ABSTRACT
The Greeks and Romans bequeathed many things to the modern West, but the experience of selfhood and identity, particularly as embodied in the concept of individualism 1 , is not one of them. Still, our classical heritage does give us the means of understanding important dimensions of the modern self. A number of the modern world's seminal thinkers—Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Marx come immediately to mind—articulated by pointed contrasts to ancient Greece and Rome what it meant to live a human life in the modern West. Through their constructions of classical antiquity these thinkers delineated the severe stresses and dislocations resulting from those two great revolutions, the French and the Industrial. Occasionally the result of what might be characterized a high nostalgia for a simpler past 2 , nonetheless these constructions helped define the radically different type of relation that existed between the individual and his society in the modern world from the relation which existed in classical antiquity. This perception went on to play a powerful role in the analysis of modern experience.
