Ad rem, towards a new reception of antiquity in the post-modern World

Abstract

This article presents the shift in the ontological status and function of Ancient Greek and Roman cultural heritage undergone by Western civilization in the last decades of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Antique tradition has since ceased to be transmitted simply as a system of ideas, values or role models, which was successively actualized in the process of its reception. In the post-modern consciousness, Ancient Greek and Roman heritage began to be understood as an individual collection of objects, consumed by society and adapted for the implementation of specific aims and aspirations. This shift consequentially results in the obsolescence of the investigative methodologies used in the study of the reception of antiquity, which have been adapted so far, and thus challenges us to search for more adequate ways of description and analysis of this cultural phenomenon. In light of this, the article presents a new understanding of the reception process and postulates a new research method, referring to the categories of speculative realism, theory of metadesign and the concept of Actor Network Theory (ANT).