Damian Valdez (Auth.) - German Philhellenism - The Pathos of The Historical Imagination From Winckelmann To Goethe-Palgrave Macmillan US (2014)

German Philhellenism
This page intentionally left blank

German Philhellenism
The Pathos of the Historical Imagination
from Winckelmann to Goethe
Damian Valdez
GERMAN PHILHELLENISM
Copyright © Damian Valdez, 2014.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-29314-5
All rights reserved.

First published in 2014 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-45108-1 ISBN 978-1-137-29315-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137293152
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Valdez, Damian.
German Philhellenism : the pathos of the historical imagination from
Winckelmann to Goethe / Damian Valdez.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Greece—Civilization—To 146 B.C.—Historiography.

2. Germany—Intellectual life. 3. Civilization, Classical, in
literature. 4. German literature—18th century—History and
criticism. 5. Germany—Civilization—Greek influences. I. Title.
DF78.V33 2014
938.0072⬘043—dc23 2014002969
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: July 2014
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
C on ten t s
Introduction 1
1 The Age of Winckelmann and the Young
Herder I: Encounters 5
2 Winckelmann and the Young Herder II:
Historicity and Symbols 27
3 The Women of Athens I: The Varieties of
Enlightenment History 57
4 The Women of Athens II: Courtesans, Heroines,
and the Greek Polis 83
5 Iphigenie auf Tauris: German Theatre and Philhellenism 107
6 The Legacies of Iphigenie auf Tauris 129
7 From Sturm und Drang to Italy 151
8 The Loss of Paradise and the History of Freedom:
German Philhellenism in the 1790s 181
Notes 209
Bibliography 245
Index 259
Introduction
This book tells the story of the relationship between German letters
and ancient Greece in the second half of the eighteenth century. It
is a study of two generations; that of Winckelmann and Herder, and
that of Schiller and the younger Goethe. It tells the story of philhel-
lenic ideas in the half century before Romanticism and Napoleon
changed the terms in which the various legacies of Greek antiquity
were conceived and manifested in art, literature, and historiography.
This study is a complement to the work of Suzanne Marchand, whose
Down from Olympus has delineated the German interest in Greece
from the point of view archeology and educational institutions, and
to the work of Katherine Harloe, whose book, Winckelmann and the
Invention of Antiquity, elucidates philhellenic ideas in this period in
the context of their relationship with classical philology.1
This book concentrates on an analysis of the texts of four main
authors and a number of contemporaries, whose work informed,
challenged, developed, or contradicted that of the protagonists. In
the past, this story has often been told as a single-minded obsession,
whose literary output rested on an almost fanatical faith in the aes-
thetic purity and singularity of Greece. The traditional narratives, like
those of Eliza Marian Butler and Walther Rehm, to name the most
famous, retrace the origins and apogee of this “faith” and isolate
the German-Greek relationship as a phenomenon that stood above
history and whose radiance placed it beyond the complexities of the
Enlightenment, even if it assimilated what it needed from it in order
to reach its enraptured heights.2 This book tells the story instead
by the means of two juxtapositions that allow us to understand the
intellectual contexts and problems within which philhellenic ideals
were articulated, and how these ideals in turn underwent significant
transitions that transformed the significance of Greece in German
letters. Though the purity of the philhellenic phenomenon is thereby
diluted, we gain a better understanding of the intellectual problems
and enterprises in which it was embedded and of the paradoxes that
attended its central claims and literary endeavors.3
2 GERMAN PHILHELLENISM
The first juxtaposition is that of philhellenic aesthetics, theatre,

and ideas of Greek historicity on the one hand, and Enlightenment
historiography on the other. The evocations of Greek art and society
and of the poetic resonance and ethical significance of Greek achieve-
ments and customs always encountered and had to overcome, either
explicitly or tacitly, a body of historical work that undermined many
of their central claims and aspirations. The principal adversary or foil
who challenged these ideas or against whom they were articulated was
the Göttingen professor Christoph Meiners, whose energetic produc-
tivity and sharp polemical tone provide a striking contrast to the pas-
sages of the philhellenic authors. Meiners’s Göttingen is juxtaposed
to Weimar and Dresden as rival interpretations of Greek antiquity.
Yet Enlightenment historiography was more than a foil and adversary.
The historical reality of Greece was also a philhellenic problem and
a fruitful terrain of speculation informed and prompted by the work
of Enlightenment historians. The historicity of idealized Greek insti-
tutions, like the competitive games and other contests, the theatre
and sculpture, engendered two problems that are present in differ-
ent manifestations throughout the story: the unique bonds of male
friendship and the position of women. These problems were deeply
entwined with ideals read into paradigmatic Greek figures, just as
they were inseparable from the whole complex of historical institu-
tions seen to constitute Greek public life and believed to account for
the nature and excellence of Greek art.
The second juxtaposition is between the ideals discerned in Greece
or Greek art and German literature, principally the work of Goethe
and Schiller themselves, who as playwrights and poets, lent a literary
existence in a new form to selected aspects of the Greek historic-
ity explored by the previous generation. Out of the tension between
Greek historicity and the creativity of the literary imagination arose
new possibilities in drama, philosophy, and aesthetics, which were
in turn profoundly affected by the challenges of Kant, the French
Revolution, and developments in classical philology. The second
generation of Philhellenes articulated a theodicy embedded in the
promise of knowledge and indebted to the evocation of Greece in
the nature, landscape, and humanity around them. The eclipse of
Greek historicity, that is, the loss of the historical context of philhel-
lenic ideals, made it possible to address the problem of evil, address
the nature of guilt, and envisage the acquisition of knowledge that
would ensure the triumph of modern humanity over barbarism, just
as Greek historicity had made it possible to address the problem of
INTRODUCTION 3
the position of women and to derive meaning from the uniqueness of

Greek male friendship. The Greek freedom discerned in the histori-
cal Greece, with the primacy of rhetoric and public civic life, made
way for the various freedoms and capacities of the Genie, the creative
individual, whose Greek and modern countenances were juxtaposed
in productive tension.
Parallel to this story, I try to show how German Philhellenism
was understood as an intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic phenom-
enon by the scholarship of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, which lent
pride and pathos to its accounts, often conditioned by the political
anxieties and imperatives of the time. Finally, the articulation of
philhellenic claims turned on the search for the ethical import of
Greek art and achievements. Yet these claims were unfolded through
what we might call “intellectual prisms,” that is, interests and alle-
giances that preceded, accompanied, nourished, or qualified the love
of ancient Greece, diluting once again the notion of the purity of the
philhellenic “faith.” For Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Johann
Gottfried Herder, ancient Greece was first of all a personal encounter
of immense significance, the resonances and insights of which made
them cardinal figures in the history of the aesthetic theory and philos-
ophy of history of their age. Greece yielded its secrets piecemeal only
to the right approach and through the right medium: by turns sculp-
ture, poetry in various forms, and finally, music. The rivalry between
these media, the rivalry between visual and nonvisual approximations
to truth within the philhellenic imagination, and the primacy of one
point of view or another at given moments in philhellenic minds was
to have important consequences for the interpretation of ancient
Greece and the German relationship with Greek antiquity.
C H A P T E R 1
The Age of Winckelmann and the

Young Herder I: Encounters
Seen in both their German and wider European contexts, Johann

Joachim Winckelmann and Johann Gottfried Herder’s relationship
with ancient Greece represented a break with contemporary ideas. In
Walther Rehm’s view, author of Greekdom and the Age Goethe, pub-
lished in 1936, the break was fundamentally aesthetic: Winckelmann’s
admiration of Greece was the rejection of the baroque taste in art
and architecture and of the dominant French appropriation of Rome
in both politics and art.1 For Erich Aron, whose short treatise on
Herder and Winckelmann was published in 1929, Herder was reacting
against the quaint and facile evocations of Greek idylls that appeared
in contemporary German literature in the mid eighteenth century.2
Yet what makes it meaningful to speak of Philhellenism, as opposed
to a cheerful evocation of Greek themes, is the fact that Winckelmann
and Herder articulated a deeply ethical engagement with Greece. It
embodied a variety of ethical values and aspirations with unequaled
beauty. This recognition was consummated with pedagogical fervor
and accompanied by the pathos of a profound rupture with modern
life. All of these features of their relation to Greece lent distinctive
tones to the conversation that became German Philhellenism.3
The ideals discerned by them in ancient Greece were of two kinds.
The first, weighted toward the earlier, Homeric, and more archaic
period of Greek life, celebrated a raw, tumultuous humanity, in har-
mony with nature, reveling in the primitive and natural poetry that
was also law, dance that was also social order, and epic verse that
flowed out of immediate feeling and lived experience. The unity of
poetry, law, dance, epic, and life was uncontrived. This was the Greece
of the young Herder, enmeshed in and drawing upon his understand-
ing of a wider antiquity. The second ideal was a feeling that gravi-
tated toward a summit, and sought to fix there the boundaries of a
perennial beauty. That summit was Greek bodily form, captured for
posterity in the outstanding examples of sculpture and embodying
not only the highest conception of beauty but also bearing witness to
the noblest and happiest condition of mankind. This was the Greece
of Winckelmann, raised above and separated from a wider antiquity
that shone much less brightly.
Both ideals converged on the celebration of a manly youth, naïve
and natural for Herder, noble and heroic for Winckelmann. Youth
was understood both as the prime of the life of an individual and
in terms of the place of the Hellenic world in the philosophy of his-
tory: Greece was the youth of mankind. And yet, for them, Greece
was not only an ideal, but again, a rich historical formation, a com-
plex of histories and institutions, possessed of fragility and subject to
the vicissitudes of history. The philhellenic conversation initiated by
Winckelmann and Herder was thus also a confrontation between two
powerful impulses: the idealizing and the historicizing. The dialectic
of ideal and historicity at the heart of German Philhellenism engen-
dered significant problems and aporias that, as we shall see, disturbed
and enriched that conversation.
Winckelmann and the Primacy of Visual Art

“To be and to appear became two entirely different things, and
from this distinction arose ostentatious display, deceitful cunning,
and all the vices that follow in their wake.”4 With these words in
the famous Discourse on the Origins of Inequality of 1755, Jean-
Jacques Rousseau pointed to the perils of the sense of sight, the sense
through which, as Michael Sonenscher pointed out, Kant would later
interpret Rousseau’s account of corruption.5 Since the high point
of Winckelmann’s encounter with Greece took place through the
medium of sight, and since first Denis Diderot in 1765 and then the
art historian Ernst Gombrich in 1971, as well as other scholars since,
asserted the proximity of Winckelmann’s style and aims to those of
the Genevan philosopher, it is worth beginning with an examina-
tion of this issue.6 Winckelmann, the cobbler’s son, wrote Wolfgang
Schadewaldt in 1941, saw with new eyes. Think of the miracle of this
man, who had spent his life in unspeakable hardship, until he came
to Dresden and Rome, and, seemingly without any prior “schooling
of the eyes, suddenly he commanded that deep seeing and contem-
plating, with which he became for us Germans the discoverer of a
new reality.”7 That reality consisted for Winckelmann in images; his
imagination always returned to a visual representation as the most
THE AGE OF WINCKELMANN AND THE YOUNG HERDER I 7
compelling embodiment of the qualities and ideas that attracted and

moved him. Yet the first images that fascinated him were not those of
sculpture, to which at first he had no access, but rather those drawn
from Homer’s epic poetry.
Sitting in his modest rooms in Seehausen in the hours of night,
reading the Iliad, he was captivated by the verses, Schadewaldt tells us,
where the strength of the body in combat or competition come to the
fore. Most of his excerpts concern the “higher dispositions”: courage,
unbending toughness, unshakeable loyalty, generosity in taking back
a harsh word, exuberance in proclaiming one’s own excellence, and
finally, friendship.8 The speed and vivacity of the narrative, the deep
impression made on him by the Greek language, with which he was
intimately familiar, and the sanctuary that this heroic world offered
to an impoverished North German schoolteacher in those sleepless
nights, marked the beginning of an encounter that would take him
to Rome and to international fame. Out of the pages of the Iliad
appeared to flow an exhilarating and beautiful negation not only of
his adversity but of the world of mid-eighteenth-century Europe, of
its taste and attitudes. Winckelmann yearned above all to conquer
the heart of contemporary German youth. Yet it was not by means of
Homeric verses that this beautiful negation was to be instilled in the
hearts of northern youth. It was visual allegory that instead had the
ultimate sanction of eternity for Winckelmann and offered the means
of recuperating and emulating, so far as anyone was able, the virtue
and nobility of the epic. Sight, therefore, and not language, was the
primary means of invoking the redemptive power of Homeric Greece.
This distinction lies at the root of the divergent philhellenic wholes
alluded to by Winckelmann and Herder. It also reverses the trajectory
of corruption attributed by Rousseau to sight.
To understand how this came about we must bear in mind, ironi-
cally enough, that quality of Winckelmann’s mind that rendered him
most Rousseauian in the eyes of subsequent commentators: the pref-
erence for nature over artifice and for simplicity over elaboration.
Through the Essay on Allegory, published in 1766 and regarded by
Winckelmann’s contemporaries as his least successful work, he set out
to provide an instructive manual for artists.9 “Every allegorical sign,”
he admonished, “should contain within itself the most diverse charac-
teristics of the represented thing, and the simpler it is, the more easily
it will be grasped,” it should not require explanatory text. The essay
was also a sustained reflection on the relationship between concept
and image, between language and idea. “Nature itself,” he continued,
“has been the teacher of allegory and this language appears more
proper to it than the subsequently invented signs of our ideas: for it is

