Europe's need for a revised foundation-myth became imperative when it began to be reshaped by the forces of modernity. These forces emerged during the eighteenth century and, by the nineteenth, had transformed Europe materially, politically, and culturally. Appropriate to a period of such revolutionary change, Greece provided a critical component for a new myth of Europe which Rome did not: discontinuity. This was because Greece was disconnected from the ideological underpinnings of ecclesiastical and judicial authority bestowed on European institutions by Roman antiquity. Greek antiquity appeared as a form of estrangement. Moreover, when Greece emerged from beneath the cloak of Ottoman power, it appeared so removed from the greatness of its classical past (in the opinion of contemporary observers, even the Greek people were distinct from the ancient Hellenes) that Greek antiquity offered, if not a tabula rasa, at least one sufficiently amenable to accommodate various narratives and formulations.

The most profound and far reaching formulations of Greek antiquity and what Greece meant for Europe were developed by Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Friedrich Nietzsche. Winckelmann aroused the enthusiasm in Germany and elsewhere for things Hellenic and invented the notion of the modern Greek ideal. He championed the Apollonian, celebrating the Apollo Belvedere as the image of “the most beautiful deity” (der schönsten Gottheit). Nietzsche, champion of the Dionysian, reimagined and re-situated Hellenism by dislodging it from the ethereal orbit, where Winckelmann had placed it, and abandoning the marmoreal solidity of Winckelmann's Greeks to imbue archaic Greece with a dynamism and vitality more suitable to the latter half of the nineteenth century.