François Hartog uses a sentence by the poet Paul Valéry to describe his search for the key moments in the encounter between the modern European era and ancient Greece, drawing on his long-standing engagement with ancient history and historiography as well as its theory. The result is a study that leads from the Anciens et Modernes to the political discourses of revolutionary and Napoleonic France to German enthusiasm for Greek antiquity and even takes painting from Altdorfer to Lichtenstein into account. A bibliographical essay by the historian Dimitris Kousouris on the preoccupation of modern Greece with the ancient world rounds off the volume.