fundamental and gives a true image of things, which are found in few
words of the oldest languages, and to paint thoughts is undoubtedly
older than the writing of the same, as we know from the poetry of
the peoples of the ancient and modern world.”10 The ideal situation
always at the forefront of his mind posited a youthful and impression-
able seer confronted with the purest, simplest, and thus most compel-
ling representation of nobleness and beauty. To evoke and instill in
others the will to recreate this ideal situation was at the heart of all
Winckelmann’s writings as well as at the heart of his own experiences
in Dresden and Rome.
Homer, his first sustained encounter with the Greek world, was
in any case a herald of images: “he turned the reflections of wisdom
concerning human passions into sensual images and thereby gave his
concepts at the same time a body, which he enlivened with enticing
images.”11 And the very limitations of language in Homeric Greece
lay at the root of that heroic ethic Winckelmann ardently admired.
General ideas of virtue and vice could hardly be represented visually
in those days, he explained, and in the times of this poet, the uni-
versal concept of virtue was not known, the Greek word that subse-
quently had that meaning, then referred only to courage. In the best
times of the ancients only the heroic virtues, those that raise human
dignity, were practiced. Ideas that had the opposite effect were not
represented in public monuments. While modern education con-
centrated on the purity of manners and external duties, the ancients
sought to make hearts responsive to true honor and to accustom the
youth to a masculine and magnanimous virtue, which disdained all
petty schemes and even life itself, when the result of an enterprise did
not correspond to the greatness of its idea.12 The ancient world itself,
therefore, retained Homeric virtue, with its simplicity, its linguistic
humility and unity, in public visual representations.
But before these mature reflections and just prior to his departure
for Rome, Winckelmann wrote his famous manifesto, Thoughts on
the Imitation of Greek Works in Sculpture and Painting, published
in Dresden the same year as Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of
Inequality.13 Winckelmann’s historic deed, wrote Walther Rehm, was
the discovery and awakening of Greekdom from within the German
mind. It was first of all a reaction against the Roman world and its
baroque successor. Rehm cited Giambattista Vico’s view of 1725 that
the Romans and not the Greeks were the heroes of the ancient world.
In Piranesi’s work the baroque-classical pathos of Roman-heroic maj-
esty and the monumentality of its historical past were emphatically
expressed.14 The 1755 essay has thus come to be seen as the first salvo
of anti-Roman revolt, a paean to an antibaroque aesthetic.
The only way for us to become great, the essay stated, is to imitate
the ancients. This injunction was followed by a speculative reflection
on the causes of ancient Greek beauty and the means by which it
was harnessed. The first models of beauty Winckelmann mentioned
were Spartan youths. They were made to do bodily exercises from
the age of seven; they slept on the bare earth and were trained in
wrestling and swimming. In the exercises, he said, the great games
were a powerful incentive for young Greeks, and the laws prescribed
a ten-month preparation period for the Olympic Games, preparations
that should take place at Elis itself. The greatest prizes were more
often given to youths than men, as Pindar’s odes told us. The high-
est longing of youth was to emulate the divine Diagoras of Rhodes
a famous Olympic victor. The schools of the artists were therefore
the gymnasia. And not only the artists but the wise went there too,
including Socrates. It was there that sculptors like Phidias studied
the imprint that young wrestlers had made on the sand.15 Thus for
Winckelmann, there was a direct causal link between the competitive
exercises done in preparation for Olympic contests and the masculine
form with which artists approximated divine beauty.
The frequent opportunities for the observation of nature, he
explained, made the Greek artists go even further. They began to
imagine certain universal ideas of beauties, both of individual parts
and of whole bodily proportions, which should surpass even nature
itself: their original idea was a nature created in the very understand-
ing of the mind. This is how the Greeks fashioned gods and men.16 It
was at this point that the differences with Bernini, renowned sculptor
of the baroque, came to the fore. Unlike the baroque, the Greeks
creatively synthesized what different parts of nature offered in order
to surpass it. To imitate nature in a single object, as Bernini advo-
cated, was to make a copy or a portrait; it was the path to “Dutch
figures and forms,” whereas the Greeks took the path of universal
beauty. “Our nature,” Winckelmann asserted, “will not easily create
for itself so perfect a body as that of Antinous Admirantus and the
idea will never imagine the more than human attributes of a beautiful
deity in the Vatican Apollo.” Thus the imitation of the ancients, he
confidently concluded, will teach us to become clever more speedily,
because it finds in one single concept that which is scattered in the
whole of nature.17
Alongside this idea of ideal beauty, this essay expressed what was
to become a fundamental philhellenic trope in Germany. This was
a twofold affirmation of the peculiarly Greek sense of measure and

proportion. The line that separates the full from the superfluous of
nature is very small, Winckelmann explained, and the greatest mas-
ters have deviated on both sides from its not always discernible border.
He who wanted to avoid an emaciated contour has fallen into volup-
tuousness and he who wanted to avoid the latter has fallen into the
opposite.18 Winckelmann’s great biographer Carl Justi explained how
his idea of beauty and proportion was derived from ideas about draw-
ing advanced by the painters Anton Raphael Mengs and Hogarth.
Winckelmann, he explained, whose only attempts in art consisted of
drawing, could not conceive of beauty but through the abstractions of
lines. Everything was clearer in the sketch than the completed paint-
ing.19 It is a neat irony, Justi tells us, that the core of this system of the
teacher of Greek art should come from Hogarth, who was regarded
with such contempt by the admirers of Greece.20 The culmination
of the essay, was the claim that “just as the depths of the sea are
always calm, even if the surface rages ever so much, so the expression
[Ausdruck] in the figures of the Greeks, always show, in the midst of
all passions, a great and clam soul.”21 Winckelmann’s prime example
was the statue of the Laocoon group, to which we shall return.
That this essay had the character of a manifesto was confirmed by
Winckelmann’s subsequent actions. A savvy self-publicist, he wrote
and had published an anonymous “letter” in response to the essay
on imitation, in which he used revealing self-parody to emphasize his
points.22 German contemporaries puzzled over the authorship of the
letter or Sendschreiben with suspicion falling on Winckelmann’s friend,
the painter Christoph Hagedorn.23 The author of the essay, wrote the
supposedly anonymous author of the Sendschreiben, “asserts with the
tone of a lawgiver that the correctness of the contour can only be
learned from the Greeks.”24 The letter played devil’s advocate, saying
that “our artists have just as much opportunity to study naked beauty
as in the gymnasia of the ancients,” pointing to the views offered
on the banks of the Seine in Paris. Once again, Winckelmann’s self-
parody harbored a serious point. The author of the letter even went
so far as to defend Bernini’s portrait of Louis XIV as the embodi-
ment of beauty.25 Of course, this letter could not be left unanswered
and the self-publicist Winckelmann resorted to his tricks once again.
There duly appeared in Dresden a response entitled Explanation of the
Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Sculpture and Painting.
“I had not believed,” a disingenuous Winckelmann wrote, “that my
little piece deserved such attention and that it would evoke judg-
ments on it.” Since it was written for those who know art, it seemed
superfluous to add layers of scholarship, he said, adding, that “artists

understand what one writes with half words about art.”26
There followed a further disquisition on the causes of Greek beauty.
The authority of Hippocrates was invoked to demonstrate once again
that the mild heavens of Greece produced the most beautiful and
well-formed creatures and an agreement between customs and bodily
form. This relationship was shown in modern times by the example
of Georgia, on the authority of the travel reports of Chardin, univer-
sally read in Europe at this time.27 One could also deduce from the
language of Greeks the formation of their bodies, given that north-
ern languages were overloaded with consonants.28 “When nature
proceeded with the entire formation of the body in the same way as
with the tools of speech,” Winckelmann explained, “then the Greeks
were made of fine matter; nerves and muscles were elastic to the most
sensitive degree and facilitated the flexible movement of the body.”
This supple and uncontrived agreeableness of body accompanied,
Winckelmann claimed, a happy and joyful character.29 By contrast,
the action of the hero and of the horse in the statue of Louis XIV by
Bernini was far too wild and exaggerated. Therefore the careful study
of nature was by no means sufficient for a perfect concept of beauty,
just as the study of anatomy alone cannot teach us the most beautiful
bodily proportions.30
Again, bodily form and the heavens and education that formed
them were the ultimate causes of beauty and of the ethic inseparable
from it. The travel reports of a Chardin or the speculations of the
Abbé Jean-Baptiste Dubos on the influence of climate on art, all of
which Winckelmann read avidly, merely served to confirm an opinion
already formed at Seehausen in the nocturnal reading sessions when
the Iliad had fired up his longing and imagination. In an important
essay of 1968, Martin Fontius argued that Winckelmann’s aesthetic
was essentially a reaffirmation of the “essential doctrinal ideas of
French classicism,” which had as its goal moral education as well as
the imitation of the ancients. However, as Fontius further argued,
Winckelmann diluted the pure sensuality of Dubos for whom cli-
mate, mediated by air and blood, determined the rise and fall of art,
by assigning an independent causal power to other factors.31
Fontius, an East German scholar, was reacting against claims made,
for different reasons, by figures like Walther Rehm and Eliza Marian
Butler for the quintessentially German contributions of Winckelmann
as part of the effort to delineate the elements of the German rela-
tionship to Greece. Others more recently, like Katherine Harloe
and Elisabeth Decultot, building on the work of Carl Justi, have
convincingly demonstrated the significance of French historiography

in spurring his ambition to produce a history of art akin to Voltaire’s
history of manners and Montesquieu’s study of laws.32 Yet the focus
on the provenance of ideas and tropes and their national frameworks
must be accompanied by what was also a confrontation between spe-
cifically philhellenic claims and several Enlightenment historiogra-
phies and moral philosophies, British, French and German. It is the
aim of this study to delineate the contours of that confrontation.
Language was not constitutive but rather reflective of beauti-
ful form and of ancient vitality. When Pandarus fired an arrow at
Menelaus, Winckelmann observed in the Remarks, Homer’s words
are such that the reader believes he sees the arrow being fired, travel-
ing through the air and penetrating the shield of Menelaus.33 The
etiology of Greek beauty in this essay reads like a sequence of causes
beginning with the heavens, the wind, and the waters, as well as edu-
cation and exercise, and only then discussing language as a reflection
of them. Thus both at the summit of Greek beauty, in the sculptures
of Phidias, and in terms of its etiology, it is bodily form and its cli-
mactic and social context that supersedes language. At the same time,
emphasizing that the Christian value of humility was unknown to
antiquity, Winckelmann endows Athenian Greekdom with two com-
plementary personalities that opposed the modern ethics of submis-
siveness and concern for external duties: the grandeur of a suffering
Laocoon and the cheerfulness of Greek youth in general. The noble
education and character of the sculpted youth corresponded to the
noble character of the artist, a nobility both attained and recaptured
in visual form.
Herder and the Moral Stature of Poetry

