1. Knox, B.M.W., The Oldest Dead White European Males (New York 1993), 21Google Scholar; Corbusier, Le, Journey to the East, tr. Zalnik, Ivan (Cambridge MA 1987), 216Google Scholar; Heidegger, M., Existence and Being, tr. Kaufmann, Walter (in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre [New York 1956], 215).Google Scholar

2. ‘The Acropolis becomes for the viewer a place where the highest aesthetic values of Western culture escape the ravages of time and limitations of local or nationalist colour…’ Leontis, Artemis, Typographies of Hellenism (Ithaca 1995), 51Google Scholar. By contrast, the Colosseum and Forum of Rome are deeply localised in time and spirit.

3. On the term, Leontis (n.2 above, 43) quotes Foucault (from a lecture ‘Of Other Spaces’) in which heterotopias are defined as places ‘outside of all places, even though it may be possible to define their location in reality…. These places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about.‘

4. Leontis (n.2 above) provides a splendid critical survey of much of this terrain, though her emphases (obviously with respect to modern Greece’s rapport with ancient) and specific fields of enquiry are quite different from mine.

5. Leontis (n.2 above), 44.

6. As well as in Journey to the East, Le Corbusier eulogises on this perfection in Towards a New Architecture (tr. Mitchell [London 1927/1978]). For example at 203: ‘There has been nothing like it anywhere or at any period’.

7. Which ‘whiteness’ of course provides a ready tablet for other inscriptions too. Racial inscription, for instance, is a centrepiece of the current debate in (e.g. at i.241ff.) and surrounding Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (London 1987).Google Scholar

8. What is Philosophy?, tr. Kluback, and Wilde, (London 1958), 45.Google Scholar

9. ‘The Greeks were perceived as having transcended mundane chaos and being closer to the ineffable best. In some sense, then, they were themselves the human universal.’ (Bernal [n.7 above], i.288.)

10. So congenial has ancient Greece been to the Western mind that it has hardly noticed the present-day inhabitants; a people seen to belong more to East than West, to be specimens of civilisational decline (‘Athenians walk with supine indifference among the ruins of antiquity’ [Gibbon, , Decline and Fall (New York 1932), iiGoogle Scholar. 1178]; ‘Modern Greek is flavoured with a suspicion of contempt’ [Byron, , Byzantine Achievement (New York 1969), 8Google Scholar—though this was a point of view from which Byron disassociated himself]).

11. The movements of modern Greece’s reappropriations of its antique past have been convoluted and controversial. See, for instance, Leontis (n.2 above), ch 4.

12. The activities of the German philological tradition, emanating from the late 17th/early 18th century, are well documented. Herein is the source of the modem manifestation of the discipline of Classics, and accordingly of its particular role in the creation of the myth of ancient Greece. The hold of Germany in this classical tradition has been remarkable. It has now of course mainly collapsed. America (another great Western power) has assumed the mantle of the West’s mastery of ‘classical’ Greece.

13. See, for instance, the in many ways splendid works variously authored/edited by Zeitlin, Halperin, Winkler: Constraints of Desire (Winkler: New York 1990Google Scholar), One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (Halperin: New York 1990Google Scholar), and Before Sexuality (Halperin, Winkler, Zeitlin eds.: Princeton 1990).Google Scholar

14. This culture of preserved ‘ruins’ re classical structures is of recent origin. For instance one of the key figures in the history of restoration, Viollet-le-Duc, in his Dictionnaire raisonné (Paris 1866Google Scholar) vigorously recommended the rebuilding (not maintenance) of antique structures. To him, archaeology’s ‘restorations’ were a recent and objectionable practice. ‘Restauration. Le mot et la chose sont modernes. Restaurer un édifice, ce n’est pas l’entrenir, le réparer ou le refaire, c’est rétablir dans un état complet…’ (viii.14). Compare this with Ruskin (The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 1848) in which any form of rebuilding is considered to destroy the aura of originality.

