Ancients versus Moderns: The Birth of the Idea of Progress

In January 1687 Charles Perrault read a poem to the Académie française praising the age of Louis XIV as equal or superior to ancient Greece and Rome. The poet Nicolas Boileau furiously defended the classics, starting a long 'Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns'. Moderns such as Bernard de Fontenelle argued that while ancient poets might never be surpassed, knowledge accumulates: modern science, built on the telescope, microscope and printing press, plainly exceeded what the ancients knew.

In England the debate continued, and Jonathan Swift satirized it in The Battle of the Books (1704). The quarrel mattered because it challenged the assumption that the best wisdom lay in the past. Out of it grew the Enlightenment idea of progress: the belief that human knowledge and perhaps society itself could improve over time. Critics, then and now, questioned whether moral improvement necessarily follows scientific advance.