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But that basis of that fascination was also part of the reason for the rise of neoclassisism.

Greece and the Roman Republic and Empire came to be seen as purer, grander and more refined past, which drove a lot of effort into re-discovering information about them, which led to an increased interest in archeology, and eventually to things like neoclassism.

Dictators and radicals alike looked for lessons, and found them in different places for centuries. E.g. the former have often had an extreme fascination with the idea of continuity with the Roman Empire (see one of Napoleons later extreme examples of trying to be Roman[1]); the latter with the nascent democracy of the Greek city states and the Roman Republic.

You find it everywhere, not just in philosophy, architecture and art: English itself was subjected to a sustained "assault" of writers trying to bring more Latin and Greek words into common use.

A bit cheek-in-mouth: Everyone wanted to create the new Rome, ever since the fall of Rome (e.g. consider the Holy Roman Empire and the idea of "translatio imperii" which was used to justify a tenuous connection to the perceived glory of ROme [2]). They just disagreed (strongly) about what was great about Rome.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_style#/media/File:The_M...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translatio_imperii




The HRE probably had the best claim next to the Byzantines to being the true successors to Rome, but of course in the US they were a lot more interested in the Roman republic than the dominate.


Good point about the Roman republic.

As to being a true successor, recall that the Holy Roman Empire was famously neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

The "Byzantine Empire" is equally a misnomer. Constantine moved the capital of the Roman Empire to Byzantium-- renaming it "New Rome"--for defensive and commercial reasons. The Roman Empire itself remained. The notion that the "Byzantine Empire" was a successor to the Roman may arise from the fact that the eastern parts of the empire had always used Greek as the language of administration and as a lingua franca. Greek was barely known in the West from the fall of the eastern empire (ca. 476) to the Renaissance, when Greek scholars came to Italy as the eastern empire was contracting.

Given the Roman Empire's survival until 1453, the fall of Constantinople, a claim of succession is best made by the Russian Empire. Their Orthodox religion and Cyrillic alphabet were clearly derived from Greek Orthodoxy and the Greek alphabet.


The HRE had a very tenuous claim. They didn't even use the name until hundreds of years in, and most of their emperors were not crowned by any popes. Their claim was basically that the HRE was a successor to East Francia, which lands had been part of the Carolingian Empire, which had been ruled by Charlemagne, who had been crowned emperor by the pope in attempt to stake out his own very tenuous claim to be the continuation of the West Roman Empire (which had basically been defunct for centuries by then).

Couple that with the invented principle of translatio imperii [1], and they glossed over the multiple long breaks in lineage, and lack of even an unbroken connection between the territories ruled.

There's the old joke about the HRE: It was neither Holy, Roman or an Empire - the emperor ruled on paper, but it had very limited practical effect other than letting a smaller and smaller set of families reflect in the glory of an Emperor title.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translatio_imperii


Yeah, I agree, but the late Roman Empire was almost mostly Germanic barbarians so you can see the continuity easily enough. You might call it tenuous but it's still a better claim than most.

As an aside, that aphorism about the Holy Roman Empire is so well-known that it has the unfortunate trait of being spouted by people who know nothing else about the topic (not that I'm accusing you of that, if it sounds that way).




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