The influence of ancient Greece and Rome on Western culture is unmatched by any other. The very words "classic" and "classical", which literally refer to these ancient states, have also come to mean "the standard" or "the best". Classicism the reverence for Greek and Roman culture, especially literature, art, clarity, and has been defining characteristic of Western culture throughout history.

After the Roman Empire fell to nomads in the early Middle Ages, few Europeans had the education of inclination to pursue the ancient wisdom of the Greeks and Romans. Their work was never lost manuscripts had been stored in medieval libraries and monasteries but Renaissance thinkers acted as if they had discovered the classics. In Italy, the birthplace of Renaissance, scholars looked first to their Roman ancestors: Livy, Ovid, Horace, Seneca, Pliny and others. The writings of Cicero, The Roman state-man, became a model for Renaissance Italian prose. Virgil, too, with his sonorous verse, became a literary hero. When Florentine poet Francesco Petrarca became poet laureate in 1341, he gave speech on Vigil in Latin.

Renaissance architects, led by 15th-century thinker Leon Bautsta Alberti, looked to the classical age for inspiration. Alberti studied ancient buildings in Rome before writing his influential. Ten Books on Architecture, which stressed proportion and harmony. In art, similar  classical ideas-harmony, balance, the glorification of the human form-inspired the sculpture of Michelangelo, The paintings of Raphael, and the works of many others.