Classical studies—understood broadly here as studies dedicated to Greco-Roman civilization and those that took it as a basis—have a prominent place in all the most reputable educational and research institutions worldwide. This fact, besides highlighting its importance for knowledge production since the origin of modern university institutions, also reflects its strategic role in the study of ancient societies. The first factor to explain this is the position of the classical world in the history of written records. Without forgetting the learning of classical societies from the surrounding world, it was they who took a decisive step in the development, conservation, and dissemination of a tradition transformed by their present, which we know through written and archaeological records, in the fields of philosophy, literary production, and history.
Practically contemporaneous, these three written expressions are the basis of classical formation, whether for professionals in history, literature, philology, linguistics, archaeology, or philosophy, or for modern sciences as a whole, derived from such intellectual production. By its nature, classical studies were interdisciplinary avant la lettre, always carried out in the spirit of deep cooperation, interdependence, complexity, and conceptual, theoretical, and methodological density. The study of Greek and Latin literature, for example, dialogues with data and paradigms provided by archaeology, history, anthropology, the study of religions, classical philology, etc.—and vice versa. It is also important to emphasize the importance of so-called “post-classical” studies (Late Antiquity, Middle Ages, modern interpretations and uses of Antiquity, etc.), increasingly recognized as fundamental for understanding earlier periods and Modernity, but also for the critical knowledge of its historical construction, notably in the 19th century.
Indeed, the material quality of testimonies from the classical and post-classical ancient world (nomenclatures that, like all temporal classification, we adopt provisionally and critically) and the preservation of its artifacts have made its study a laboratory of methodologies for approaching other societies of the distant past. Thus, classical and post-classical studies have become the epicenter of the great theoretical and methodological transformations that have had an impact on the humanities since the 18th century. We can cite contributions from authors of various areas and tendencies, such as Edward Gibbon, Friedrich Creuzer, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Friedrich Nietzsche, Theodor Mommsen, Fustel de Coulanges, Paul Veyne, Marc Bloch, and Georges Duby. Let us also remember the importance of classical formation in the intellectual production of more recent thinkers who were able to present a critical view of modernity full of consequences such as Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Reinhart Koselleck, Paolo Prodi, and Giorgio Agamben.
The study of the classical tradition does not end in itself. It is also the study of its reception, starting with the particular and still very impactful constructions presented by scholars since Late Antiquity itself, reaching the present times. The role of the 19th century in shaping our worldview (including the academic perspective, in shaping modern universities) and, within it, the strategic position given to a certain view of the classical world, recommend that the deconstruction paths of these forms be accompanied by a re-discussion of these ancient foundations.
Among other reflections, the reconstruction that our time is invited to present in the face of the general crisis caused by the empire of merchandise involves the reconsideration of pre-modern societies and, in particular, the tools we seek in classical antiquity to consider them. Abandoning, ignoring, or allowing the weakening of awareness of the role of this distant past consists of a structural danger that jeopardizes the hard-earned legitimacy of humanities studies. It is imperative to remember that such legitimacy of the humanities is an important support for the valorization of facts and rights related to cultures, races, genders, whose recognition is now urgent.
The study of the classical past, its transformation (from which, through the Middle Ages, Modernity and ultimately Post-Modernity emerged), and its reception (which continues to bubble through and despite academics, driving the circuit of problems and objects of study) is a common good that must add to the knowledge related to other foundations of human trajectory on earth.