Antiques.

Correctness of outline, and the justness of character in the human figure are eternal; all other points are variable, all other points are in a degree subordinate and indifferent--such as colour manners and costume; they are marks of various nations; but the form of man has been fixed by eternal laws, and must therefore be immutable. It was to those points that the philosophical taste of the Greek artists was directed; and their figures produced on those principles leave no room for improvement, their excellencies are eternal.

Letter from Benjamin West to Charles Wilison Peale, 1809

As the theory of the divine right of kings and the aristocratic ideal of society faded toward the end of the eighteenth century, the enthusiasm for classical Rome and Greece grew apace. Political rebels searching for a new form of government found their model in the republics of antiquity, while those seeking a new basis for society found it in the citizen, the responsible member of the civitas, the city-state of the ancient world.

The Western mind was discovering the discipline of history and its companion, archaeology. The excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum in the second quarter of the eighteenth century had resurrected the long-lost physical appearance of the vanished world of the Greeks and Romans, until then only known through the works of ancient poets and historians. At the same time the mental image of the past was transformed by writers like Gibbon and Voltaire, who made a comparative and critical study of sources to build a living portrait of the lost civilization.

The rational, skeptical eighteenth-century mind thought nothing of changing the world with which it had become dissatisfied. In the United States Thomas Jefferson made the same confident appeal to reason and justice as had Joseph Priestley and William Godwin in England and Jean Jacques Rousseau in France. Modem society had become corrupt, so why not remodel it on the ...