Living Musical Gestures

“Who will free us from the Greeks and Romans?” complained three centuries ago the French literati involved in the dispute about the ancients and the moderns. Only in our times has the question had an explicit positive answer, an answer that can be summed up in one word: technology.
As long as people traveled by stagecoach and the horse was not only used for farm tourism and for betting, the technical level of European societies was not very different from that of two thousand years before. Thoughts and reasoning therefore moved in a material context in which the average speed of movement, except in rare exceptions, could not exceed ten kilometers per hour. Various consequences arose from this, including that which made people believe that they could learn something from historical precedents and accept absolute continuity with the past. And since the Greeks and Romans had been the sources of Western culture, it was thought that retracing their history and reading their literature was a way of drawing from them new energy and new teachings that could be used in the future.
[…] The dizzying speed of history found in the twentieth century and attributable to the last phase of the industrial revolution, has shown us that there is no longer any continuity with the ancient world, and in general with the past, and that the break is definitive and irreversible. […] In any case, there remains the opportunity, or rather the necessity, not to disperse a tradition which, no less than others, has sought to discover and shape the nature of man, that is, the need to preserve the memory of the genetic heritage that has brought to today’s Western culture. This memory seems to us to be able to form people who are more thoughtful and more suited to civil coexistence either because they are made intransigent by experienced ideals or because they are softened by the “pietas” that is learned from contemplation of the past.

Giuseppe Antonelli, History of Ancient Rome (1994)