Out of Arcadia

the long version

For centuries the glories of ancient Greece were upheld as the embodiment of cultural and political greatness although by the later 19th century 'cultural pessimism and elitism' had begun to infest classical research with investigations into the darker sides of the ancients. These revised papers from a conference held in Princeton in 1999 examine the transformations that took place in German classical scholarship during the 18th and 19th centuries and look in particular at three figures that held a pivotal role in major debates of the time - Burckhardt, Nietzsche and Wilamowitz. Together the contributors study 'the gradual erosion of the neohumanist, emancipatory legacy of philhellenism in the Wilhelmine era and the increasing susceptibility of classical scholars to iliberal, nationalist and - especially after World War I - racist beliefs'