Ancients and moderns

Use in the book

Joubert contrasts calming, moderating and regulating passions through exercise with the modern aim of excitation. A second contrast concerns abundance: praise of everything plentiful almost reverses the ancient critics’ maxim against excess. These are polemical comparisons of aims and judgments, not neutral histories of every ancient and modern writer. A separate contrast credits the earliest writers with saying only beautiful things and later writers with saying much in few words. Yet “earlier critics (among the moderns)” shows why ancien cannot invariably become ancient: the named critics belong within the modern group.

Places to read

1. I, p. 389, entry 4, ¶1Ancient regulation and modern excitation of passions are opposed.
2. II, p. 672, entry 8, ¶1The capable/guilty contrast qualifies literary abundance.
3. II, p. 733, entry 9, ¶1Earliest and later writers receive different merits.
4. II, p. 525, entry 13, ¶1Anciens means earlier critics within the moderns.

Translation in this edition

The English translation distinguishes ancients from earlier rather than imposing a single equivalent. The Latin critical maxim on II.672 remains literal; its note reports a close Ciceronian parallel without replacing Joubert’s Plus with magis. Relative periods in the earliest/later comparison receive no invented dates.

Use in the book

The Preface's account of the vague contrasts ancient public occupations with modern enclosed faculties. Civic affairs and bodily exercise supposedly left little room for restless feeling without an object. This is an explanatory contrast advanced by the authorial argument, not a comprehensive history of ancient emotional life.

René's travels encounter a more troubling antiquity. Its greatness lies in ruins, and its remains may be criminal dust. The past is a mutilated statue rather than a complete model for imitation. Classical materials can awaken thought and admiration without providing the lost whole he seeks.

The authorial defense turns to ancient tragic families when explaining the story's catastrophe, then proposes a Christian sanctification of the inherited material. Borrowing is therefore accompanied by moral recoding. Likewise a Vestal figure can describe a Christian nun, or a pagan example of composed dying can enter René's dangerous reasoning. Such transfers are selective and sometimes uneasy; none warrants reading the entire narrative as a disguised Platonic system.

Places to read

1. Preface p. 10Les anciens ont peu — The historical comparison is qualified rather than absolute.
2. Preface p. 14les anciens attribuoient à la fatalité — Ancient catastrophe supplies a model later recast in Christian terms.
3. p. 148Rome et de la Grèce — The travel sequence encounters antiquity as remains.
4. p. 152deux statues incomplètes — Past and present fail in different ways to form a whole.
5. p. 187la vestale — A classical religious figure is transferred to a Christian setting.

Translation in this edition

The supplied variants show that earlier uses of “philosophy” give way to religion, disgust for earth or wisdom in several places in the 1826 text. Those local changes matter, but they do not expunge classical material from the narrative. The supplied variants allow comparison of wording, not a complete genealogy of the author's intellectual development.