In the spring of 1964, just before the opening of the Olympic Games in Tokyo, the French government made the exceptional decision to loan the Venus de Milo to Japan. Some 1,750,000 people were able to admire the famous statue in Tokyo and Kyoto, many of them only after waiting in line for hours. At the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, where it was displayed from May 21 until June 25, the average number of visitors reached 24,700 per day, a figure comparable to the daily number of admissions at the Louvre Museum. Only the Tutankhamun exhibition presented the following year, again in Tokyo and Kyoto, attracted larger crowds.1 What are we to make of the attraction that the Greco-Roman patrimony has exerted not only in Japan, but also, more recently, in Korea, China, and Singapore? From a European point of view, there is a great risk in seeing this interest as an homage to Western civilization, indeed as a recognition of its superiority. A kind of condescending self-satisfaction creeps in: “They admire us. That’s perfectly normal, of course. But don’t they see that they demean themselves by behaving in this manner? And all the more since they cannot understand.

So much patience for so little gain ... ” The embarrassment that is felt in the West at how much trouble other nations have gone to to appreciate the culture of antiquity is associated with a paradoxical sentiment, namely, that Greece is the place where the human mind achieved its fundamental liberty, but that this place belongs to “us.” The freedom that was first discovered in Greece points toward autonomy, but it is under copyright – as though the people of the West were to say, “Feel free to feel free, but don’t forget to pay the fees you owe us!”