“It was through language that Herder first came to the Greeks,”
wrote Erich Aron in 1929. It was “a special feeling for language as
eternal human revelation.”34 “I hear each great spirit speak with its
own tongue,” mused the young Herder, adding that “I immediately
raise myself to him and give to my soul the expansiveness of every
clime.”35 From the beginning, Herder’s encounter with Greece was
mediated by a combination of powerful and shifting intellectual and
ethical impulses, assimilated in his student days at Königsberg, the
city in which he became acquainted with the work and teaching of
Immanuel Kant and of Johann Georg Hamann. His interpretation of
Greece developed through what we might call a “series of prisms.”
These prisms were the moral and intellectual desiderata and interests
that existed alongside his love of Greek antiquity. The first set of
prisms was provided by Hamann, a formidable scholar of language
and the Bible. There could at first sight be no greater opposition than
that between Hamann and Winckelmann, Arnold Berger observed
in his 1903 study of the relationship between the young Herder and
Winckelmann. Here a longing for the highest beauty, for simplic-
ity, stillness, and greatness, there a resigned cynicism, the lack of
any sense of measure and beauty. Yet the two were united, Berger
asserted, by a drive toward the individual and original, toward the
life-giving sources of nature, and above all, by a belief in the “lower
faculties of the soul” that immediately revealed themselves to be the
truly life-creating ones.36
Berger’s reference to the lower faculties of the soul hints at a domi-
nant paradigm in mid-eighteenth-century German aesthetic ideas
derived from the work of Leibniz and Christian Wolff: that the senses
represented the lower faculties of cognition.37 The implication that
Hamann and Winckelmann and later Herder set out to rescue these
lower forces has profound significance for their interpretation of
Greece and was precisely the sensibility that accounts for the intensity
of their initial encounter with it. The passages of Homer and statues
by Phidias and Apelles depicted for the young Winckelmann virtues
and heroisms tied to physical form and vitality just as the language the
young Herder was to discover similarly appealed to a raw and naïve
human exuberance. The lower faculties of the soul corresponded very
neatly to the youthful coloring of their Hellenic enthusiasm. The
question was which form these lower faculties should take in order to
fulfill the aesthetic and ethical longings awakened by antiquity.
In January 1760, Hamann wrote to his brother in Riga that the
ideas of Wincklemann’s Thoughts on Imitation were applicable to
poetry to the highest degree of precision.38 It was mindset and lan-
guage that in their effect on each other, Hamann explained, deter-
mine the character of a people in contrast to others, and reveal their
character just as well as their external form.39 But alongside this vali-
dation of Winckelmann and alongside a shared disdain for cumber-
some scholarship, there was a repudiation of the pagan ethic that the
latter discerned in the expressions and bearing of Greek sculpture:
“Not the increase of knowledge can show us the way, not abstractions
which make us old and clever, but rather the naivety of feeling, in
which the warmth and exuberance of youth is renewed. The sources
of rejuvenation do not flow in classical antiquity: the materials of the
creative spirit are nature and scripture; salvation is of the Jews, comes
from the East, from the Bible, from the original conditions of human
life.”40 Hamann’s interest in language as the means of ascertaining

the nature of a people, and the ethical imperative of resorting to the
written word as testimony of origins that were proximate to salvation
provided the two initial prisms through which the young Herder’s
interest in Greece was first articulated.
The clearest formulation of Herder’s position was the prize
essay of 1777, On the Effect of Poetic Art on the Morals of Peoples in
Ancient and Modern Times.41 “According to many testimonies of the
ancients,” the essay began, “poetry had for them the strongest influ-
ence on morals. She, the daughter of heaven, had the staff of power
to tame animals, enliven stones, to breathe into the soul of man,
what one wanted, love and hate, courage and meekness, veneration
of the gods, terror, hope and consolation, joy.” She led raw peoples
to live under laws, the apathetic back to work and struggle, the fear-
ful toward endeavors, and the companions of death she made brave
and adroit.42 How could Plato then banish the poets from his idea
republic? Herder wrote this essay in the spirit of Hamann’s longing to
seek the naivety of feeling in the earliest times and there to see divine
forces at work. Herder’s aim was to bear witness to the morally and
politically creative power of poetry in the context of an unbroken
proximity to nature. He acknowledged that in this enterprise he was
following in the footsteps of the English philosopher John Brown,
whose work, entitled A Dissertation on the Rise, Union and Power, the
Progressions, Separations and Corruptions, of Poetry and Music, had
been published in London in 1763.43
Brown argued that in early societies, poetry, music, and dance
had been part of a single custom and spectacle, what he called the
“natural alliance of these three sister graces.” Travelers “who describe
the scenes of uncultivated nature,” Brown wrote, “agree in telling us
that melody, dance, and song, make up the ruling pastime, adorn the
feasts, compose the religion, fix the manners, strengthen the policy
and even form the future paradise of savage man.” “By these attractive
and powerful arts,” he continued, “they celebrate their public solem-
nities, by these they lament their private and public calamities, the
death of friends, or the loss of warriors: by these united, they express
their joy on their marriages, harvests, hunts, victories, praise the great
actions of their gods and heroes, excite each other to war and brave
exploits, or to suffer death and torments with unshaken constancy.”44
Brown derived the inspiration for his theses chiefly from the Jesuit
missionary François-Joseph Lafitau, who had already published a
comparison of American Indian customs with those of the earliest
times in 1724, passages of which Brown quoted at length.45 Herder
may not have been impressed with Brown’s remarks on Greece, which
he thought were sketchy and unconvincing, but there is no doubt
that he shared Brown’s rapture at the idea of an original unity of
these arts and that he too sought to demonstrate with his own ideas
and scholarship the birth of a politics and ethics under the auspices
of nature. He also shared Brown’s premise that the decline of that
condition brought with it a measure of corruption. Thus alongside
the philosophy of Hamann, it was the speculations of Brown, and
the Jesuit travel reports on which they were based, which formed the
second prism through which Herder interpreted Greek antiquity.
So long as a person lives among the objects of nature and these
touch him deeply, Herder reflected, the freer and more divinely he
can express with language, that which he has received, the more we
can find a poetic art that lives and is creative (wirkt), and this is pre-
cisely the case in the times of quite wild nature or in the first stages of
political formation. But when art supplanted nature and finished laws
took the place of lively feeling, how could poetry and the creative lan-
guage of nature be possible anymore?46 Herder’s essay examined the
fate of this language of nature among the ancient Hebrews, Greeks,
and Romans. Speaking of the Hebrews, Herder began by saying that
not even its enemies could deny that this people had the most mar-
velous creative poetry. Its purpose was to turn it into the people of
God. Herder continued here the Christian apologetics of Hamann.
The phrase “salvation is of the Jews,” which, as we saw, Hamann, had
used as part of his moral exhortation to go after the early history of
language, was, after all, taken from the Gospel of John.47 But Herder’s
affinity for the ancient Hebrews was also part of a strong revival of
interest in the Hebrew Bible in eighteenth-century Germany, which
manifested itself most emphatically in the popularity of the Book of
Job. As Jonathan Sheehan has shown, this book and the Hebrew Bible
in general was admired by Herder and others as an instance of the
sublime, an aesthetic category, raised to prominence by the essays of
Edmund Burke in 1757 and Immanuel Kant in 1764 and particularly
suited to awe-inspiring, miraculous, and imposing divine interven-
tions.48 It was therefore a mixture of the moral imperative he shared
with Brown and Hamann and of the aesthetic interest he shared with
Kant and Burke, which engendered what was both a formidable coun-
terweight and a crucial foundation of his Philhellenism.
God saved them by miracles and signs, Herder enthused of the
Hebrews, and how did he impart to them the first ideas? Through
poetry! Through the glorious song of their Exodus. It was to be a
memorial of its lawgiver, Moses, a song that eternally shaped the
morals and heart of the people. Not even the famous Spartan lawgiver
Lycurgus could be compared with him, Herder asserted.49 If among
all peoples, said Herder, answering his own earlier question to Plato,
poets were the first idolaters, flatterers of the people and of princes,
corrupters of morals, so among the Hebrews they were the adversar-
ies of idolatry, of conceit and flattery, and of weak morals. Where is
the unique providence of God more convincingly praised and mani-
fested as in the history of this people? Christianity, he added, grew
out of the same seed.50
Here too, Herder wrote of early Greece, poetry was in the begin-
ning divine, and she shaped the morals of persons and peoples. The
oldest lawgivers, judges of secrets, and the innermost worship were
poets: Orpheus, Amphion, Linus, and Thales. Out of their old cos-
mogonies, hymns, secrets, and tales, they derived their political and
moral order (Sittlichkeit). Moreover, Herder argued that Plato with
all his wisdom was deeply enmeshed with every obscure and intri-
cate question of poetic sayings and tales of the old times. Without
them indeed, there could have been no Plato.51 To the apotheosis
of natural poetry celebrated by Brown and Lafitau, Herder added
a strongly esoteric note. Poets were custodians of secrets and pro-
tagonists of an innermost worship. And yet this esoteric material
leads Herder to the same place as them: that the first public laws and
customs had been articulated by a holistic poetic art that united in
a single act all its participants and fulfilled all political and religious
functions.
Having established that this was the case in Greece, Herder cel-
ebrated Greece very much in Winckelmann’s terms but with subtle
inflections of some significance. The gods Egypt, he explained,
became for the Greeks beautiful poetic beings, they threw off every-
thing heavy and superfluous and showed themselves naked, as mother
earth made them, in beautiful human form, and human, often too
human, action. Art came to compete with poetry. Out of two verses
of Homer, he observed, Phidias made his famous statue of Jupiter
as if from a revelation. Their education in the most beautiful ages
consisted of bodily exercise, music, and poetry, under the supervi-
sion of elders, and they became, thanks to the lawgivers of the states,
the foundation of their character. Homer was everything to them,
the fine eye with which he saw everything, each object depicted not
crassly, but with a light, pure outline, correct and finely measured.
From Homer they derived order (Sittlichkeit), art, and truth.52 In
this passage, it is the sculptor Phidias who is subordinate to the poet
Homer, whereas for Winckelmann, Phidias had been the artist who
brought to its truest and highest representation that which Homer

had seen but not created.
The Meanings of Greek Beauty

The scholarship of the 1920s and 1930s in Germany sought not only
to depict but also to recover the classical era of German Philhellenism.
The language and categories with which it described the relation-
ship between Germans and ancient Greeks gave a new character to
the eighteenth century, one sometimes redolent of the developments
in philosophy and psychology in the early twentieth century. The
encounter with Greece was raised in dramatic effect; the protagonists
became enraptured “seers,” prophets of a new German identity. This
was the case with Rehm, whose rich narrative otherwise evinces a
fine sensibility for the nature and origins of philhellenic ideas.53 Erich
Aron wrote of Winckelmann in 1929: “For him there was no deeper
access to the heroic world of the Greeks than through the antique
Eros, intelligible to him because of his nature.”54 Aron’s Herder was
the discoverer of the naive early Greece, whose morals and vitality
were deeply divorced from those of modern times, a champion of
the “extra-moral” conception of Greece. His study set up a teleologi-
cal view of Philhellenism leading directly from Herder to Nietzsche,
whose term “extra-moral” he used frequently.
For both Aron and Rehm, what was fascinating and heroic about
Winckelmann was his unique proximity to the power of a distinctively
Greek Eros. It united beauty, masculinity, and a sense of profound
harmony between individual and cosmos, between life and environ-
ment, and between bodily form and a morality of grandeur, whether
this was expressed in the dignity of Laocoon or in the heroism of
an Epaminondas, the Theban commander who was so admired by
Winckelmann. This fascination for the worship of masculine form
as endowed with a divine dignity and of the heroic virtues derived
from it, was to an even greater degree the image of Winckelmann in
the work of the George-Kreis of poets and historians around the poet
Stefan George in the early twentieth century.55 Berthold Vallentin’s
biography of Winckelmann, published by the circle’s own press in
1931, conformed to the circle’s avowed purpose of publishing “myth-
ological” biographies, of turning their subjects into heroic, some-
times suffering, always visionary heralds of esoteric, transformative
wisdom drawn from the heights of human history.56 While the his-
toricists of the early twentieth century, like Meinecke and Dilthey,
were interested in the insights into the historical whole offered by
Winckelmann and Herder, it was above all the discussion of Greek

