DESCRIPTION
For European, American, and British Romantic writers, thinkers, artists and architects, the cultural greatness of the West had its origins in classical Greece and Rome. In particular, the ‘Golden Age’ of Greece fired the imaginations of the late Romantic writers. Simultaneously a place, a time, an idea, and a narrative, the classical world was integral to Romantic self-fashioning. Ancient Greece was uniquely placed, geographically, historically and imaginatively, at the juncture between West and East, between ancient civilization and modernity, and between myth and historical fact. This ambiguous position meant that Romantic Hellenists could adopt the ancient past and reimagine it to support a number of often conflicting political, social and cultural viewpoints.
