The Power of the Past

How are we to interpret the role of tradition in the Greek East? Does a core of inherited cultural traits pass from generation to generation, or do persons symbolically construct the past to speak to the present? Individuals who copied Homeric themes in literature or emulated the sculptural programs of fifth-century Greek sculptors did not receive a static and clearly articulated tradition. Certainly, the artists of antiquity believed they had appropriated faithfully and accurately fixed and immutable traditions. Innovation was viewed with suspicion, if not outright hostility. Ancient protests to the contrary, the particular images selected from the past took on a new life, a new existence, when they reappeared in literature, sculpture, art, and architecture. These individuals reinvented tradition.

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