beauty that provided the raw material for the national and mystical
celebrations of the 1920s and 1930s. It was, after all, the most sen-
sual part of the encounter with Greece. It is therefore worth exam-
ining how Winckelmann and Herder described the nature of that
sensuality.
Rehm prefaced his account of Winckelmann’s evocation of Greek
beauty with a discussion of the two textual stimuli that assisted his
visual rapture and imagination: his reading of Plato’s Phaedrus, one
of his favorite texts from antiquity, and his reading of Shaftesbury,
the English philosopher of the early eighteenth century. He was sym-
pathetic, Rehm explained, to Shaftesbury’s ethic-aesthetic idea of the
harmonious self-contained world, in which the divine-beautiful was
manifested. Moreover, Shaftesbury also wanted to see man as a single
whole, the image of that overarching cosmos. Both Winckelmann
and Shaftesbury according to Rehm, believed in the Kalokagathia;
that the beautiful is also the good and that in a beautiful body only
a beautiful soul oriented toward virtue could exist.57 This was the
argument of Winckelmann’s essay of 1763, On the Capacity for the
Sensibility for Beauty in Art and on Instruction in the Same, dedi-
cated to his friend von Berg.58 Winckelmann sought to demonstrate
empirically how classical Greece lived up to Shaftesbury’s sense of
harmony and thus to portray it as rooted in and exclusive to Greek
life and customs. It was a also a particularly sensual interpretation of
Plato that underlay his belief that Greek sculptors worked to evoke in
their statues an idea of divinity already conceived in their mind. In
this sense his reading of Plato matched his earlier explanation of how
Greek artists united the perfections scattered in different places by
nature into a single idea.59
The pinnacle of beauty in Greek sculpture was the Apollo Belvedere,
which, Winckelmann recounted, had made him feel transported to
the holy grove. The moment when he stood in front of this statue
marks the most intense way-station of his encounter with the legacy
of Greek antiquity, and his description of it, written prior to his mon-
umental History of the Art of Antiquity, bears witness to the powerful
synthesis of aesthetic and ethical qualities, giving his own distinctive
coloration to the genre of inquiry promoted by Shaftesbury. “This
Apollo supersedes all other likenesses of the same as much as the
Apollo of Homer does those which subsequent poets paint. Raised
above mankind is his form, and his stance evinces the greatness which
fills him. An eternal spring, as in the happy Elysium, clothes the blos-
soming masculinity of mature years with a pleasing youth and plays
with gentle tenderness on the proud edifice of his limbs.” Despite the
disdain discernible in his lips and up to his forehead, the peace, which
floats in a contended calm on that forehead, remains undisturbed. 60
That imperturbability that does not deny the passions but allows an
effortless sovereignty and restraint to overshadow them, was the ethi-
cal quality evinced for Winckelmann in Greek sculpture. This was less
idealistic than the Kalokagathia of Shaftesbury and Rehm’s attempt
to link the two thinkers as of one mind in this regard is less convinc-
ing. This was because the imperturbability Winckelmann admired
also allowed an admittedly subordinate but nonetheless palpable exis-
tence to capricious sentiments like disdain and anger. The moral core
was sovereignty rather than goodness.
Whether a moral core was discernible in bodily beauty and if so
in what measure was the subject of Herder’s essay Is the Beauty of the
Body a Sign of the Beauty of the Soul?, another prize entry. Herder
accepted as his premise one of the chief characteristics of Greek
beauty defined by Winckelmann: the right measure and proportion
of the features. He also understood the precise inflection of the link
between this type of beauty and its moral quality. A proportionate
form can indeed be a sign of a measured mind, Herder agreed, inca-
pable of great passions, be they good or bad. The stability of spirit,
however, which accompanies proportionate form may well be the
portal of every beauty, but often remains the portal. It belonged to
quiet charms that do not disturb but also do not enliven the spirit.
Indeed, the greatest men, Herder observed, have often been men of
unstable traits, since the passion that raised them to greatness also
determined from early on this unstable form.61 “Our imagination,”
Herder concluded, “finds in facial traits, for the most part, more than
nature has placed in them and usually as much as one wants to find.”
If Winckelmann, “on the wings of his imagination, finds in the statue
of the Apollo Belvedere in Rome, such unending beauties of spiritual
divinity, that he raises himself to rapture, then one must congratulate
someone who perceives in the bodies of others so much spirit, so
much beauty, and not vex them.”62
Herder’s skepticism about the possibilities of a purely visual rela-
tionship to beauty is part of his wider response to the aesthetic and
philosophical debates of his day turning on the nature of the senses
and aesthetic perception. As Paul Guyer argues, Herder rejected the
strident distinction between mind and body and the suggestion that
aesthetic pleasures are essentially distinct from the other sources of
happiness.63 His essay on sculpture, published in 1778 but composed
over a period of many years, was also an intervention in the debate
sustained by John Locke and Denis Diderot, among others, about

the relationship between sight and touch.64 It was in many respects
Herder’s reckoning with the central aesthetic pillar of Winckelmann’s
Greece. Herder began by commenting that the blind man postulated
by Diderot in his Letter on the Blind of 1749 could distinguish by the
hardness and surface of a body no less finely than by means of a tone
of voice or than we do by means of colors. The lessons of these reflec-
tions, he wrote, were that our eyes only showed us shapes (Gestalten),
it was touch that showed us bodies, that everything that is form can
only be revealed by touch.65 The opthalmist with a thousand eyes,
without touch, would remain his whole life in Plato’s cave and would
have no concept of a single true bodily characteristic as such. The
epistemological claim at the heart of this philosophical discussion
was delivered with lapidary certainty: “in the face is dream, in touch,
truth.”66
Winckelmann’s “beautiful contour,” that graceful, unbroken
line, could be more closely perceived by touch than vision. The task
Herder set himself in the philosophical part of the treatise was to
give the sense of touch a separate aesthetic validity.67 He argued
against Falconet’s Thoughts on Sculpture, that aesthetic impressions
could not be comprehended under a single “organ of the soul.” He
preferred to speak of the categories of surface, sound, and body, cor-
responding to space, time, and force (Kraft).68 Without these dis-
tinctions the subsequent points of the treatise and their philhellenic
import would have been impossible. Since sculpture could not admit
of dress, it was only in ancient Greece that it could attain its most
beautiful form. In the orient the body was a secret, clothed in gar-
ments, with only the face, hand, and feet exposed. In the Jewish
land, sculpture was forbidden and in Egypt it went down a differ-
ent road, separate from beauty. In the history of monks and saints
it could make no progress.69 But Greece was the only strip of land
on earth where beautiful proportionate form was also nature. The
works created there were the work of the sense of touch, lighthouses
in the stormy seas of the ages. It is perhaps good, Herder wrote in
a melancholic and important passage, that barbarians destroyed so
many of them. Their vast number would have robbed us of sanity;
they should be our friends and not our masters.70 Herder’s philhel-
lenic paradox, gently qualifying Winckelmann’s fervor, was that we
could only ever wish to experience the fragments of the truths rep-
resented in antiquity.
The fourth and fifth sections of the treatise unfold the ethical
implications both of the primacy of touch and of its reality in ancient
Greece. It begins with a significant disclaimer: this treatise was not

in praise of beauty nor about physiognomy nor antiquity; he was nei-
ther artist, nor antiquarian, nor physiognomist. Rather, his aim was
to show that every form of beauty and the sublime in the human
body was ultimately the form of health, of life, of strength (Kraft)
in every member of this artful creation. This strength in turn was
no abstraction but could only be felt. The more a limb meant what it
should mean, the more beautiful it is, the more sympathy it inspires,
the more we transport ourselves to it with our whole being. The soul
of Kraft is movement and once touch perceives movement, it rises
to a higher level of empathy and understanding.71 It is at this point
that Herder reaches what is arguably the key passage. To be human,
to touch blindly, to perceive how the soul in every character, every
stance and passion acts upon us—that is, the language of nature, is
intelligible to every people on earth.
The Greeks had conveyed that universal language of nature bet-
ter than anyone else because they were able to depict with precision
and yet with artistic simplicity the figures they sculpted: a statue
was unmistakably that of this god or hero and no other, a point
Winckelmann had already made.72 Without any system or philosophi-
cal ideal, the Greeks saw as blind men and felt as seeing beings. This
precision in the depiction of every stance and passion, every char-
acter, had taken the Greeks to the pinnacle of the art, never since
equaled. The point for Herder was that this achievement evoked in us
a more than merely contemplative attitude. Every movement of the
body alluded to in sculpture glides silently into us—that is why we
feel every addition to the simplicity of this depiction as a burden.73
This, of course, was a critique of baroque art, which heaped elabora-
tions and decorations on complex gestures. What the Greeks achieved
and the baroque negated was an extraordinary truthfulness in the
depiction of character and humanity in all its emotions. This truth-
fulness was born of the happy and vigorous cultivation of healthy
bodily form, of the precision that this familiarity with bodies allowed
in the depiction of emotion, but most of all of the sympathy aroused
in us by the movement and character that the primacy of the sense of
touch gave to Greek sculpture. Diderot’s blind man had become the
genius of Greece. Herder discerned in this a more varied and nuanced
depiction of ethical truths, of passions and emotions than the simpler
and more comforting equation of the good and the beautiful read
into Shaftesbury by contemporaries. At the same time, that truthful-
ness, that proximity to natural language was itself an ethical aspira-
tion attributed more to a stage of history than to individual character.
It is thus to the constructions of history in the interpretation of Greek

antiquity that we now turn.
“Shipwrecked on the Earth”: Enlightenment

Historians and Greek Competition
“Indeed I imagine myself appearing in the great Olympic stadium,
where I fancy that I see the statues of young and masculine heroes
und chariots, of two or four wheels of iron, with the figures of victors
on them, and so many wondrous works of art by the thousand; yes,
my imagination has descended into this dream many times because I
compare myself with those competitors.”74 This paean, which intro-
duced the section on the essence of art in Winckelmann’s History
of the Art of Antiquity, was in the spirit of Herodotus’s remark on
athletes that “they competed not for the sake of money but for the
sake of excellence.”75 This was the scene he imagined at Elis—seat
of the ancient Olympic Games. The most virtuous and heroic young
men congregating in one place, representing their native cities in a
holy festival that united all Greece and adjourned all hostilities; which
brought the great artists to observe their beautiful bodies in noble
exertion, and which left both for contemporaries and for posterity
a testimony of all this in sculpture, was the most compelling and
prominent scene of his historical imagination. The History of the Art
of Antiquity ascended to it through Egypt and Etruria and through
several layers of argument and scholarship. In 1755, as we have seen,
he had made the explicit link between training for Olympic contests
and the beauty observed by sculptors.
Beyond discussing the causes of beauty that he had delineated in
1755, he gave that beauty, in 1764, a more dramatic world-historical
stage. History advanced to a society where beauty was suffused with
heroic bearing and was public on a grand scale. The young men, once
they had already been trained in exercises appeared at the great games
in the stadium before the eyes of the whole people, he wrote, “not
without some trepidation.”76 Uniting the physical origins of Greek
beauty, and providing the public context in which it acquired its sig-
nificance, was the agon or contest, which exercised a fascination for
Winckelmann second only to sculpture itself. In order to understand
the historical significance of these claims for the philhellenic sensibil-
ity unfolding in Winckelmann’s work, we must examine what place
Greek competition had in Enlightenment historiography.
The historians of the age of Enlightenment disagreed funda-
mentally about the significance of Greek gymnastic exercises and
competitions and about the historical trajectory in which they were

embedded. Their concerns therefore very closely paralleled those of
Winckelmann and Herder. In the section concerning the principles
of government in his Spirit of the Laws of 1748, Montesquieu argued
that “the gymnastic exercises established among the Greeks depended
no less than other institutions on the goodness of the principle of
government.” In Plato’s time, he explained, “these institutions were
remarkable; they were related to a great purpose, the military art.
But when the Greeks were no longer virtuous, these institutions
destroyed the military art itself; one no longer went down to the
wrestling arena to be trained but to be corrupted. Plutarch tells us
that, in his time, the Romans thought these games were the prin-
cipal cause of the servitude into which the Greeks had fallen. On
the contrary, it was the Greeks’ servitude that had corrupted these
exercises.”77 In Montesquieu’s scheme the decline of the principle
underlying republican government, that of virtue, eventually made
the exercises and games another expression of vice. In Plutarch’s time,
he concluded, “the parks, where one fought naked, and the wres-
tling matches, made the young people cowardly, inclined them to an
infamous love and made only dancers of them; but in Epaminondas’
time, wrestling had brought victory to the Thebans at the battle of
Leuctra.”78 For Montesquieu, then, Greek contests and the practice
of constant physical competition, when allied with virtue, brought
decisive military victory.
Ten years later, in 1758, the French historian Antoine-Yves Goguet
published a treatise entitled, The Origin of Laws, Arts, and Sciences:
And Their Progress among the Most Ancient of Nations. In the discus-
sion on ancient Greece in the third volume, he wrote: “We regard the
institution of the games of Greece in every respect as a masterpiece of
policy and prudence.” But the ambition of carrying the palm became,
at last, he explained, a general and universal madness. They despised
the study of the most useful and necessary arts, to occupy themselves
entirely in useless trials of skill. The taste for gymnastics was a kind of
epidemic malady, Goguet observed, which spread over all Greece.79
In his Recherches philosophiques sur les Grecs, published in 1788,
the historian Cornelius de Pauw maintained the classic scheme of
the relationship between government and manners established by
Montesquieu. “We have now to explain,” he wrote, “how far the
constitutions of the Athenians, and of the Greeks in general, were
influenced by gymnastic institutions. Never were any inventions
more pernicious than these, which seemed expressly calculated to
enervate the human race.”80 Like Goguet, de Pauw regarded Greek
exercises, races, and competitions as embodying an inherent tendency

