izB RENAISSANCES

of the Hellenic literature of a post-Augustan Imperial Age before they
had the temerity to produce caricatures of the language and style of
a Thucydides and an Herodotus. In a parallel Western renaissance of
Hellenism in a Latin dress, the sequence was likewise the inverse of the
original order. Medieval Western Latinists were content to reproduce
the Latin of a post-Diocletianic Age before they ventured to try their
hand at imitating the works of an antecedent Silver Age of Latin
literature, or those of a Golden Age by which the Silver Age itself had
been preceded.1

This inversion of an original chronological order can also be observed
in the evolution of renaissances in the field of visual art. For example,
in the evolution of a Western renaissance of Hellenic architecture, an
Andrea Palladio (vivebat A.D. 1518-80) made his appearance 141 years
later than a Filippo Brunelleschi (vivebat A.D. 1377-1446). In other
words, a series of Western architects who were turning their eyes
towards Hellenic sources of inspiration, because they were no longer
rinding scope for their creative powers either in a native Western
Romanesque style or in an imported 'Gothic', sought to reproduce
the cupola of the Ayfa Sophia2 before they thought of reproducing
the columns and pediment of the Parthenon, though the Parthenon
was the chef-d'oeuvre of the native style of Hellenic architecture at
its zenith, whereas the Ayia Sophia was a tour de force of Ionian epi-
goni of Ictinus who, after discarding their already worked-out native
style as impiously as Brunelleschi and Palladio were discarding theirs,
had sought their own fresh inspiration abroad in an exotic Syriac style
which was the native Hellenic style's antithesis,3 In the long-drawn-
out epilogue to the history of an Egyptiac Civilization which had been
galvanized into an unnatural life-in-death after it had run through
all the phases of disintegration to the very verge of dissolution,4 the
artistic as well as the political style of a 'Middle Empire* which had
played the senile role of an Egyptiac universal state was promptly
revived, after an abortive interregnum, under 'the New Empire* in the
sixteenth and fifteenth centuries B.C.,S whereas the revival of the artistic
style of 'the Old Kingdom', whose floruit had come and gone some seven
or eight hundred years before 'the Middle Empire's', was not attempted
until the advent of the Saite Age in the seventh and sixth centuries B,c.

If, as the sequence of renaissances of Hellenic political institutions in
Western history suggests, the order in which a living society evokes
ghosts out of the past life of a dead predecessor is determined by the
living society's estimate of the ability of divers ghosts to help it to meet
its own successive pressing needs, how are we to account for the ap-
parently well-attested fact that this utilitarian order of evocation turns
out to be correlated with the order in which these elements of the life
of the dead civilization had originally succeeded one another in the
flesh? If the order of evocation is, as it appears to be, the inverse of the

* See Taylor, H. O.: The Mediaeval Mind (London 1911, Macmillsn, a vote,), vol. U,
p. 133.

* See p. 84, above. 3 See IV, iv. S4""SS>
4 See I. i. 133-9; IL ii. ixa; V. v. 351-3; V. vi. 190; and VI. vii. 49-50.
s See further pp. 350-1, below.