ABSTRACT
The Graeco-Roman world presents all the fundamental forms of deviation: pure hedonism, moralism or pedagogism, mysticism, and together with them the most solemn and celebrated rigoristic negation of art which has ever been made. It also exhibits attempts at the theory of expression or pure imagination; but nothing more than approaches and attempts. Hence, since people must now take sides in the controversy as to whether Aesthetic is an ancient or modern science, they cannot but place themselves upon the side of those who affirm its modernity. A rapid glance at the theories of antiquity will suffice to justify what they have said. They say rapid, because to enter into minute particulars, collecting all the scattered observations of ancient writers upon art, would be to do again what has been done many times and sometimes very well. Further, those ideas, propositions and theories have passed into the common patrimony of knowledge, together with what else remains of the classical world.
