The Western classical tradition is the reception of classical Greco-Roman antiquity by later cultures, especially the post-classical West,[2] involving texts, imagery, objects, ideas, institutions, monuments, architecture, cultural artifacts, rituals, practices, and sayings.[3] Philosophy, political thought, and mythology are three major examples of how classical culture survives and continues to have influence.[4] The West is one of a number of world cultures regarded as having a classical tradition, including the Indian, Chinese, and Islamic traditions.[5]
The study of the classical tradition differs from classical philology, which seeks to recover "the meanings that ancient texts had in their original contexts."[6] It examines both later efforts to uncover the realities of the Greco-Roman world and "creative misunderstandings" that reinterpret ancient values, ideas and aesthetic models for contemporary use.[7] The classicist and translator Charles Martindale has defined the reception of classical antiquity as "a two-way process ... in which the present and the past are in dialogue with each other."[8]
The beginning of a self-conscious classical tradition is usually located in the Renaissance, with the work of Petrarch in 14th-century Italy.[9] Although Petrarch believed that he was recovering an unobstructed view of a classical past that had been obscured for centuries, the classical tradition in fact had continued uninterrupted during the Middle Ages.[10] There was no single moment of rupture when the inhabitants of what was formerly the Roman Empire went to bed in antiquity and awoke in the medieval world; rather, the cultural transformation occurred over centuries. The use and meaning of the classical tradition may seem, however, to change dramatically with the emergence of humanism.[11]
La frase "tradición clásica" es en sí misma una etiqueta moderna, articulada más notablemente en la era posterior a la Segunda Guerra Mundial con The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature de Gilbert Highet (1949) y The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries of RR. Bólgar (1954). La palabra inglesa "tradición", y con ella el concepto de "transmitir" la cultura clásica, deriva del verbo latino trado, tradere, traditus , en el sentido de "entregar, entregar". [13]
Los escritores y artistas influenciados por la tradición clásica pueden nombrar sus modelos antiguos o aludir a sus obras. A menudo los estudiosos infieren la influencia clásica a través de métodos comparativos que revelan patrones de pensamiento. A veces, las copias de textos griegos y latinos de los autores contendrán anotaciones escritas a mano que ofrecen evidencia directa de cómo leyeron y entendieron sus modelos clásicos; por ejemplo, a finales del siglo XX, el descubrimiento de la copia de Lucrecio de Montaigne permitió a los estudiosos documentar una influencia que se había reconocido desde hacía mucho tiempo. [14]