This book proposes a framework in which ‘the classic’ figures less as an autonomous entity than as the result of the interplay between source text and translation practice. It discusses the consequences of this hypothesis for questioning established definitions of the classic: how does translation mediate the social, political, and national uses of ‘the classics’ in the contemporary global context of changing canons and traditions? The idea of the classic is invested in a particular model of history, one that allows for a perpetual tension between the enduring and the transient, and for the survival of the past in ways that are comprehensible even to a radically different present. This comprehensibility is not immediate or unmediated, but involves acts of translation by successive generations of readers. Classics in translation thus epitomise a peculiar mode of historicity which consists of the co-articulation of the timeless and the historical: each one of these categories both sustains and endangers the other. Such a condition has a political dimension that goes beyond the strict historicization of the classics. The call to translate is an ethical and political project for a post-Babel humanity. It has served as a vital means for constructing traditions that participate in the conflicts of the present, but also as the medium through which cultural works establish a certain solidarity between the struggles, polemics, visions, and experiences of different ages.