to excess. But whereas Goguet understood this tendency as temporal,
that is as unfolding over a period of time, for de Pauw, excess was the
essence of Greek contests. “To those who observe that such exercises
taken in moderation must have been useful,” he warned, “it may be
answered that this was impossible, because they were founded on a
spirit of emulation, which in its nature is incompatible with restraint.
No medium existed between conquering and being conquered: each
effort led to a greater, and the antagonists were equally enervated by a
defeat or a victory. For one wrestler, who became famous, thousands
either perished in the attempt, or, from being totally maimed, were
rendered useless to themselves, and burthensome to society.”81
De Pauw was particularly concerned with the anatomical dynam-
ics and the medical effects of racing and wrestling. Montesquieu
says, he wrote, that the wrestling exercises gave the victory to the
Thebans in the battle of Leuctra. But he did not attend to the period
when this event took place. Two centuries had passed, since the
Lacedaemonians began to practice the same art and yet they were
completely defeated. Moreover, he added, the skill of the Thebans in
this exercise did not prevent them from being totally vanquished soon
after at Chaeronea or made prisoners by Alexander and sold as slaves
to the highest bidder. To prove effectually the excellence of the gym-
nastic institutions, the author of the Spirit of the Laws should have
demonstrated that Thebes was never destroyed and that the Theban
name was not effaced from the list of nations.” The Macedonians,
whom Demosthenes had styled Barbarians, defeated the Greeks in
almost every battle, de Pauw asserted, without ever practicing such
exercises. And the Romans, “who did not even know the word gym-
nastics were confident of defeating all the Greeks who should oppose
them, and this was at a time when the latter had rendered themselves
enervated by their efforts to become invincible.” Even if the exercises
did not cause deformities, de Pauw averred, “yet those violent perspi-
rations, which were the unavoidable consequence, could not fail to
weaken the human frame, by depriving it of the juices necessary for
its preservation.”82
Similar investigations were underway in Germany. In November
1780, the Society of Antiquities of Cassel announced the subject of
the essay competition for the following year: “What was the luxury
of the Athenians from the time of Pisistratus till Philip of Macedon
and how did it gradually bring about the fall of the state?” The win-
ning entry in 1781 was that of the Göttingen philosopher Christoph
Meiners, whose work on the ancient world would be read by Herder.
Meiners told a story of decline and corruption from an early golden

age of Athenian virtue. In the early times, he explained, the most
distinguished citizens of Athens did not amass great material posses-
sions, and Meiners was fond of citing the example of Alcmaeon, who
“made his fortune neither through trade, nor agriculture, nor cattle-
rearing,” but from chariot races. He referred to the passage of Plato’s
Laws, which designated an “age of the rule of the laws,” in which the
better part of the citizens were occupied with competitive games,
with the hunt and with affairs of state rather than sensual pleasures.83
For Meiners, the agon was the antithesis of sensual corruption and
luxury.
While Montesquieu had been vague about the process by which
competitive games and exercises had become associated with vices,
and while Cornelius de Pauw had associated the decline with homo-
sexuality and physical exhaustion, for Meiners it had been the cour-
tesans and the schools of such arts introduced by Aspasia, which had
orchestrated the downfall of the agon and of the Greek freedom of
which it had been the most tangible expression. “By this,” he wrote,
“she damaged the whole nation more than if she had been the instiga-
tor of the Peloponnesian Wars. Because of the courtesans, not only
was the health of the young men weakened early but they hindered
the formation of their hearts and spirit . . . The thirst for noble ambi-
tion and the desire for glory and great deeds was snuffed out.”84 If
Montesquieu and Meiners were defenders of the agon and asserted
its link with the military vitality and freedom of the state from for-
eign domination, it was nevertheless figures like de Pauw, espousing
together with Goguet the idea of the inherent madness and excess
of Greek competition, who deployed the most lapidary language.
“Pindar, speaking of a race at the Pythian Games,” de Pauw wrote,
“relates that forty chariots were shattered to pieces, and as many driv-
ers overturned on the arena, or, as Sophocles expresses it, shipwrecked
on the earth.”85
C H A P T E R 2
Winckelmann and the Young Herder II:

Historicity and Symbols
The Chariots of Elis: Winckelmann

and Greek Historicity
The most salient ethical properties discerned in Greek sculpture, sov-
ereignty for Winckelmann, and truthfulness for Herder, were rooted
in Greek institutions, as much as they were the happy creation of
Greek individual genius. These institutions were themselves embed-
ded in a wider historical process best described as a philosophical
geography: different regions of the history of antiquity embodied
different characters and propensities, distinct political and aesthetic
personalities that had a bearing on art and on the ethical stances it
represented in varying form. The historicity of ancient Greece was
thus both an engagement with the institutions and customs, particu-
larly of fifth- and fourth-century Attic Greece, that underlay not only
great artistic achievement, but also an account of its place in a vaster
array and succession of other historical entities.
Two of the greatest historians of German historiographical tra-
ditions, Wilhelm Dilthey and Friedrich Meinecke, agreed that the
age of Winckelmann brought forth a new understanding of history,
a peculiarly German and Protestant achievement. This new vision of
history advanced through many fine gradations, each time oppos-
ing Enlightenment principles and methods. At its purest and most
distilled, it represented a new sensitivity to historical individuality,
an aspiration to assess each period and the actors within it on their
own terms and to understand from within the complex web of rela-
tionships that characterize any historical formation.1 This was not
just seen as a conflict between two historical methodologies but also
between two diametrically opposed philosophies. The ethical pathos
of the narrative of these twentieth-century historians is unmistak-

able and is important for the legacy of Winckelmann and Herder’s
historical ideas. “There is a contrast,” observed Meinecke in his book
on the Origins of Historicism in 1936, “between those whose thought
is principally directed towards certain ideals, and those, who, without
losing sight of related ideals and often touching upon them, neverthe-
less apply their main creative efforts to the mystery of individuality in
life and history and so open the way towards historism.”2 For Dilthey,
historicism was the capacity to feel the richness and vitality of the
forces that constitute history. It was born of the sense for “genetic
thought” that Philip Melanchthon and Leibniz had propagated in
Germany.3
This mid-eighteenth-century revival of Protestant-Lutheran skepti-
cism concerning universal reason was also at the heart of the work of
Hamann, who transmitted to Herder themes that would later be assim-
ilated by his philosophy of history.4 The hallmarks of these Protestant
intimations of historicism were a celebration of scriptural and thereby
textual authority, the primacy of language for an understanding of
past societies, alongside the critique of a universally valid reason. For
Dilthey, Winckelmann’s descriptions of the succession of different
periods in the history of art was not only a great achievement for his-
torical science but also broke through the key Enlightenment idea of
progress by setting up a revered age located long before the eighteenth
century.5 But precisely this, for Meinecke, meant that Winckelmann
stood apart from the main historicist tradition even if he did much to
advance the practice of history. “However epoch-making his methods
might be,” he wrote, “his conception of development, like Lessing’s
outline of religious history, was limited by the notion of perfection. It
only differed from the versions current in the Enlightenment in that
it placed this perfection in a Romanticised past—a past that must be
regarded with yearning.”6 This was far from the quasi-religious uncov-
ering of historical individuality and its holistic fabric of relationships at
the heart of the classic historicist account.
In 1764, Winckelmann published his History of the Art of
Antiquity, one of the most important texts of what later became the
German Philhellenic canon.7 He had a pedagogical purpose in writ-
ing it and the language of the book reflected that. It was a work of
immense ambition and scope, following in the footsteps of Count
Caylus’s Recueil des antiquites and following the same succession of
civilizations: Egyptians, Etruscans, Greeks, and Romans.8 “I take the
word history in the wider meaning which it has in the Greek lan-
guage,” he wrote in the introduction, and added that his purpose
WINCKELMANN AND THE YOUNG HERDER II 29
was to deliver an “instructive edifice” (Lehrgebäude). It was not to

be a history of artists, he explained in a reference to the tradition
exemplified by Vasari’s lives of great artists, but rather of the essence
of art. The history of art should teach the origin, growth, change,
and fall of the same and the different styles of peoples, times, and art-
ists. With a strident confidence bordering on conceit, he pointed out
that few authors had attempted to deal with the innermost reality of
art and that they did so only for the sake of demonstrating scholar-
ship or to deliver commonplace praise.9 The description of a statue,
Winckelmann asserted in this programmatic passage, should describe
the causes of its beauty and the particulars of the style of art. He pas-
sionately juxtaposed his project, with its combination of a mystical
veneration of the high point of beauty with an empirical underpin-
ning showing how it came to be, to the Enlightenment’s encyclopedic
aspiration to comprehensiveness and scholarship. For him, writing on
art was not about antiquarian detail but the exegesis and narrative of
a trained eye and an initiated soul. Katherine Harloe has pointed out
in her recent study that Winckelmann had admitted the epistemic
fragility of his historical edifice, emphasizing its reliance upon conjec-
ture and “professing the importance of imagination and desire” in its
construction. Winckelmann, she writes, paraded and dramatized the
openness and uncertainties inherent in the process of reconstructing
antiquity.10
Winckelmann, of course, would have preferred to write for the
initiated. Since he could not write for Greeks, he said, he had to
proceed carefully. A dialogue on the nature of art in the style of
Plato’s Phaedrus would have been much more congenial to him.11
Indeed, this text accompanied Winckelmann’s unfolding ideas about
how the beauty of Greek bodily form ultimately reflected an incor-
poreal divine beauty, and gave him a sense of how the soul can glide
from the appreciation of one to that of the other. Winckelmann’s
evocation of the Phaedrus was to resonate for a long time in German
intellectual and literary history, particularly when the aesthetics of
bodily form were raised to transcendental meaning, as they would
be in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, passages of which approxi-
mate an exposition of Winckelmann’s sentiments.12 All this only
compounds the problem raised by Friedrich Meinecke, that the ide-
alism of perfection leaves little room for histories that do justice to
their subject. And yet this mystical core is precisely what demands,
in Winckelmann’s mind, a historical narrative deeply concerned with
exploring combinations of causes and with delineating a subtle divi-
sion of historical periods.
The veneration Winckelmann had for that scene at Elis discussed

in the previous chapter, though certainly looking up toward perfec-
tion, was nevertheless informed by an acute awareness of its historic-
ity. The section on the essence of Greek art in the History was an
attempt to comprehend the historical whole of that scene. In that
sense, Dilthey’s assessment is more perceptive than Meinecke’s. That
attempt contained important foundational claims each with a subse-
quent history in German Philhellenism. The first was that the Greeks
consciously gave to beauty a religious veneration. Herodotus told of
a monument in Egesta in (Greek) Sicily to a young man of a differ-
ent city, Winckelmann wistfully recounted, erected for him like to a
hero, because of his beauty and to which people offered sacrifices.
No other people, he said, honored beauty to the same extent. The
beautiful sought to show themselves to the whole people and particu-
larly, to win the favor of artists, since they determined the prize of it.
He noted that it had been beauty that saved the famous Courtesan
Phryne from the death penalty, a scene we shall return to in chap-
ter 4.13 Yet it was not only this superstition but also the joyful dispo-
sition of the Greeks that contributed to the rise of art, since artists
made accurate likenesses of victors of the games. It was the city too
that was crowned and so the citizens took part in the honor of these
statues, to which they contributed the costs. The artists who made
them, Winckelmann asserted, therefore interacted with the people as
a whole.14
The religious regard for beauty and the practice of the games that
made the bodies beautiful and brought them together with artists
were the two most important components of the historical whole that
encased Winckelmann’s adoration of sculpture. They are repeated in
many forms throughout the text. It is only when these have been
established that he talks of freedom in the political sense, a passion,
nurtured, according to Horst Rüdiger, by his reading of Shaftesbury’s
praise of it in the Characteristics.15 Religion and the games long pre-
dated the rise of classical Athenian democracy and the consolidation
of political freedom in various stages from 509 BC. In the historical
section in Part II, Winckelmann pointed out that there were statues of
victors at Elis before the flourishing of art, representing the defenders
of freedom.16 This was the freedom of heroic individual resistance to
the individual tyrant, implicitly the merit of an archaic heroic aristoc-
racy. “Concerning government and constitution, he explained, free-
dom is the foremost cause of the rise of art.” The nation as a whole
never had a tyrant; greatness was not concentrated in a single indi-
vidual.17 Winckelmann made an implicit distinction between archaic
and classical freedom, though the former breathed life into the latter.
Political freedom in the sense of later classical democracy was there-
fore the last factor to take its place in Winckelmann’s historical whole.
It was not the foundation of the scene at Elis that was the composite
manifestation of Greek beauty and its causes.
But comments on the absence of tyranny are formulaic and com-
monplace. This led Winckelmann’s great nineteenth-century biogra-
pher Carl Justi to criticize this aspect of his philosophy of history:
“The author leads us through antiquity in order to show us continu-
ously the same spectacle: that every peace, every revival of the republic
magically brings forth a group of artists, every war by contrast, and
the loss of freedom brings about the ruin of taste and disaster.” In
such a scheme, the life of art would bear a resemblance to today’s
financial and business cycles, Justi observed, which are so sensitive
to the pulsations of the political world. In truth, he said, art has a
more robust constitution.18 Justi was a faithful and detailed expo-
nent of his subject’s ideas but he often sought to find the unintended
paradox or to put complexity in the place of a simplicity that had lent
Winckelmann’s ideas poignancy and a lapidary quality.
Classical as opposed to archaic freedom had a more complex fab-
ric than that evinced by political fluctuation. It was linked to the
prominence of the art of rhetoric and public speaking, making use of
Hardiou’s Dissertation sur l’origine et les progres de la Rhetorique dans
la Grece.19 As Gombrich noted in 1971, Winckelmann constantly
drew parallels in all of his works between the decline of rhetoric and
corruption in art.20 The art of public speaking, he explained, began
to flourish among the Greeks during the full enjoyment of freedom.21
“Freedom, the mother of all great events and changes of constitution
and of jealousy among the Greeks planted, even in the beginning, the
seeds of noble ideas, and just as in the view of the immeasurable sur-
face of the sea the proud beating of the waves upon the rocks of the
beach extends our gaze and leads the mind beyond petty things, so
could no one with this view think without nobleness.”22 The absence
of a single tyrant was significant because it allowed the Greek cities
to harbor envy and jealousy for each other, the foundation of com-
petition between cities and thus of the public spectacle and public
pride that gave rise to the encounter between noble beauty and art-
ists. One further claim in this part of the text is of some significance.
Winckelmann argued that what he was describing was made clearer
by a comparison with Rome. For the Romans, inhuman and bloody
games, fighters who contended with death, were the most pleasant
entertainments for the whole people even in its most polite ages. The
Greeks, by contrast, shunned this cruelty. Winckelmann also cited

