Both Greek and Roman modes of thought were hostile to any imitators. The Greek view of nature and history placed non-Greeks in a perpetual position of inferiority. As Hesiod, Plato, and Polybius articulated these concepts, nature was degenerative. Nature’s decline meant that history was headed downhill and did not provide the French a level playing field with the Ancients. No matter how well the French imitated the Ancients, they would never come close to their lofty models because the future was always already slanted downward. The French elite’s task of bearing the Ancients’ load was as difficult and futile as Sisyphus’s. Many Romans, like Lucretius, adopted a similar view of nature and history, even though it meant that they, who came after the Greeks, were lower down in the hierarchy of being. France, by extension, was of even lesser stature. Thus, French imitators were diminished by both Greek and the Roman sources.
The concept of the barbarian, borrowed from Greek thought, coupled with the idea of the degeneration of nature, also troubled the myth of a French continuity or alignment with the Ancients, making their models seem inimitable. In his Défense, Du Bellay defined the term “barbarian” by observing that it came from a Greek word rooted in the specificity of the Greek language. Concerning “the meaning of this word barbarous: in antiquity they were called barbarous who spoke Greek badly. For as foreigners coming to Athens attempted to speak Greek, they often fell into this absurd sound Barbaras [βάρβαρος]”45 Similarly, more than a century later Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel (1690) too defined “barbarian” as rooted in the Greek language: “Foreigners, when they came to Greece, stuttered, spoke crudely.”46 Barbaros was an onomatopoeia, evoking the babbling, inarticulate sounds of the person who could not speak Greek correctly. By extension, the term “barbarian” designated all those who were not-Greek.
The Greek tongue was central to the Greeks’ definition of “barbarian” because language provided the foundation upon which all of Greek culture and identity was constructed, as Edith Hall and Anthony Pagden have discussed.47 The outsiders’ incorrect use of Greek designated more than a simple linguistic deficiency. It meant they could not achieve right reason. Without the Greek language, with its right reason, outsiders did not have the proper qualities to form or be included in the community, the polis. Although outsiders physically resembled humans, they were not fully human because they dwelled beyond the boundaries of the polis. Positioned on the outside, they had no knowledge of virtue, nor could they share in human society’s highest goals. Not recognizing the force of the bonds holding humans together, they were creatures for whom “the language of social exchange was devoid of meaning,” as Pagden puts it.48 Thus, while “barbarian” referred first to language and non-Greek speakers, it came to mean, by extension, those who were not fully rational or human. Many Greek writers grafted the human/nonhuman distinction onto the Greek/not-Greek opposition.49 Du Bellay resented the implication of nonhuman, complaining: “Afterwards the Greeks transferred this term [barbarian] to brutal and cruel customs, calling all nations but Greece barbarous.”50 A century later, Furetière’s dictionary definition of the term criticized the Greek/non-Greek opposition: “The Greeks called Barbarians … all those who were not from their country,”51 because of Greece’s disdain for non-Greek nations.
The Greek/barbarian binary opposition did not accord France’s humanist-educated elite a stable place within its frame. The French elite were literally not Greek-speaking, nor were they Greek. And yet, of course, they did not want to see themselves as barbarians. Greek culture, unlike its Roman counterpart, had no middle term or in-between state. It defined the “us” position so narrowly that not even the Romans quite fitted in. As Du Bellay noted, the Romans did not quite measure up; they enriched their language “almost the equal of Greek.”52 The Romans occupied a status of “almost but not quite” Greek, to transpose Homi Bhabha’s famous phrase,53 making them feel culturally inferior. By extension, the French were even lower down in that imagined hierarchy. The Greek understanding of the barbarian came out of a binary thought structure that offered no solid place for the French—at least not literally in its original form. The French elite could not legitimately occupy the “us” slot alongside the Greeks, since these proclaimed “fathers” would have probably derided them as poor imitators had they still been alive.54 Rooted in the specificity of the Greek language, the concept of the barbarian could not be easily transferred to the French language, thus pushing France outside the circle of a desired “us-ness” with the Greeks.
The Greek linguistic divide thus reflected the dominant Greek worldview, which imposed strong “us-them” boundaries that did not readily welcome outsiders. Its boundaries reflected a highly polarized world to protect the carefully ordered political structures of (Greek) reason from the wildness of barbaric spaces beyond. Because its boundaries were not particularly elastic or fluid, foreigners were largely fixed in their position outside the polis. Barbarians could not easily acquire right reason or become civilized enough to merit inclusion.55
Despite this chasm that potentially threatened France’s continuity with the Ancients, many intellectuals still transformed or “translated” the key concepts of Greek thought into their own world of thought. Many seventeenth-century writers interpreted the term “barbarian” figuratively, seeing themselves as united with the Greeks in a fundamental sameness so that they could substitute themselves on the Greek pedestal. The French Academy dictionary of 1694 defined the term “barbarian” such that the French occupied the dominant, civilized “us” slot in the “us-them” divide: “Barbaric: A language which has no relation to ours, or which is rude and shocks our ear” (my emphasis).56 Similarly, Furetière defined the barbarian as non-French. “Barbarian: Foreigner who is from a country which is very far, sauvage, badly polished, cruel and who has manners very different from ours” (my emphasis).57 French intellectuals of the seventeenth-century world of letters became obsessed with their own language, imitating the Greek emphasis on language. To speak French well meant being, like the Greeks, “not barbarian.” Frenchness and purity came to be defined negatively as “not barbarian.” Vaugelas wrote that “one can commit a barbarism … in speaking a word which is not at all French.” To speak French purely “one has only to avoid barbarisms.”58 Similarly, Furetière clarified his definition of “diction” by adding: “This diction is not French, but barbaric.”59 However, as much as the French humanist-educated elite sought to align themselves with the Greeks in the “us” position, the Greek pedestal was a narrow space that did not permit the French to share it. If the French elite imagined they got one foot up on it, the other foot was left dangling, always waiting and hoping to gain a firm footing there. Unable to fit stably on the pedestal, the French elite kept falling out of alignment with the Greeks and into the “barbarian” slot. In sum, the dominant strain of Greek thought did not really accommodate imitation. The diachronic notion of degeneration and the synchronic notion of the barbarian, if understood literally, doomed the French aspiration of kinship to failure.
The Romans did not fit on the Greek pedestal either. They lived in the shadow of the Greek giants. The Roman-Greek dynamic presented a different version of the vicious circle that the French elite also fell into. The Romans were obsessed by the fear of being barbarians, culturally inferior to the Greeks, as several classicists have argued.60 This Roman fear was reflected in its key founding myth from Virgil’s Aeneid. After the Greeks had sacked Troy, Aeneas left with his father and settled in the land of the Latins. As both Rémi Brague and Richard Waswo have described it, to be Roman was to be rooted in the experience of exile, separated from one’s first land and transplanted to a new one. There, one began anew out of the ashes of the old.61 Rome’s myth of its Trojan origin portrayed itself as derivative, and inferior to its sources. Thus Rome’s true home was located in an elsewhere, a source that it could never fully possess or ever fully make its own because it was both