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  Theme of The Battle of the books. The Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns Disputes among scholars concerning the superiority of classical Greek and Roman authors over contemporary writers have occurred at least since the time of the Renaissance. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, however, such debates turned into heated conflicts, particularly in France and England. In these two countries the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes and the Battle of the Books pitted the Ancients—who upheld the authority of the writers of antiquity in intellectual matters—against the Moderns—who maintained that writers of the present day possessed greater knowledge and more-refined tastes than their predecessors. Underlying these positions were fundamental assumptions regarding the state of art, culture, and human knowledge. The Ancients viewed Greco-Roman civilization as the apex of human achievement and all subsequent culture as a decline from this high point. Thus, the