Abstract

A tour through Reinhart Koselleck’s extensive library shows his intimacy with Greek and Latin texts, almost reminiscent of the Humanist postulate ad fontes. Furthermore, the paramount importance of Greek historiography is obvious in Koselleck’s efforts to formulate a theory of history and gauge the possibilities and limits of historical knowledge. He saw Thucydides in particular as the archegetes of modern historiography. His reference to the historiographical and philosophical tradition of Greco-Roman antiquity allowed him to analyze and bring to consciousness »the peculiarity of modern times as a new time and the history of time as time«. Talking about Reinhart Koselleck and ancient history always means talking about Christian Meier. In no other field did the two historians work more closely together than in the field of conceptual history. Through his work, Meier consistently historicized antiquity, which he perceived as rather alien, but whose significance for the present he underscored from the perspective of reception. Koselleck, on the other hand, who described temporalization (»Verzeichtlichung«) as the decisive criterion of modernity, detemporalized antiquity in order to advance to the supra-temporal proprium of ancient historiography and philosophy, which is an essential component of his own theory of history.