A Modern Way with the Classic

H ORACE PROVIDED a rule of thumb, sensible so far as it goes, when he said: est vetus atque probus, centum qui perfecit annos; he did not know the word classic in the literary sense, but Pope was right to put it into his imitation of Horace's line: Who lasts a century can have no flaw,/I hold that Wit a Classic, good in law. 1 What they leave out is any account of the temporal agencies of survival, the most important of which is a more or less continuous chorus of voices asserting the value of the classic; and of course they say nothing about the difficulties that arise in consequence of periodic changes in language, generic expectation, ideology, and so forth. The imperialist view of the classic accommodates all these. It does so by modifications of the basic model (renovations, translations, and the like) and by other means we can broadly call allegorical. But ultimately it rests on the notion of a moment privileged, timeless yet capable of contemporaneity with all others, a classic in which all lesser classics participate. If we were to think of theirs as a scientific theory, we should reject it either as we reject Ptolemaic astronomy (because discrepancies between the model and observational data require too many new rules-epicycles, translationes-for the model itself to remain credible; a new model is required) or more simply because it is not, as Popper would say, testable. It is easy to see that such criteria have no relevance. And yet such models change, by other and perhaps obscurer laws. We are less and less able to be easy with the imperial model in its purity

Art · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classical Philosophy and Thought · History

• ‘Novelty’ through narrative and paratextual voice

  Open Access•Qiyue Zhou, Minhui Xu•Language and Literature…•2024

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