The Greco-Roman and Judaic Legacies

Abstract

The legacy of classical antiquity is an obvious place to begin an account of the origins of the idea of Europe, which has often been traced back to Greek and Roman antiquity. But the nature of that relation is far from clear as is the question of the relation of the ancient civilizations to what later became known as Europe, a notion that was more or less unknown to the ancients. Any consideration of the legacy of antiquity needs to take account of the fact that the very notion of a classical age was a product of a later era and the relation to antiquity has not been constant. The Christian tradition commenced with a break with what it regarded as a pagan epoch, while the Renaissance looked to the recovery of certain elements of the classical age and the Enlightenment sought to distance the modern age from the ancient civilizations and their legacy, seeing as it did in Benjamin Constant’s formulation in 1819, a fundamental discord between the ‘liberty of the ancient and the moderns’.