intimate and not monumental’.
M.'s fifth chapter, ‘History as Nightmare. Conceptions of Progress and Decline’, covers the rejection of history ‘in favor of more present-oriented disciplines’, as well as the (selectively Eurocentric) ‘grand narratives’ of progressive development or long-term decline. Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire and Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations both ‘reveal’ that saturation in historical study can ‘uproot the future’, thus preventing change. W. J. Ashley provides a key quotation in the final chapter, ‘Allusion and Appropriation. The Rhetorical Uses of Antiquity’: ‘An alleged historical fact has often more hold upon men's minds than any theoretic argument.’ M. notes that Aristotle serves Marx as both an economic authority and a predecessor who has been surpassed. Others, too, used classical allusions, but with mixed results, as Matthew Arnold said. Did Roscher's claim that a passage in Demosthenes ‘cautions us against the Manchester criterion of national prosperity’ win anyone over? M. uses slavery as a ‘case study’ of the variety of ways in which writers ‘deployed ancient material’. He reviews the many ways in which ancient slavery was invoked, and the perhaps surprisingly widespread readiness to call factory workers ‘modern slaves’. Neither Nietzschean ‘diagnosis’ nor Marxian ‘denunciation’ of slavery wins our adherence ‘except on preconceived political or moral grounds’. In Marx, Nietzsche, and the other subjects of this book, concepts like ‘classical’ and ‘modern’ are disputed without resolution, but in all cases, ‘there needs to be an alternative, a touchstone … to which we can refer in making sense of our own situation’.
This is an inadequate ‘summary’, passing over many useful observations. The book succeeds not by pressing a single grand claim, but by providing hints and suggestions, backed up by thoughtful reading. Although the conclusion is muted, the book opens up topics often ignored in standard studies of ‘classical influence’, and enables readers to pursue important questions. Further work by M. himself would be welcome, perhaps particularly on the intriguing triad of Marx, Nietzsche and Weber.