Scipio Africanus’s destruction of Carthage to argue that Greek war-
making was more humane.23
Part II of the History provided a chronological sketch of art,
“According to the external circumstances of the Greeks.” This sepa-
ration of internal and external was a cardinal sin for the historicist
purism of Meinecke; a true historicist would only consider a single
integrated whole. Nevertheless, the parts of that whole come together
in the course of the narrative, an investigation of the combination of
factors that gave rise to the greatest art conceived as historical peri-
ods of short duration. The Greek climate, the tradition of physical
exercises and of the games, the competition between athletes and
between cities, the public spaces that brought together these celebra-
tions with great artists, all this predated the high point of art. The
process that brought about that high point was initiated by political
developments. It was the Ionian revolt of 499 BC in the wake of
which the Persians had “destroyed Miletus and taken away its inhab-
itants” that, Winckelmann wrote, “touched the Greeks, particularly
the Athenians most deeply.”24 Like the historian Julius Beloch, writ-
ing the history of Greece in 1914, Winckelmann accentuated the
shocking impression made upon Athens by the suppression of the
revolt.25 Even years later, Winckelmann added, the Athenian people
were brought to tears by the memory of it.26 Athenian and Greek
generosity and heroism triumphed at Marathon in 490 BC ushering
in the power of Athens and the prominence there of the arts and
sciences.
The battle of Salamis in 480 BC marked the beginning of a
“remarkable 50-year period.” The crucial Spartan contribution at
Plataea was left unsung by Winckelmann. Extraordinary men and
great minds all appeared at once. “Herodotus came in the 77th
Olympiad from Caria to Elis and read out his history to all Greeks
who were assembled there.”27 Sophocles, the greatest tragedian, was
of this time, as were the great sculptors Phidias and Parhasios. The
age of Pericles, a shorter time within this 50-year period, brought
about great public works and monuments. This was documented by
Pausanias, the writer from whom Winckelmann derived the signifi-
cance of public monuments in Greece, and as Katherine Harloe has
demonstrated, a crucial historical source for him.28 It was the sense
of a shared fate, heightened by heroic and magnanimous leadership
like that of Pericles, which enlivened still more the public celebra-
tion and sponsorship of artistic achievement. A second period of
flourishing brought about in the wake of the last and greatest Greek
hero, the Theban commander Epaminondas, the great sculptures

of Lysippus and Apelles. But after the definitive establishment of
Macedonian and later, of Roman rule, the flattery and submissive-
ness of courts precluded the relationship between a magnanimous
and heroic leadership and a free interested public that had marked
the zenith of Greek life.
In this narrative art assumes the personality of a unitary histori-
cal subject, transported by the vicissitudes of political history across
the boundaries of Winckelmann’s philosophical geography. “Art,
which suffered distress in Greece was brought by the Seleucids to
Asia.” There, Antiochus Epiphanes, King of Syria, introduced gladi-
atorial games “which the Greeks initially looked on with disgust.”29
The generosity of Athens with the Ionians was superseded by the
cruelty of new games. There followed a corrupted taste among the
Greeks, for which the courtly life of their poets was largely to blame.
Winckelmann then drew an uncharitable comparison with his own
time. In the previous century he said, a destructive plague in Italy and
elsewhere had perturbed the brains of the learned and brought their
blood to feverish boil. At around this time, he continued, the same
plague spread among the artists Arpino, Bernini, and Borromini and
they abandoned nature and antiquity in painting, sculpture, and
architecture.30 The baroque art he wanted to overcome was a result
of the plague.
Woven into the narrative were two important constants that denoted
the peculiarities of Greek character and history for Winckelmann. The
first was the creative political power of rhetoric (Beredsamkeit). The
early tyrants like Pisistratus had used it to come to power even with-
out violence. Later, in the fifth century, it had become a “science”
(Wissenschaft).31 In the last great revival of freedom, Demosthenes
had spoken “invincibly for his fatherland.”32 The great speakers, tra-
gedians, artists, and athletes all submitted themselves to the judg-
ment of an ideal public, assembled for Winckelmann at each juncture
of Greek history at Elis. The second constant was the power of jeal-
ousy, a factor that incited competition but exposed the fragility of
Greek character. In the golden age of art under Pericles, the peace
that reigned in Athens assisted work and the public recognition of
merit had softened jealousy.33 By turns jealousy aroused the cities
against each other, like in the later history of Athens at the time of the
Achaean league, and had a hand in the downfall of the last redoubts of
a resurgent freedom. Yet it was friendship, radiant in the accounts of
the heroic age and present throughout the written history of Greece,
which fascinated Winckelmann more than the freedom that it often
reflected and championed. It represented the most compelling out-

line of a Greek ethic.
The Historical Problem of Male Friendship

“This philia,” the historian Ernst Curtius observed in a lecture enti-
tled “Friendship in antiquity,” given at the University of Göttingen in
1863, “is the actual soul of ancient life. It gives it a sense of warmth,
which spreads itself like a gentle scent over the clearly defined fea-
tures of antiquity, and attracts us more than anything else; it is that
which is closest to our being; it represents that which to the mod-
ern world is Romanticism, the sense of self-abandon which rests on
Frauendienst —service to women—and the courting of women.”34
“Private friendship and zeal for the public and our country are vir-
tues purely voluntary in a Christian,” Lord Shaftesbury had writ-
ten in 1709, and added in a footnote that by private friendship no
reader could understand the common benevolence and charity that
Christians are obliged to show to all men, but rather “that peculiar
relation, which is formed by a consent and harmony of minds, by
mutual esteem and reciprocal tenderness.” The two Jewish heroes,
David and Jonathan, Shaftesbury wrote, as well as the Greeks Pylades
and Orestes, Theseus and Pirithous, Plato and Dion, Epaminondas
and Pelopidas were examples of this.35 Both Edward Gibbon and Jean-
Jacques Rousseau were to criticize Christianity later in the century on
account of its indifference to public action on behalf of the state.36 But
Shaftesbury’s characterization of friendship as a heroic virtue tending
toward patriotic service and distinction was a critique aligned with
the emotional sensibilities and imagination of Winckelmann, one his
most avid readers.
In a short essay on the subject of historical lectures written in 1754,
Winckelmann observed that Epaminondas, the Theban commander,
was the greatest of all Greeks. Where, he asked, was the herald of the
Mantinea of the Germans, the Epaminondas of the north? He would
like to place, he wrote, eternal friends alongside great princes to serve
for the instruction of mankind.37 In a letter to his friend Berendis
written in September of the same year, Winckelmann repeated the
observations Shaftesbury had made in 1709. In his letters of this
period friendship is designated heroic and divine, limited as such to a
few great examples in antiquity. “The concept of heroic friendship as
I seek it and cultivate it,” he wrote to Hieronymus Dietrich Berendis,
is a Phoenix, of which many speak but none has seen.38 Carl Justi
explained that he was always inclined to regard friendship pythagori-

cally as an unrestricted community in a spiritual and bodily sense.39
The ambiguity of this observation was appropriate in the context of
Winckelmann’s life, characterized by so many unrequited feelings for
young men.
The tension between the mythical and the historical Winckelmann
becomes sharpest in the consideration of the significance of friend-
ship. This tension was played out, broadly speaking, in two mod-
els, one taking its point of departure from Aristotle’s Nichomachean
Ethics the other looking to Plato’s Phaedrus, a favorite text of
Winckelmann. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s famous essay on
Winckelmann of 1805 included a section entitled “Freundschaft.”
The definition of the concept at the beginning of that section is dis-
tinctly Aristotelian: the enjoyment of close connections between like
natures. Immediately after this definition Goethe observed what he
called “an interesting difference between antiquity and modernity.”
The relationship to women, he said, which for us has become so
soft and spiritual, then stood hardly above the boundary of ordi-
nary needs. Instead, the ancients invested true feeling in friendship
between men. “The passionate fulfillment of kind duties,” Goethe
wrote, “the bliss of inseparability, the dedication of one to another,
the lifelong commitment, the necessary accompaniment in death
astonish us in the union of two young men.” It was this kind of
friendship, said Goethe, that made Winckelmann a happy man even
in the midst of adversity.40
Very different was the Winckelmann of Berthold Vallentin, who
quoted long passages from the Phaedrus in his biography, published
in 1931 under the auspices of the poet Stefan George, himself fas-
cinated by the synthesis of sensuality, mysticism, and pedagogical
intensity inherent in the imagined paradigm of Greek male friend-
ship. Not Goethe’s joyful association of like natures that made him
happy in all circumstances, but rather the passionate advocacy of the
unity of sensuality and spirituality was central to Vallentin and it made
Winckelmann a forlorn figure with a greater affinity to the eternal
values of the George-Kreis around Stefan George than to any hopes
anchored in his own time.41 A similar position was taken by Walther
Rehm in his book Griechentum und Goethezeit, published in 1936.
It was in Freundschaft, he wrote, that Winckelmann’s antique char-
acter was most clearly displayed. His advocacy of heroic friendship
with its ancient-sensual character stood alone, according to Rehm,
in an age dominated by Christian-spiritual ideas of friendship. In the
enjoyment of the sight of a masculine youthful body, Rehm wrote,

also resided the ability to observe the dignity, indeed the divinity in
man, to awaken and to honor it.42
There were essentially three forms of male friendship evoked in
the German philhellenic imagination. The first was heroic friendship
properly so called; that between two paradigmatic individuals, which
defended what we have called Winckelmann’s archaic freedom. It was
this friendship as portrayed in Homer that captured Winckelmann’s
imagination and before him that of Shaftesbury. The second was that
between teacher and pupil, the model of which was Plato’s Phaedrus and
the Symposium. This again captured the imagination of Winckelmann
and that of the Göttingen philologist Johann Mathias Gesner, as well
as his Göttingen colleague Christoph Meiners. The third was that of
collective entities, of bands of men, like the Sacred Band of Thebes,
when understood in the narrow sense, and Greek society as a whole,
when conceived in the broad sense. It was this which arguably drew
Herder’s attention the most and later that of Ernst Curtius. There
was no firm boundary between each of these forms of friendship and
commentators were fascinated by the processes through which they
conditioned each other. The first kind was most associated with the
defense of the fatherland and successful opposition to tyranny. The
second was the domain of the Kalokagathia, the contemplation of
beautiful form as the portal to the contemplation of divine beauty.
The third was perhaps more associated with a tragic historical opposi-
tion to tyranny, with the defeat at the battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC
signifying not only the defeat of the Sacred Band but also the demise
of the society that had raised the ethical and spiritual status of mas-
culine bonds to such heights.
In his study, Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity, Daniel
Orrells charts the debates on the meaning of pederasty, the signifi-
cance of Socrates, and the purity and impurity of the practices associ-
ated with him. This holy lover of boys, Orrells explains, was to stand
as a pious ideal and as an embodied personage in history who sup-
plied a real-life model for the modern homosocial milieu of classical
education, which summarily excluded girls and women. Gesner set
out to show in a lecture of 1752, against Voltaire, that Socrates was
a saintly pederast, that paiderastia was the most honorable means
by which men were believed to be incited to virtue, especially virtue
in war, and whatever was beautiful. Gesner had wanted to restore
Athenian Paideia both in methods of teaching and in the approach
to texts: only a misreading of the Phaedrus could occasion suspicion
of the purity of Socrates.43 The pedagogical and emotional summit of
this intense form of friendship was premised on the contrast with and
absence of the emotional salience of women, a problem to which later
generations of philhellenic writers, as we shall see, would dedicate
more sustained attention.
In the first instance, the scholar who made the most sustained and
systematic attempt to link male friendship to the status of women
was Christoph Meiners. For him, it was precisely this problem that
eventually negated the creative effects of the institution. The Greeks
did not know a tender love of the female sex that looked to spiritual
completeness, Meiners observed at the beginning of his 1775 essay
Reflections on the Male Love of the Greeks. But they possessed a pas-
sionate love for the beauty of the male sex, which appeared outland-
ish to us in any fiction and would appear unbelievable but for the
evidence provided by the remains of antiquity. It was not a reality of
a single age or state but of all Greece and particularly of its bravest
peoples. Nothing in their way of thinking was so different to ours
as this.44
The chaste Seelenliebe (love of the soul) between men was the
mother of all virtues, the most sacred bond of virtuous souls inspired
to great and noble deeds, Meiners asserted. The greatest heroes of the
earliest ages, children of the gods, had passed on this heavenly male
love as a sacred legacy to their latest descendants. Thus it was hated
by tyrants and cowardly peoples and protected by the great lawgivers.
Perhaps Lycurgus the fabled Spartan lawgiver, had gotten the idea for
the regulation of male friendship from Crete, where, Meiners said, it
had been present in very early times. The Cretans had apprehended
the relationship between Seelenliebe and bravery, for a warrior ani-
mated by passionate love was nigh-on invincible. The Sacred Band of
Thebes, Meiners pointed out, had almost cost Philip victory at the
battle of Chaeronea.45 The sanction of lawgivers was strengthened by
the example of the great commanders, like Epaminondas, who fell
next to his Kaphisodorus at the battle of Manitnea in 362 BC. But
Meiners ended his celebration of Seelenliebe on an ominous note and
returned directly to the problem of the status of women. Among many
Greeks, particularly the Cretans and Thebans, this love had degener-
ated into unnatural vice, he said. Among the Greeks and Romans just
as in the Orient, it was linked to the bitterest hatred of the female sex
and necessarily became one of the chief causes of the depopulation of
both nations.46 With this critique of friendship, parallel to that of the
competitive athletics to which it was so closely linked, Enlightenment
historiography challenged once again the institutional and contextual
basis of philhellenic ideals.
Taste and Rhetoric: Herder and

