The development of modern historical science in Germany from the beginning of the nineteenth century brought about a sharp break from earlier views of classical antiquity. From the Middle Ages via the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, antiquity, whether in a narrow or a wider sense, whether through imitation or delimitation, had been ascribed normative significance, whereby it eclipsed all other epochs. With the emergence of modern historical thought, which disputed the validity of transhistorical values, the foundations of this view were undermined. The new insight into the historicity of human life, the ‘world as history’, brought into being through the experience of the tremendous dynamism of the French Revolution and the consequent political-social struggles, now admitted only individual phenomena which had value solely in themselves. In this view, all epochs were fundamentally the same; each was, as Ranke famously put it, ‘immediate to God’, each had ‘its special tendency and its own ideal’, was incomparable and untranslatable; none should be elevated or denigrated in comparison to the others. It was thus inevitable that antiquity lost its exclusive position and became just one epoch among others, of merely historical significance.

However, antiquity was still held in high esteem even among these German historians. There were two reasons for this. Firstly, it became a preferred object of study for the new forms of historical investigation. Modern historical science began with the historicisation of classical antiquity, and it proceeded from the inherited conception of that period.

In this chapter I explore some of the various ways in which modernity configures repetition as an improper relation to the past. This exploration mediates the wider question of what modernity wants to do with the past, whether it is to break with it, to sublimate it, or to form a new kind of relation altogether. This leads us to consider the tropes of repetition and of exemplarity as the grounds for an engagement with the past. That is to say, modernity does not merely employ these tropes in configuring a relation with the past; rather modernity's relation with the past is marked by the difference between ancient and modern uses of these tropes. Therefore, in the middle section of this chapter I turn to the theory and practice of exemplary thinking in ancient Rome, as a mode of thinking which infuses the present with the complex temporalities of subjective pasts and futures. Framing this discussion is a consideration of some ways in which Marx, in particular, characterised repetition and engaged with exemplarity in his attempt to create a new modernity.

In the Eighteenth Brumaire Marx presented, in the form of a political commentary on the revolutionary events in France between 1848 and 1851, a historical meditation on what it was to be modern, differentiating nineteenth-century forms of repetition – and of revolution – from what had gone before.

When did modern historiography of ancient Greece start? The question is deceptively simple and betrays assumptions far more revealing than any straightforward answer. Its formulation implies distinguishing between ancient historians and modern ones. But this has long been a slippery endeavour, as Nicole Loraux's title Thucydides n'est pas un collègue of some years ago reminds us. Ironically, in telling the history of historical practice, historians' chronology has often been fraught with issues of value and haunted by presentism. In fact, when the origins of modern historiography of the ancient world are sought, the divide between ancients and moderns is repeatedly left behind in favour of privileging some moderns above others. George Grote, the nineteenth-century British banker and political figure turned famous author of the History of Ancient Greece (1846–56), is the most frequently cited founder. Many of these claims, moreover, besides highlighting Grote's differences from previous moderns, reinforce this historian's foundational status by attributing contemporary value to his work. It has been well argued that his ‘is the earliest history of Greece still consulted by scholars’ and that his work has remained influential to most important twentieth-century historians of ancient Greece, including de Ste Croix, Momigliano, Finley and Hansen. Such analyses have taught us a lot about the development of modern historiography of ancient Greece.

The idea that Greek philosophy should be conceived of as one of the constituting traits of Europe and, more generally, of the west, seems to be widespread nowadays both within and outside the academic world. Influential philosophers of the last century, such as Husserl, Heidegger or Popper, have advocated this idea, despite their radically different perspectives. In the Atlas (1984) Jorge Luis Borges, who enjoyed shifting along remote times and spaces, from China to India or Iceland, expressed this widespread view with great force and clarity. In the chapter set in Greece and entitled “El Principio,” he imagines two Greek men talking – maybe Socrates and Parmenides, but names are irrelevant as are the things they are talking about. What matters is that they agree on one thing alone: “They know that discussion is the non-impossible path for reaching a truth.”

Awakening from a dream, in which he dreamt that the Encyclopaedia Britannica had entries provided with conclusions, but without beginnings, Borges had realized that he was in Greece, “… where everything has begun, if indeed things, in contrast to the entries of the encyclopaedia dreamed, have beginnings.” It is legitimate to doubt that Greece has always been regarded as the original land of philosophy, and that philosophy has been its distinctive possession and defining feature, since this has been questioned by Greeks themselves.

‘Christianity,’ wrote a young Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘cannot dispense with the notion of men having parts in a cosmic drama.’ This was a drama that played out on the level of history – for it was a defining feature of Christianity that the claims it made were not only transcendental but also, importantly, historical. It mattered for Christianity that Christ had been born at a specific historical moment, just as it mattered for Judaism – and ultimately for Christianity too – that the Jewish patriarchs had historically encountered and made covenants with their God. The structure of the Christian Bible itself makes this aspect plain: by taking over much of the Jewish tradition, the Christians were able to begin their authoritative account of the world with its creation, and to follow a privileged strand of history through the successes and travails of the Jews, so that even the books of the laws and the prophets, and of proverbs and psalms, were placed in a thoroughly historical context. The New Testament was bound equally tightly into this tradition, not only by an explicit grounding in a particular historical moment – as when Luke relates the birth of Christ to the reigns of Augustus and Herod – but also in the efforts of the New Testament writers to identify Jesus of Nazareth as the anticipated subject of Jewish messianic prophecies, not least by making him a descendant of the House of David.

