Abstract

Edelstein's death in 1965 came when he had completed only four of eight projected chapters on the idea of progress in antiquity, and these four chapters in the history of this idea take us from Xenophanes to the start of the Augustan Age. What the book is best in is scholarship of the footnote sort. Edelstein's major thesis is that the ancients exhibited something more than an isolated or peripheral interest in progress, and that, consequently, the supposed antithesis between the pagan, cyclic notion of time and the Christian, linear and progressive notion of time is a misguided oversimplification. But in his introduction, in which he discusses the notion of progress in general, Edelstein has failed to give an account of the relation of the notion of progress to the notion of historical time which would provide the critically justified ground for saying that emphasis on progress requires similar conceptions of time. Progressivism, after all, is, and in antiquity often was, compatible with catastrophism; and the latter is, at least in its ancient garb, out of step with the eschatological notion of history which finds expression in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. What Edelstein has done is to draw our attention to the polymorphous and detailed thought on progress in antiquity—often despite his own attempts to force a unity or organicism on the phenomena where there appears to be none. But when we go in search of the wider context, the conviction persists that the repeated forms and instances of progressivism in antiquity strain at but do not break free from the hegemony of moira and eternal return—even though it be not eternal return of the same.—E. A. R.