ABSTRACT
At the assembly of the Académie Française of 27 January 1687, Charles Perrault read out his poem ‘Le Siècle de Louis XIV’.1 The ancients, he conceded, were great but they were human beings like ourselves. From this unexceptionable point of departure, he launched a devastating attack on the ancients’ prestige in every domain: Plato is unreadable, Aristotle’s physics are no more credible than Herodotus’s history. The telescope and the microscope have transformed our view of nature; we now understand the workings of the human body far better than they did. The ancients excelled in oratory, but politics gave them more opportunities for eloquence. Homer’s warriors are brutal, cruel and capricious; his digressions are too frequent, and he is too much given to allegory. The other great writers of antiquity were underrated in their time, and their glory has been gradually acquired; but our great writers were recognized as such from the start, so future ages will rank them even more highly.2 In the visual arts and music, we surpass the ancients. Nature is uniform over time: it is absurd to imagine that the human beings of today are inferior to their predecessors. But if the great ages of humanity always reflect the influence of a great ruler, what age can be preferred to that of Louis XIV? His astounding military glory is matched by the piety he has displayed in the extirpation of heresy (by the revocation of the edict of Nantes two years before).