Once they choose to reflect on their lives at all, human beings have no alternative but to conceive and imagine them in the dimension of time. Time is the frame of all agency and the shifting horizon of hope and fear through which every conscious being moves. The most dramatic projects for escaping its sway organise themselves by necessity through attempts to negate it or defy its implications, and re-enact its relentless authority as they do so. As a literary genre, in all its heterogeneity, history sets itself to present consequential aspects of the past as they were, and capture and convey their significance to an audience in the present and future. Within the intellectual tradition of the west two canonical renderings of history, classical and Christian, have furnished the principal paradigms for identifying and conveying that significance, effectively obliterating all those that preceded them, and framing much of the imaginative history of Europe as they passed along their way. It has been the cumulative experience of reflecting on each of them which has done most to define the sense of history within which Europeans have lived for well over a millennium. As Alexandra Lianeri's rich collection shows, intellectual resources generated elsewhere, whether earlier or in more recent times, have still done remarkably little to shake the intellectual hegemony of visions of time and its meaning for human life which emerged from and continue to centre on these two great domains of experience.

THE EXEMPLARY USE OF THE PAST IN ANTIQUITY AND THE MODERN AGE

Reinhart Koselleck starts his book Futures Past with a discussion of Albrecht Altdorfer's painting ‘Die Alexanderschlacht’. Altdorfer seems to have taken pains to be as exact as possible. His painting shows in much detail the different sections of the battlefields. On the flags, we even find inscribed the number of troops as listed by Curtius Rufus. And yet, strikingly, the Persians look more or less like the Turks who besieged Vienna when the picture was painted in 1529 ce. On the other hand, three hundred years later, Friedrich Schlegel described the painting as an expression of old knighthood, thereby distinguishing both antiquity and the sixteenth century ce from his own time:

As Koselleck points out, the ‘temporalization of history’ created an awareness of the specific features of times and thereby led to an emphasis on the individuality or even autonomy of epochs. One of the consequences of this is the questioning of the topos of ‘historia magistra vitae’. While the exemplary use of the past has not completely vanished in the modern age, the uniqueness of epochs makes direct juxtapositions of different events rather problematic and if such juxtapositions want to claim some plausibility, they have to take into account and carefully weigh the cultural settings of the events that are compared with one another.

“Where do we stand?” asked Wilhelm von Humboldt in his review of the eighteenth century. “Which part of its long and arduous path has mankind covered? Is it on a course that leads to the final destination?” The text is more than just a glimpse on the past: it expresses a borderline experience, around 1800, which had a profound influence on the perception of past and present in Germany.

In the middle of the eighteenth century Greek antiquity had been rediscovered. Greece became the foremost object of productive artistic reception. At the same time, the exclusionist vision of classical culture associated with nobility began to end; while the neo-humanist teaching at grammar schools and the scientific research at the universities concentrated equally on the study of Greece and Rome. The ancients were no longer timeless models, but historicized paradigms for Wissenschaft, literature, and the arts. Their works were still regarded as perfect, but also as historically constituted and therefore specific. The new German image of antiquity was characterized by a latent tension between classical aesthetics and enlightening historicism, and shifted between canonization of an idealized image of antiquity, on the one hand, and recognition of its interconnection with other cultures, on the other. These categories were paradigmatically articulated in the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt.

The principal aim of this chapter is to discuss the relation between historical thought in the Renaissance and François Hartog's three regimes of historicity, thinking with and occasionally against his central concept. To anticipate the conclusion, the chapter will argue that historical thought and writing in early modern times (more or less 1350–1750) had distinctive characteristics of its own. It was a kind of regime within Hartog's spacious first regime, extending from Homer to Chateaubriand or from the Achsenzeit to the Sattelzeit.

One of the major features of this first regime is the idea of history as a storehouse of exempla offering a guide to life: historia magistra vitae, as Cicero wrote in his treatise De oratore. Like the late Reinhard Koselleck, Hartog argues that early modern European readers and writers believed in what he calls ‘the authority of the past’. Like their classical and medieval predecessors, these readers and writers believed in a usable past, claiming or assuming that history offered a repertoire of exempla. The assumption was abandoned after (and in part thanks to) the events of 1789, which offered the prospect of a future so different from the past that earlier models became irrelevant. Hence Koselleck speaks of the ‘dissolution’ (Auflösung) of the Ciceronian topos in the course of what he called the Sattelzeit of the late eighteenth century, the frontier zone between traditional and modern culture.

THEORIES OF THE MONUMENTAL

History belongs to the living man in three respects; it belongs to him as one who acts and strives, as one who preserves and honours, and as one who suffers and needs liberation. This trinity of relationships corresponds to a trinity of kinds of history.

Friedrich Nietzsche's essay ‘On the uses and disadvantages of history for life’ is one of the few extended discussions of the nature and significance of a desire for the past and of the motives that drive the production and consumption of history. In contrast to the prevailing mid-nineteenth-century German view, which saw the acquisition of historical knowledge as an end in itself, he focused on the psychology of the individual historian and of the whole modern age in which ‘we all suffer from a consuming historical fever’. In place of a simplistic and self-aggrandising distinction between the misconceived or inadequate historiography of the past and the increasing perfection and objectivity of modern scientific history, he outlined at the beginning of the essay three different species of history, in which, in different ways, the pursuit of the past served other needs than the search for pure knowledge – whether or not this was acknowledged by the historian or the reader. The first of these is the ‘monumental’.