ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns anniversaries of events from ancient Greece and Rome that come up between 1990 and 1994. Specialized though they may seem, commemorations of events from just before 1 B.C. can accustom people to do just what the bimillennium will require, namely to think in two-thousand-year spans of time. In the wake of postmodernism, it would be fascinating to harness anniversary as an occasion to reflect on the role of Roman literature in shaping European and American education from the fifteenth century down to the twentieth. All too eager to cast off authority, the postmodern age has abandoned any sense of roots in classical antiquity. Conferences on "Maecenas and the Phenomenon of Patronage in Art and Literature" would highlight one of the central thrusts of postmodern scholarship. Commemorators should have no difficulty dramatizing the conflict between the asceticism of Pythagoras and the indolence of the Sybarites, because this is something that postmoderns understand only too well.
