Let us return to eternity, which in truth we have not ever fully left since the opening chapter.

For Gregory of Nazianzus, then, Christmas Day is to be experienced as a celebration of the history of the universe and as a living recognition of the transformative epiphany of Jesus Christ, an epiphany that changes how time is lived and perceived by the Christian faithful. Gregory wants to redefine how time is counted, recounted, experienced. Ambrose of Milan at around the same time, over in the West, is rather more modest in his vision. At least at first sight. His hymns are designedly simple and easily memorable in form, though, like William Blake’s lyrics, they are far from simple in their linguistic depth and significance – and they proved extraordinarily influential in the invention of Christian time as well as of the Christian hymnic tradition. These hymns are to be sung by a congregation, and there are reports not just of people singing lustily and of the hymns spreading across Italy, but also of annoyance by Ambrose’s opponents at their success in inculcating particular doctrinal views in the singers. Hymns, that is, are to work not by a preacher telling his audience what to think but by a congregation’s absorption of ideas through repeated performance, by the pleasure of singing.

“For the last few days I have been longing for the quiet of the boat,” declared W. B. Yeats.1 As Yeats boarded the RMS Lusitania, bound for New York on January 31, 1914, he welcomed the journey. The previous month had seen him ridiculed in the English press. George Moore (1852–1933), the novelist and his sometime adversary, had published an excerpt from his memoir, Hail and Farewell, where he skewered Yeats, recalling a tantrum the poet had thrown in 1904. Speaking for Hugh Lane (1875–1915) and his exhibition of Impressionist paintings, Yeats had appeared “with a paunch, a huge stride, and an immense fur overcoat.”

One of the most surprising expressions that captures a self-conscious positioning in time comes in a remarkable poem in Book 1 of the Palatine Anthology. The poem is not an epigram at all, despite its inclusion in the anthology, but rather a 76-line poem of dedication celebrating the construction of the church of St Polyeuctos in Constantinople. The church was rebuilt in the early sixth century by Anicia Juliana, who came from one of the most distinguished family lines in eastern Greek Christian nobility. Indeed, the original church had been built in the fifth century by the empress Eudocia, who was Juliana’s great-grandmother. Juliana, in her act of rebuilding, was certainly engaging in the familiar competitiveness, aimed at both contemporary and historical rivals, that continued Hellenistic euergetism – the public display of wealth and authority through the sponsoring of public buildings – in order to contribute to the splendid redesign of Christian urban space.

The discipline of classics is unthinkable without the notion of the exemplary. On the one hand, for centuries in the West, the classical past has provided models of the best in literature, style, political system, sexual freedom – and many other idealisms. The very name ‘classics’ exists because the great texts of the past give us the first, second and third classes by which we classify and evaluate the modern. The lure of classicism is its image of the ideal in the past – a perfection or grandeur or beauty to strive after. The repeated challenges to the privilege of the Greek and Latin past in the education system, the hierarchy of cultural value, or in the very assumption of how the past matters, have sought again and again – often with a self-defeating obsessiveness – to dethrone this position of classics in the tradition of the West. In English, the apparent connection between classics and class has become a byword for such a challenge, insisting on the complicit and corrupting link between social elites and the fantasies of entitled genealogy that ground classicism.

“On the morning when I heard of his death a heavy storm was blowing and I doubt not when he died that it had well begun.”1 So wrote W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) in March 1909, four days after the death of his friend and protégé, the 37-year-old playwright John Millington Synge (1871–1909). For Yeats, the death of Synge marked an important turning point in his life and, broadly, in the development of modernist expression across the literatures of Ireland and Britain. A heavy storm was indeed blowing; and in the weeks that followed Synge’s death, Yeats, though awash in grief, slowly began to envision his reinvention as a poet, elaborating a new theory of artistic genius anchored in reflection over Synge’s art and life. A “drifting, silent man, full of hidden passion,” he wrote, Synge had long been marked by “physical weakness,” but that weakness had done little to diminish his imagination.2 On the contrary, as his body grew weak in the last months of life, Synge’s imagination became “fiery and brooding,” undimmed by disease and decay.

Literary modernism developed on the ‘Celtic fringe’ in the early twentieth century at the same time as revivals of self-declared Celtic civilizations were underway and as the character of British and Irish classical education was also evolving in drastic fashion.1 As such, classical reception was transformed in this period, in conjunction with – and in reaction to – nationalist narratives of rebirth. As classical learning slowly became dislodged from a central role in marking a sense of civic entitlement for the British Empire’s elite, formal knowledge of Greek and Roman antiquity saw its wider cultural prestige diminish, leaving receptions of antiquity open to new forms of social, political and aesthetic reconfiguration.

Standing before a judge in the Welsh town of Caernarfon, Saunders Lewis, a playwright and the president of Plaid Cymru, defended the right of conscience. The offence for which he and his associates Lewis Valentine and D. J. Williams then stood accused

Emboldened by the success of his 1926 poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, the Scottish poet and critic Christopher Grieve – better known by his pseudonym, Hugh MacDiarmid – set sight on a new creative endeavor, a work that could “glimpse the underlying pattern of human history,” what MacDiarmid called “Cencrastus, the Curly Snake.”

The messianic religions of late antiquity are obsessed with getting the time right, to know the right time – both at the level of daily, weekly, monthly or annual rituals, and at the level of world history. Where the prophet Cassandra can say for herself, ‘the day has come’, the Gospels will insist that everyone must be anxiously aware that ‘the hour is coming and is now here’. The desire to be certain about one’s place in time produces an extended, competitive and argumentative scholarly literature, which is never simply about the correct calibration of time. Rabbinical writing, first of all, is exemplary of these temporal obsessions.