sehepunkte 26 (2026), Nr. 10

Miriam Leonard: Revolution. Modern Uprisings in Ancient Time

This is a thought-provoking book with a clear and engaging premise: antiquity has offered important conceptual resources for revolution, a phenomenon often understood as both essentially modern and essential to modernity. Leonard focuses on ancient concepts of time, genre, and fraternity and how they inform 1) revolutionaries' self-fashioning in their contemporary moments and 2) subsequent analyses of the significance of revolutions. Ancient thinkers are certainly attentive to periods of political change, but these tend to be understood in terms of alternation and cyclicality rather than transformation. Nevertheless, "the history of emancipation" can be understood as one aspect of the reception of Greco-Roman antiquity and of "a contested history of classicisms" (3). One crucial point is that antiquity has offered exemplary forms, narratives, and images for modern revolutions. Another is that the historical development of the modern discipline of classics coincides with the revolutionary era of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Current debates over the revolutionary or reactionary affinities of the classics are a third component of this contested history. Leonard does not argue that classics is for or against revolution; instead, she "highlights a certain classicism of revolution" (3), and this emphasis proves fruitful for different historical and geographical contexts.

In the first of the book's three central chapters, appeals to antiquity in the French Revolution are a prompt to explore the relationship of revolution and time. The key event is the proclamation of a new French calendar in 1793, a gesture that finds analogues in the ancient world. The French Republican calendar presents itself as in tune with nature, freed from chronological frameworks indebted to classical Rome and to Christianity. The new calendar instantiates a rupture with the past but at the same time, in claiming to be natural, "it reinscribes its events in continuity" (22). The convergences and conflicts of continuity and novelty, antiquity and modernity are likewise essential to Hannah Arendt's and Karl Marx's accounts of revolution. The French Revolution is a necessary context for recognizing and interrogating "how modernity takes its form in a failed act of rupture with the past" (45).

In the second chapter, classicism turns out to be the language with which later theorists of revolution mark both efforts toward and the impossibility of this rupture. Leonard examines the mobilization of tragedy and comedy, paradigmatic genres of classical literature, in accounts of both the French and Haitian Revolutions. She begins with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German responses to the French Revolution, in which revolutionary events become a dramatic spectacle or narrative. Friedrich Schlegel "philologizes" the revolution, likening it to a "'lost classical text'" in that the history of commentary on the event "comes to overshadow the absent original" (49). These classicized German accounts could be further situated specifically with respect to the disciplinary development of classics, in which Germany in this same period plays a central role. [1] The most famous classically-inflected reading of revolution (German or otherwise) is Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire, and Leonard demonstrates (through this text and his other writings) that Marx uses tropes of tragedy and comedy to map revolutions in the Old and the New World. Marx aligns Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation with Old Comedy, reading it as a genuine revolutionary achievement in comparison with "the tragedy of the ancien régime" (61). The second half of the chapter maintains this focus on the Americas through C. L. R. James's Black Jacobins, a history of the Haitian Revolution in which revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture becomes a tragic protagonist and "tragedy and emancipation are inextricably linked" (77). Treating the French and Haitian Revolutions alongside each other responds to a gap in the work of thinkers like Arendt, whose account of revolution (as Leonard notes) does not include the Haitian Revolution; this gap is reflected in the field of classical reception, in which Black classicisms and European classicisms are often treated within very different scholarly projects. Leonard's distinctive contribution is to situate the classicisms of the Old World and the New within a shared political and intellectual landscape (in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the historiographies of both), and her discussion makes the promise of this approach clear.

Fraternity and kinship in classical and revolutionary contexts are the themes of the third chapter. Through a reading of Derrida, Leonard critiques the "fraternal relationship to antiquity" (89) at the heart of French Revolutionary self-fashioning: making the classics into our brothers cuts against the possibility of imagining chosen families beyond the classical. The family in Greek tragedy plays a significant role in theorizing both the brotherhood characteristic of revolution and the relationship of revolution to patriarchy - which is figured as a revolution against matriarchy, even as matriarchy is key to imagining the revolution to come. The epilogue reflects on the affordances and constraints of classical concepts and forms for narrating and making sense of revolutions, both as they happen and afterward. Revolution today, Leonard suggests, is "tempered by a recognition of the inevitability of return" (108); this recognition accords with an ancient conception of temporality and so seems itself to be an example of the enduring classicism of revolution.

From the outset, Leonard distinguishes her project from "an intellectual history of the role of classics" (13) in eighteenth-century revolutionary movements. This is a useful point to make, both for defining the aims of this book and for considering distinctions between intellectual history and classical reception generally. This short book does not offer a comprehensive account of classicism in a revolutionary age. Instead, Leonard attends to the relationship of revolution to antiquity so that she can explain how classicism works and what it does. The history of appealing to the classical serves to clarify the stakes, and the consequences, of the appeals themselves.

Nothing is more modern than revolution, but revolution turns out to be indebted to classical antiquity for how it understands itself and how it is understood by others. This is Leonard's key insight, and it has significant implications for understanding the discipline of classics. Whether classics is revolutionary or reactionary is by now a familiar question in classical scholarship, but Leonard's readers will find that this question, like other questions about revolution, is itself inevitably and ineluctably dependent on classicism. This book is thus a provocation to ask different questions about classics and an essential guide to how to pose them.

Note:

[1] See, e.g., Constanze Güthenke: Feeling and Classical Philology: Knowing Antiquity in German Scholarship, 1770 - 1920, Cambridge 2020 (in Leonard's bibliography).