Woland

There is no recovery of Greek antiquity in part or in whole. The Athens of Solon, Pericles, and Anaxagoras is a lost world to us. Lacedaemonia is no closer. Even if we could philologically reconstruct the Greek way of life in the present, we could not become Greek by imitation. Goethe says, “Let everyone be a Greek in his own way! But he must be one.” The Greeks, proud and self-certain as any a people, looked to none other than themselves to be themselves. There is a point about antiquarianism here: that in trying to anachronistically replicate the facts of the past, playing dress up with its customs and ‘gods,’ we lose its spirit.