western history

is, in a manifold sense, Roman, and never Greek for it was with the Romans that ‘reality’ as actualitas (overtaking the Greek idea of truth as a process of concealing and unconcealing) attains an assumed self-evidence.

This interpretation of reality as actualitas ‘attains an assumed self-evidence which has remained decisive ever since’ (EP: 14). So ‘all Western history since is in a manifold sense Roman, and never Greek’ (EP: 13), even where there has been an explicit revival of the Greeks, as in the Renaissance or in the Hellenism of later art-theorists like J. J. Winckelman (1717–68), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and others:

western history, n.Definitions

western history