Greek Historicity
If we consider how Herder imagined the historical whole, wrote Otto
Braun in Germany’s foremost historical journal in 1913, we encoun-
ter an opposition of metaphysics, often theologically colored, and
naturalism. On the one hand, history was the fulfillment of a divine
plan, yet on the other it was explained as the result of environment
and physical need.47 Yet a divinely ordained sensual vitality, a pos-
sible synthesis of Braun’s antipodes, was both the premise and the
problem with which his consideration of the Greek world began. The
two most detailed recent studies of Herder’s philosophy of history
in relation to antiquity are that of Hans-Heinrich Reuter and Ernst-
Richard Schwinge. Both of them posit internal struggles in Herder’s
development. For Reuter, writing within the Marxist framework
of East German scholarship, Herder’s relationship to Greece was a
contest between populist, democratic, and antiaristocratic sympa-
thies on the one hand, and evasive utopian tendencies of idealization
as well as sympathy for Enlightened absolutism on the other. The
freedom of the Greek polis becomes fundamentally a cipher for anti-
absolutist political and social sentiment. The Greek unity of human
drives and faculties served as a heuristic device, a critical mirror to
hold up against modernity.48
Reuter’s Herder, for all his oscillations, leans toward the democratic
side. For Schwinge, Herder’s dilemma was that he could not be to
Greek wisdom and poetry what Winckelmann had been for art. He
could not bring himself to ascribe to Greece the absolute validity and
perfection which that emulation of Winckelmann would have neces-
sitated and, in Schwinge’s view, he never overcame the dilemma.49 Yet
Herder’s difficulty was instead a paradox born of his holistic appraisal
of Greek excellence. The social institutions, beliefs, and practices that
together formed the foundation of Greek achievements themselves
evinced what proved to be a self-destructive fragility. This idea did
not fully crystallize until the late 1780s but it was already intimated in
his imaginative reconstruction of Greece as a historical whole placed
between Egyptian and Roman antiquity.
“Winckelmann’s work is a historical instructive edifice [Lehrgebäude]
which in stature deserves to be called a palace of giants and in its
façade a work of the gods.”50 These were opening remarks of Herder’s
Older Critical Forest, a reflection on different conceptions of history.
In the first section he had distinguished between history as practiced
by Herodotus and history as practiced by Polybius and, later, David
Hume. The latter’s was philosophical history, concerned with a con-

scious elaboration of cause and effect. The history of a nation could
not begin but with the simple recounting of a Herodotus. Herder’s
philosophy of history was developed in the period before his arrival
at Weimar with Winckelmann’s art history both as foil and inspira-
tion. Herder’s magnanimity as well as the plurality of his intellectual
allegiances impelled him to offer a variety of compelling and com-
plementary solutions to the problem he discerned in Winckelmann’s
conception of the development of art.
That problem was the idea of originality and invention.
Winckelmann had claimed that all peoples found within themselves
the seeds of what was necessary for art. Therefore, the art they pro-
duced was theirs and theirs alone. This, Herder said, was arbitrary
and unhistorical. To this Herder opposed the metaphor of a chain of
transmission that united the different peoples and ages and allowed
the one to inherit and transform what it had learned from the other. It
is only the philosopher, Herder mused, who imagines a natural condi-
tion from which art, language, and wisdom are derived. Historians
realize that man is inclined to imitate that which he spies even in the
distance. Greek poets and philosophers journeyed to Egypt to learn
morality, government, worship, and science. Why not also the first
artists?51
Winckelmann’s book thus fell into as many parts as the peoples
it describes; the chain was missing. The foremost historical ques-
tion, what each people received from another in the single thread
of culture, what it invented, inherited, improved, and further devel-
oped, was left unstated.52 And was it history, he continued, when one
considered the periods and styles only from the point of view of an
original nature, and overlooked the role of foreign hands in aiding or
obstructing them? It was instead an ideal of a history, well-ordered
and imposing, and an instructive edifice of art. Distancing itself from
historical pathways and deviations, it remained within the plan of an
original nature, forming itself.53 This was the fundamental divergence
between the two philhellenes. And yet Winckelmann’s unfolding of
an originality gifted by nature and climate and developed within an
enclosed world of causes arrived at the same place, at the apotheosis
of the same beauties and virtues as Herder’s chain of characters and
aptitudes, where capricious affections and all the adversities of history
drove the forward movement, tentatively and not without loss. Since
they both sought to explain the blossoming of Greek art in the con-
text of the life engendered by peculiarly Greek institutions, we may
say they are divergent historical moralities of growth.
We have seen that Gombrich had postulated the affinity of

Winckelmann’s evocation of simplicity and calm grandeur in Greek
sculpture as well as his concern with subsequent corruption, with the
morality of Rousseau. But the differences may be more important. As
Judith Shklar pointed out, the citizen of Rousseau’s Social Contract
and the ideal pupil of his novel Emile, were both mirrors held up
against the injustices and shortcomings of the age, rather than blue-
prints for a realistic transformation.54 This was their moral thrust.
Winckelmann’s main concern was not an attack on the baroque or
the politics of his time, though this contributed to his ardor, but
rather the meticulous evocation of a world laden with noble virtues
and divine beauties.
Winckelmann had begun with the Greeks as his only exemplars of
beauty in art according to their complete nature, Herder explained
in his entry to the prize contest offered by the Academy of Cassel in
1777, on the question of where Winckelmann had found the sciences
of antiquity and where he had left them. “He encompasses more than
he has, intuits more than he knows, wonders in the blessed dream
and gives himself to it. The faculties of his soul are still undivided
and, like a child learning to speak, he would like to give everything
at once.”55 Climate, government, and so on do not account for every-
thing, since in cultivated lands these vary so much. Rather, tradition,
doctrine, the chain of transmission does the most and in the mecha-
nism of art, especially so.56 Here the two ethics of growth were jux-
taposed. The distinction between dream and truth in Herder’s essay
on sculpture, which was being composed at the same time, is now
applied to the philosophy of history. The dream evinces an undivided
soul and a dedication to the noble world it teaches. The chain of
transmission aspires to truth, just as the simplicity of Greek sculpture.
It eschews philosophical systems imposed by a later time—rejecting,
for example, Montesquieu’s classification of oriental despotism for
the simple patriarchal age of Eastern wisdom—just as Greek statues
eschewed the disorienting ornamentation of the baroque.
Herder explained that on the question of the interaction of peoples
he was on the side of Caylus and Goguet rather than Winckelmann.
But it was the ethical pathos of his idea of the chain of peoples that led
him beyond Caylus and Goguet. The Egyptians did not want to work
for us or for the Greeks but for themselves.57 If an Egyptian of ancient
times entered a Greek gallery, he observed, he would be astonished
and horrified. “You, youth,” the Egyptian would say, “reach for the
olive branch, how different it is with us! We only represent that which
lasts eternally, the stance of stillness and of sacred silence.”58 This
sense of a chain of sensibilities manifesting itself in the history of

peoples, and which would have to be understood from within their
respective worlds, animated his short work This Too a Philosophy of
History for the Education of Mankind, published in 1774 and the
product of his lonely Bückeburg period of reflection.59 In dedicating
to each composite scene of history not only a reverent appraisal of
its sensibilities, customs, and psychology but also an understanding
of how the various elements of life constitute a single whole to be
judged from its own standpoint, Herder inaugurated a new kind of
universal history. As Frederick Beiser has pointed out, this universal
history was deeply entwined with the idea of providence that charac-
terized the Bückeburg period and brought with it a rapprochement
with Hamann after a dispute on the origin of language.60
At the end of the Older Critical Forest, Herder had alluded to the
Protestant-scriptural foundations of his nascent philosophy of history.
The Holy Scriptures, he had observed, were written in terms that
spoke to the people and life of those times, and our religion, govern-
ment, and first wisdom all came from the East.61 The written word,
understood in terms of the life-world it reflected, was thus for Herder
the authority that initiated the philosophy of history. The first part
of This Too a Philosophy of History was accordingly a panegyric to the
patriarchal Orient, seat of that authority which in the beginning had
no need of systems and exegesis but prevailed by awe and reverence.
Here too there were echoes of the aesthetic category of the sublime.
Sharply impugning the Enlightenment affirmation of progress, each
way-station in this story was a historical whole, embodying an ethic
worthy of humanity, the passing of which was lamented. Who could
deny, he wrote, that with historical change untold measures of the old
strength and nourishment are lost? The solemn wisdom of the ori-
ent, when torn away from the curtain of the mysteries was but pretty
chatter, an “instructive edifice” of the Greek schools and markets.62
The passing of esoteric wisdom and its supersession by the lightness
of the Greeks is lamentable from the point of view of the sublime and
the patriarchal. Herder’s pathos adopted by turns the standpoint of
each of way-station in his philosophical geography and this empathy
allowed him to fill their respective worlds with an incontestable moral
dignity, all the more poignant because these worlds were transient.
But Herder did not simply juxtapose his chain of peoples to
Winckelmann’s “instructive edifice.” As we have seen, he wanted
to exhaust the creative potential of each possibility. Following this
imperative, he developed from Winckelmann’s legacy the intimations
of a third position, akin to the literary movement known as the Sturm
und Drang. This movement of young writers in the 1770s was fasci-
nated by the individual creative genius and its capacity to articulate, in
the manner of inspired bards, the poetic wisdom of a people. In this
decade, Shakespeare and the supposedly Scottish poet Ossian were
the subjects of this fascination.63 Herder’s own essay on Shakespeare
from this time waxed lyrical about the bard’s ability to reproduce
with such precision and comprehensiveness, the political and social
life and personalities of his day.64 At the end of his prize essay of 1777,
Herder wrote that he wished that the spirit of Winckelmann would
set itself upon an artist, who would turn his theory into action and
marry his ideas with flesh and blood in works of sunlight and marble.
All the investigations of the researchers of antiquity prepared the way
for the genius, who revived and arrayed this antiquity with the magi-
cal powers of Medea. The theory of the beautiful, full of feeling, with
Winckelmann’s ancient simplicity, dignity, and strength, was but an
invitation for him who should come, the new Raphael or Angelo of
the Germans, “who could create for us Greek men and Greek art.”65
Just like Winckelmann before him, Herder had an acute sensibility
for the position and historical significance of the power of rhetoric in
ancient Greece and Athens in particular. As a young man of 20, he
had prepared a short essay entitled Do We Still Have a Public and a
Fatherland Like the Ancients? In it he lamented the passing of an active
and patriotic citizenry on the Athenian model.66 This was the begin-
ning of a long engagement with the character of civic life, a concern
that encompassed governance, rhetoric, public spectacle, and the link
between these and the problem of taste. An important exposition of
these issues and the connections between them was the Causes of the
Decline of Taste among the Different Peoples with Whom It Flourished.
For Herder, the power of rhetoric born alongside all the other Greek
arts, contained the seeds of a disequilibrium and threatened to rend
asunder the synchronicity between works of art and ethical aspirations
that he and Winckelmann affirmed with such passion. “Certain works,”
Herder wrote, “can in the end arouse a passion of a kind that is artisti-
cally but not morally good. They want storm rather than clear sunshine.
Brutus was no Cicero and Socrates no Pericles, no Demosthenes.”
The states in which the best taste flourished were not the most
virtuous, and Athens “with all its taste was itself no Sparta in terms
of civic virtue.”67 Taste was a synthesis of reason, of genius, and of the
sensual, desiring forces.68 It was thus for Herder a composite whole
that could yield different results in different polities. Taste upheld
good morals but not as good morals. Rather, it upheld them as beau-
tiful decency and fine order. This was the point of greatest divergence
between art form as taste and ethic as public morality. But, as we

