One of the most surprising expressions that captures a self-conscious positioning in time comes in a remarkable poem in Book 1 of the Palatine Anthology. The poem is not an epigram at all, despite its inclusion in the anthology, but rather a 76-line poem of dedication celebrating the construction of the church of St Polyeuctos in Constantinople. The church was rebuilt in the early sixth century by Anicia Juliana, who came from one of the most distinguished family lines in eastern Greek Christian nobility. Indeed, the original church had been built in the fifth century by the empress Eudocia, who was Juliana’s great-grandmother. Juliana, in her act of rebuilding, was certainly engaging in the familiar competitiveness, aimed at both contemporary and historical rivals, that continued Hellenistic euergetism – the public display of wealth and authority through the sponsoring of public buildings – in order to contribute to the splendid redesign of Christian urban space.

The discipline of classics is unthinkable without the notion of the exemplary. On the one hand, for centuries in the West, the classical past has provided models of the best in literature, style, political system, sexual freedom – and many other idealisms. The very name ‘classics’ exists because the great texts of the past give us the first, second and third classes by which we classify and evaluate the modern. The lure of classicism is its image of the ideal in the past – a perfection or grandeur or beauty to strive after. The repeated challenges to the privilege of the Greek and Latin past in the education system, the hierarchy of cultural value, or in the very assumption of how the past matters, have sought again and again – often with a self-defeating obsessiveness – to dethrone this position of classics in the tradition of the West. In English, the apparent connection between classics and class has become a byword for such a challenge, insisting on the complicit and corrupting link between social elites and the fantasies of entitled genealogy that ground classicism.

“On the morning when I heard of his death a heavy storm was blowing and I doubt not when he died that it had well begun.”1 So wrote W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) in March 1909, four days after the death of his friend and protégé, the 37-year-old playwright John Millington Synge (1871–1909). For Yeats, the death of Synge marked an important turning point in his life and, broadly, in the development of modernist expression across the literatures of Ireland and Britain. A heavy storm was indeed blowing; and in the weeks that followed Synge’s death, Yeats, though awash in grief, slowly began to envision his reinvention as a poet, elaborating a new theory of artistic genius anchored in reflection over Synge’s art and life. A “drifting, silent man, full of hidden passion,” he wrote, Synge had long been marked by “physical weakness,” but that weakness had done little to diminish his imagination.2 On the contrary, as his body grew weak in the last months of life, Synge’s imagination became “fiery and brooding,” undimmed by disease and decay.

Literary modernism developed on the ‘Celtic fringe’ in the early twentieth century at the same time as revivals of self-declared Celtic civilizations were underway and as the character of British and Irish classical education was also evolving in drastic fashion.1 As such, classical reception was transformed in this period, in conjunction with – and in reaction to – nationalist narratives of rebirth. As classical learning slowly became dislodged from a central role in marking a sense of civic entitlement for the British Empire’s elite, formal knowledge of Greek and Roman antiquity saw its wider cultural prestige diminish, leaving receptions of antiquity open to new forms of social, political and aesthetic reconfiguration.

Standing before a judge in the Welsh town of Caernarfon, Saunders Lewis, a playwright and the president of Plaid Cymru, defended the right of conscience. The offence for which he and his associates Lewis Valentine and D. J. Williams then stood accused

Emboldened by the success of his 1926 poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, the Scottish poet and critic Christopher Grieve – better known by his pseudonym, Hugh MacDiarmid – set sight on a new creative endeavor, a work that could “glimpse the underlying pattern of human history,” what MacDiarmid called “Cencrastus, the Curly Snake.”

The messianic religions of late antiquity are obsessed with getting the time right, to know the right time – both at the level of daily, weekly, monthly or annual rituals, and at the level of world history. Where the prophet Cassandra can say for herself, ‘the day has come’, the Gospels will insist that everyone must be anxiously aware that ‘the hour is coming and is now here’. The desire to be certain about one’s place in time produces an extended, competitive and argumentative scholarly literature, which is never simply about the correct calibration of time. Rabbinical writing, first of all, is exemplary of these temporal obsessions.

“I am distressed and indignant,” declared T. S. Eliot (1888–1965).1 “[D]iscreet investigations” were warranted, he told Sylvia Beach (1887–1962), for a “conspiracy” against James Joyce’s newly published novel, Ulysses, seemed to be afoot in England.2 In the months since the book’s 1922 printing in Paris, a number of English literary critics had come forward seeking press copies, but few actual reviews of the novel had appeared in British magazines and journals. Disheartened, Joyce himself explained to Harriet Shaw Weaver (1876–1961) that “certain critics” seemed keen to obtain the novel if only to then “boycott the book.”

This is the first question that Augustine asks about himself in the Confessions, and it begins with a stumbling into speech. He does not know where he comes from. This is the question which stalls Sophocles’ Oedipus in his domineering argument with Teiresias, starts his search for his parentage, and thus begins his downfall into knowledge and self-destruction. Oedipus does not know where he comes from, an ignorance displayed even and especially when, with multiply-layered ironies, he calls himself ‘the know-nothing Oedipus’. It is also the foundational question for Freud, reader of Oedipus, who insists that for all the productive work of analysis of the self we can never fully and properly know our own self, and certainly not the answer to where the self comes from. Augustine specifies huc ‘to here’, which he immediately glosses as ‘this life that dies or death that lives’. The horizon of expectation is defined – in a way that is alien to Sophocles or Freud – by this definition of a life-time as a hesitation between a journey towards death, or an already living death: a theologically defined time shaped between the already and the not yet.

The messianic religions that came to dominate this lived life of late antiquity made waiting central to their sense of temporality, as we have seen. As the poets of erotics have always known, there is certain headiness in the combination of fervour and deferral. Waiting, however, structures the sense of the present – the now – with a question of its value, its temporariness. ‘Who would deny that the present has no duration?’, asked Augustine. In the nineteenth century, William James tried to answer this anxiety about the duration and thus evaluation of the ‘nowness’ of the now with an empirical, experimentally tested answer: ‘the practically cognized present is no knife-edge’, he concluded, ‘but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched and from which we look in two directions into time’. It was possible to count in seconds, and then in fractions of seconds, a human experience of now, a breadth measured ‘from one five-hundreth of a second to twelve seconds’.