15. Though both sides seem to be contending as to ‘origins’; Bernal for African ones and Mary Lefkowitz (e.g. in Not out of Africa [New York 1996]Google Scholar) for the ‘parthenogenic’ tradition of Greece in European culture.

16. This idea is pervasive throughout Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy (Oxford 1991Google Scholar). For example, ‘philosophy was borm in and through the (Athenian) polis’ (15). At 102 Castoriadis talks of the ‘creation of democracy and philosophy’ by the Greeks/Athenians.

17. Eliot, T.S., ‘What is a Classic?’, in Kermode, Frank (ed), T.S. Eliot: Selected Prose (London 1975), 115ffGoogle Scholar. Heidegger takes a characteristically less flattering view of Roman historicity; they ‘miserably fail to grasp the primordial essence of ancient Greece’ (Parmenides, tr. Schuwer, and Rojcewicz, [Bloomington 1992], 43Google Scholar).

18. Leontis (n.l above), 4: ‘Hellas is also a major ideal of modernity.’

19. Take, for instance, the influence of existentialism on the conception of the hero in Greek tragedy (above all Sophoclean) during the 1950s/60s, most notably in the books of Whitman, Cedric (Sophocles [Cambridge MA 1957]Google Scholar) and Knox, Bernard (The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy [Berkeley 1964]Google Scholar). Sale’s, WilliamExistentialism and Euripides (Berwick Vic. 1977Google Scholar) provides another instance of this type of influence. Havelock, in The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics (London 1957Google Scholar) made all sorts of associations between sophistic theory and 20th century anthropology and linguistics. New Criticism provided another vibrant engagement (though here mainly with respect to Roman poetry). And so the ‘story’ continues: Foucault, Derrida, Irigaray, and other theorists are common figures on the agenda of modern classics and classicists, in the work of such as Charles Segal, Froma Zeitlin, Page duBois, Simon Goldhill, and plenty more; and in journals such as Arethusa, Helios, Arion, Ramus. A survey of these influences on classics is to be found in Boyle’s, Tony article ‘Intellectual Pluralism and the Common Pursuit: Ramus Twenty Years’, Ramus 20 (1991), 113–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar. These influences, of course, have been thoroughly invigorating for the discipline. My point for the moment, however, is that the Greeks are seen as being ‘naturally’ responsive to them, to the shifting scenario of methodologies.

20. Bronze sculptures have obviously been less susceptible to this agenda, and accordingly have not played a central role in the image of the classical body. The silence, until recently, of scholarship, not just classical scholarship, on the body is notable. Plato’s distinction of ‘mind’ and body many would argue played the key formative role in this outcome (see, for example, Grosz, Elizabeth, Volatile Bodies [Bloomington 1994], 5Google Scholar). But ironies abound. In the Symposium, for instance, a work overtly directed to a ‘bodily’ theme, Socrates (as ever) disavows its importance (and relevance) for philosophy’s project. Ironically tradition saddled him with philosophy’s most recognisable body. And what has been the role/effect of this body in Platonic philosophy?

21. The myth resounds in the recent, and certainly biggest, book (Green, Peter, From Alexander to Actium [London 1990]Google Scholar) on this denigrated era housing prodigious talents of all types.

22. Clearly one of the key points of my argument is that, in practice at least, modernism was not as separated from or critical of the antique tradition as is sometimes assumed. Where a conscious endeavour for separation was undertaken, for example Wagner’s and Schoenberg’s deployment, and invention, of German mythologies, the historicity of these mythologies, compared with the ‘timelessness’ of classical Greek myth, is instructive.

23. ‘A philhellene likes the living Greeks, and a classicist likes the dead ones’ (Whitman, Cedric, The Vitality of the Greek Language and its Importance Today [New York 1954], 5).Google Scholar

24. On this issue see, for instance, Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind (Princeton 1992CrossRefGoogle Scholar), and Whom the Gods Destroy (Princeton 1995).Google Scholar

25. See n.21 above.