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- Because European and Western literature and cultures were produced as a
recreation, a revival of the classical cultures of Greece and Rome.
- education, politics, fashion, architecture, painting,Sculptures were ALL produced in imitation of classical antiquity (Greece and Rome).
- Roman poet Horace writes: “Captive Greece took its wild conqueror captive”
- Horace expresses a sense of inferiority and ambivalence because Rome conquered Greece politically and militarily but Rome could never produce a refined culture
- find this sense of ambivalence and inferiority everywhere in Roman
- The Romans conquered Greece militarily, but they always felt that the culture of Greece remained infinitely more sophisticated and refined in poetry, in philosophy, in rhetoric, in medicine, in architecture, in painting, in manners and in refinement
- Education in Rome consisted simply in IMITATING Greek masterpieces in literature, rhetoric, painting, etc. Horace, for example, advised his readers to simply imitate the Greeks and never try to invent anything themselves because their inventions will be weak and unattractive
- Imitation cannot produce originality. As Seneca puts it with bitterness, “a man who follows another not only finds nothing; he is not even looking by Seneca.
- The Romans were a simple rural and uncultivated people who became successful warriors