Foreword: Classical Reception and the Political

In a well-known passage from the Eighteenth Brumaire Karl Marx famously formulates the role of Rome in the French Revolution as an instance of history repeating itself: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes, in order to present the new scene of world history" (10). One reading of Marx might see him as exposing the illusion of any claim to innovation. There can never be such a thing as an unprecedented event. Marx seems to be suggesting that the French Revolution was an event not despite but because of the fact that it had a precedent. On the other hand, one might see Marx asserting that the very innovation of the event is predicated on the return of some "spirit of the past." The "newness" of the French Revolution consists in its untimely reenaction of what Jacques Derrida has called the "very ancient" in the "very modern" (Kearney, 112). Marx continues: "The heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time in Roman costumes and with Roman phrases" (11). The active agents of the French Revolution achieve the "task of their time." "Men" as Marx