Repetition

In 1964 Bernard van Groningen responded to an invitation to speak on the subject of ‘General literary tendencies of the second century AD’ at the fourth International Congress of Classical Studies in Philadelphia. His oration, subsequently published, is one of the most hostile of the many attacks upon Greek literary culture under Roman rule, a blunt, historically insensitive, and occasionally incoherent diatribe against what he sees as ‘an essentially weak literature’.‘Reading the bulk of second-century litera-ture,’ he argues, ‘... one is not transported into a real world, but into [sic] a sham one, in a museum of fossils. ‘The reason he suggests for this decadence is a ‘weakening of the will’ ,caused by the supplanting of rationality by religion, and particularly by Roman conquest: Real art, real literature as well, cannot thrive unless in freedom. It is the achievement of independent, responsible minds ... The Greek literature of the second century is the work of a powerless community ... It [?the literature?] is a neglected one in a neglected century, and, generally speaking, it deserves this neglect.

Ancient history · Art · CONQUEST · Decadence · Epistemology · Literature · Rationality · Repetition (rhetorical device) · Subject (documents) · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classics · History · Philosophy