ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to examine aspects of ancient art that recall a sense of the natural cosmos that is other to us as moderns. At the same time, the chapter explores other aspects of antiquity which closely resemble modern culture. It takes the problem of Hamlet, a figure for alienation usually understood as a figure for modernity and examines his role in antiquity. His alienation from social roles is typical of Hellenistic culture. The chapter explores the Roman reception of Classical and Hellenistic art in the Republican period and finds a solution to the divide between Classical and Hellenistic attitudes in the tradition of the gens and how it unified Republican Romans. The chapter goes on to discuss the end of this tradition and the return to a sense of alienation from what was perceived as hypocrisy in later Rome. It examines the new eclecticism of imperial Roman art as a sign of an unresolved problem that is at the core of our own relationship with art in late modernity.
