the old and the new
I think this morning for the first time I really understood an anecdote about Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, the top German Ancient philologist of the late 19th and early 20th century. Wilamowitz was the Stephen Hawkins of European philology. The anecdote claims that Wilamowitz considered his Greek to be better than Plato's. Usually the anecdote is used to teach incoming freshmen about the hybris of the Wilhelmine Age, or something along those lines.
But it occurred to me that he might have been making an entirely different point: that there was nothing left that Plato could teach him about Greek. And that's a more interesting comment, if one accepts that line of argument for a moment. For in the recorded history of the cultures of this world, there are very few cases of people actually coming to the point where they are conscious of exceeding their predecessors, noting the conceptual discontinuity. In some sense it was one of the key elements-and key differences with respect to prior times-of the Renaissance and its continuation in the European Enlightenment. By the time of the 19th century and the early 20th century, in many disciplines people not only understood what the Ancients had been doing to the point of comprehending them, but also understood where the Ancients had been wrong or confused.
Compare that to the prior times, where there were basically a handful of restorative themes to justify political take-over: The old values had been lost and needed to be brought back (Chinese Empire); the rulers had become soft and needed to be replaced by rulers paying attention to the ways of the Gods (Mesopotamia); the people had forgotten their God(s) and prophets needed to remind them (Old Testament). You couldn't be doing anything overtly new; the voice from the burning thorn bush took care to point out that this was the God of Moses' forefathers speaking.
European philology of the 18th and 19th century was a race to the inheritance of Classical Antiquity: Who would come off as the continuation of the cultural and literary heritage of the Roman Empire (who had conveniently bagged the Greeks earlier on)? This was esp. relevant for the upstart dukedom of Prussia, who managed to out-wrangle the competition and eventually come to inherit back the crown of the Roman Empire for the German states. Mommsen, Harnack and Wilamowitz were the Bismarcks of the reconquest of that claim.
But now we consciously enter the realm of fiction, and imagine that Wilamowitz one day at his writing desk looked through the whole enterprise, realized that this was a political gamble were the fruits of war had long stopped to justify the labors expended. There was much more scholarship to be done, histories to be written, and editions to be prepared, no doubt. But the cultural heritage reaped was beginning to look inapplicable to the problems at hand: World War I and the social turmoil before and after it; the shattering of Newtonian Physics; the advent of Realism in art. And one can imagine him putting down his pen, maybe just for a moment, in despair, realizing that it was becoming pointless to look to the Ancients for guidance: Why even ask them, if you know more Greek than they do?