shall see, when Herder discussed art form as symbol, the relation-
ship between beautiful aesthetic order and morality was restored.
Both modes of the coexistence of beauty and ethics characterized a
peculiarly Greek historicity and constituted the fundamental conflict
within Herder’s philhellenic sensibility.
Every fine man of Greek education was a judge, Herder observed,
as one could tell from the competitions, and also in the content and
effect of the stage as a lively public affair, as in Athens.69 The whole
book of laws of Aristotle was taken from the mouth of the people.
But just as natural poetry had lost its primitive vitality when it turned
into philosophy, so too the decline of the spirit of action and freedom
led to the decline of the stage and of taste. Just as Winckelmann
had implied in 1755 and in 1764, Herder advanced in this essay the
idea that the Greeks were a nation of judges. They judged the qual-
ity of bodily exertion and beauty, of sculpture and monuments, and
of the art of public speaking and acting and they did so as part of a
single whole. They both agreed that the blossoming period of this
whole was but a brief window in history but this did not detract from
its splendor and neither did the fact that it contained within it, for
Herder, the seeds of its own political and moral destruction.
The role of Greece in the 1774 scholarly poem on history was to
exemplify the blossoming youth of mankind. Reversing the religious
and aesthetic sensibilities of the patriarchal Orient, it exuded freedom
and love, pleasure and joy.70 This was, of course, the poetic apotheo-
sis of Greece in this treatise, but in it Herder directly and consciously
assimilated a key aspect of Winckelmann’s understanding of Greek
historicity: the focus on the public institutions as embodying the joy-
ful, playful, exuberant, and youthful countenance of Greece. This
composite image of the primacy of a public life centered on the physi-
cal affirmation and veneration of youth as the kernel of Greek histo-
ricity was retained by Hegel in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World
History.71 In 1774, Herder also articulated a problematic with aes-
thetic and ethical implications, which would play itself out in the
history of German Philhellenism. “Struggle and assistance,” Herder
summed up, “striving and moderating, the powers of the human
spirit were brought into the finest measure und lack of measure.”72
That Greek art, symbols, and character in certain forms displayed
an admirable sense of measure and proportion and in others alluded
to or actually embodied the danger of excess, was a constant con-
cern of Philhellenic debate, one to which Wilhelm von Humboldt
would return explicitly in his essay On Feminine and Masculine Form
of 1795.73 It gave primacy at different times, to different forms of art

and different periods of Greek history, discerning in each case a dif-
ferent ethic and arousing complex responses. It is to these responses
that we now turn.
F rom Laocoon to Nemesis

“The temple of wisdom,” wrote David Hume in an essay entitled
The Stoic, “is seated upon a rock.” 74 Disdainful of the passions and
confident of vanquishing the power they possessed over the human
mind and body, Hume’s stoics renounced all affective attachments
and dedicated themselves to an aloof and imperturbable existence.
His mocking caricature reflected the skepticism of Scottish moral
philosophy toward a pure and rigid stoicism. Conflicts between
variants of neo-stoicism and their opponents formed an important
component of philosophical debate in the first half of the eighteenth
century in Britain and France, as Christopher Brooke has demon-
strated.75 For the nascent new philhellenic sensibility in Germany,
stoicism formed one of the poles between which the moral personal-
ity of works of art and of given historical settings was situated. The
other pole was the sickly sweet and sentimental idyll, the setting of
petty abandon and sensual indulgence in a spirit of lightness, serv-
ing contemporary tastes and typical of Wilhelm Heinse’s Laidion
of 1774.76 In his study of Greekdom in the work of Herder and
Winckelmann in 1903, Arnold Berger stressed the repellent effect
of the latter as prompting a countervailing concern with Greek his-
toricity.77 But the relationship with stoic or quasi-stoic stances is
of equal importance. For in between these poles, and informed by
the tension between them, Herder engaged with Winckelmann as
well as with important contributions by the Hamburg playwright
and philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing on the ethical import
of Greek sculpture and of symbols and allegories of death and the
afterlife.
The contrast between ethics read into Greek symbols can best be
understood by examining the meaning of Ethos for Winckelmann and
Herder. In his treatise on allegory of 1766, Winckelmann described
how Ethos originated as a term for Gebärde, which we might translate
as gesture or demeanor.78 Schadewaldt already pointed to the impor-
tance of the bodily expression in Winckelmann’s reading of Homer.79
By contrast, in the Fragmente, written soon after, Herder discussed
Ethos in terms of an attachment to the landscape, to community, to
myth, and to cult.80 The ethical personality was thus respectively
anchored either in the cultic community or in the ideal individual

bodily form.
“In some of the Greek tragedies,” wrote Adam Smith in The
Theory of Moral Sentiments published in 1759, “there is an attempt
to excite compassion, by the representation of the agonies of bodily
pain. Philoctetes cries out and faints from the extremity of his suf-
ferings. Hippolytus and Hercules are both introduced as expiring
under the severest tortures, which it seems, even the fortitude of
Hercules was incapable of supporting.” If any of the heroes were to
recover, Smith contended, “we should think the representation of
their sufferings perfectly ridiculous.” These attempts to excite com-
passion by the representation of bodily pain, may be regarded, he
concluded, as among the greatest breaches of decorum of which the
Greek theatre has set the example.81 Just as the causal chain that
Winckelmann postulated for Greek bodily beauty had defied aspects
of Enlightenment historiography, so now the idealization of a specifi-
cally Greek ethic in the context of suffering would have to overcome
one of the Enlightenment’s most salient traditions of moral theory.
What that Greek ethic represented in this context was itself contested
among those who did not share Smith’s disdainful skepticism. The
differences of view were dictated by the contrasting purposes of these
authors, didactic and philosophical.
The debate was occasioned by and centered on the most poi-
gnant representation of suffering and adversity that extant ancient
statues could evoke: the Laocoon group. Laocoon was the unfor-
tunate Trojan priest condemned to a terrible punishment by Apollo
for trying to warn the Trojans against accepting the dubious Greek
gift of a wooden horse. The statue, made according to the laudatory
passage in Pliny’s Natural History, by Hagedandros, Polydoros, and
Athenodoros of Rhodes, depicted Laocoon and his young sons at the
moment when they were attacked by the snakes sent by Apollo, an
instant of agonizing struggle and pain. The statue had been lost and
was discovered near Rome in 1506.82 In his 1755 essay on the imi-
tation of Greek works in painting and sculpture, Winckelmann had
praised the group as the pinnacle of Greek character. The pain felt
by Laocoon, he wrote, expressed itself with no rage in the face and
in the whole stance; there was no cry but rather an anxious, muffled
sigh. The Laocoon suffers, he said, but he suffers like the Philoctetes
of Sophocles; his plight reaches our very soul yet the effect of it is that
we wish to be able to bear adversity like this great man. “The expres-
sion [Ausdruck] of so great a soul,” Winckelmann enthused, “goes
far beyond the representation of beautiful nature. The artist must
have felt in himself the strength of spirit, which he imprinted on his

marble. Greece had artists and philosophers in one person.”83
Winckelmann had taken the first step toward the sacralization of
Greek sculpture that was to be a salient and passionate tendency of his
statue descriptions, published between the 1755 essay and the History
of the Art of Antiquity of 1764 and his later work.84 In the historical
part of the History of the Art of Antiquity, Winckelmann associated
parts of Laocoon’s strained body with particular spiritual dispositions.
The Laocoon, he wrote, was made after the image of man, who con-
sciously summons the strength of the spirit against pain. The armed
spirit is reflected in the swollen muscles and nerves, the raised chest
that struggles to breathe, and in his refusal to succumb to a consum-
mate sensation, collecting the pain within himself and closing it off.
His mouth was full of sorrow, with the lower lip weighed down by it.
Laocoon was a statue depicting characters in the heroic age and it is
interesting that Winckelmann sought the exemplar of Greek dignity
and fortitude in a Trojan figure. He discerned in the bodily features
and expressions of this statue something more fundamental than the
fine representation of a moving scene from the Homeric epics. If the
artist was also the philosopher, then his vision was dictated a priori by
a peculiarly Greek attitude, a fortitude grounded in a consciousness
of proximity to the divine, something expressed for Winckelmann
when Laocoon raises his head, appealing to the heavens. 85
Central to the plausibility of that sacaralized dignity was the
avoidance of excess. All actions and positions of Greek figures,
Winckelmann had written in 1755, which did not partake of this
character of wisdom, and were instead too fiery and wild, fell into
an error that ancient artists called “Parenthyrstis.”86 Discussing with
Moses Mendelssohn what produced sympathy in spectators, readers,
and audiences, Lessing turned to the Laocoon and Winckelmann’s
interpretation. His assessment, which sought to delineate the lim-
its and properties of sculpture and painting, was entitled Laocoon
and appeared in 1766.87 For Simon Richter, the engagement with
the Laocoon group was above all a challenge within classical aesthet-
ics, paradoxically forcing it to focus on pain and suffering.88 Lessing
agreed with Winckelmann that the sculptors of Laocoon had avoided
a loud cry and had been right to do so, and he agreed that Greek art
shunned the representation of excessive passion and pain. But he took
exception to Winckelmann’s criticism of Virgil and to his comparison
between Laocoon and Philoctetes.89 Whereas Winckelmann wanted
to depict the dignified restraint inherent in Greek character as such,
Lessing wanted to find the source and plausibility of sympathy. It was
a significant difference of inflection within a philhellenic sensibil-

ity. Winckelmann wanted to offer man a model in Laocoon, wrote
Charlotte Ephraim in her study of the idea of Greece in the eigh-
teenth century, whereas Lessing dissolved “Winckelmann’s magical
unity” by separating art from life.90 Her book, which emphasized the
pedagogical fervor of Lessing, Herder, and Winckelmann, empha-
sized the emotional differences between Winckelmann and Lessing,
pointing to the passionate admirations of the former and the sober
detachment of the latter.
Helmut Sichtermann has shown how Lessing accepted many of
Winckelmann’s ideas, including, the notion that Greek artists repro-
duced nature not directly but through Homer and that it was better
to imitate the Greeks than nature and, finally, that such ideas had
gained enough currency for Lessing to be able to appeal frequently
to “the public.” 91 Yet this common point of departure makes the dif-
ferences all the more significant. For Lessing, Winckelmann’s heroic
age was too severe, detracting from the humanity of Greek noble-
ness. Virgil’s Laocoon cried out but this did not obscure his merits
as a patriot and loving father.92 “To cry out,” Lessing wrote, “is the
natural expression of bodily pain. Homer’s wounded warriors often
fall to the ground with a cry.” Even if Homer otherwise raised his
heroes above human nature, he remained true to it nonetheless, when
it came to the feeling of pain and hurt feelings and when it came to
the expression of this feeling through cries and tears, he explained.
Moreover, this distinguished the Greeks from northern heroes,
who were not permitted to show fear. Greek heroism was like a dor-
mant spark, roused only by external power; that of the barbarian was
a bright, consuming flame, which was ever fierce and devoured all
other good qualities in him.93 When the Trojan king forbade crying,
the poet was telling us, he observed, that only the noble ( gesittete)
Greek can at the same time cry and be brave, whereas the Trojan, in
order to be brave, had to snuff out his humanity. If it is true, Lessing
concluded this part of the argument, that according to the Greek
way of thinking, crying out when feeling bodily pain can be recon-
ciled with a great soul, it cannot be, as Winckelmann had thought,
the expression of that soul that forbade the artist from depicting the
cry.94 The reason must instead be sought in terms of the effects on
the reader or spectator of being confronted with expressions of pain
in different contexts and art forms. This brought Lessing to engage
with Smith’s argument, quoted at the start of this section.
Smith erred, Lessing wrote, in trying to impose general laws
for our feelings. Their fabric was too fine and intricate and every
postulate would have to allow so many exceptions, that general laws

would have to be reduced to a few observations limited to a small
number of cases. Smith had argued that we have contempt for the
violent expression of physical pain, but that was not so if, like in the
case of Philoctetes, we know him to be a man of constancy, and when
we see that the pain can make him cry out but not force him to do
anything else. Moral greatness among the Greeks, Lessing enthused,
consisted in an unchangeable love for one’s friends and unchanging
hatred toward enemies. Philoctetes retained that greatness through
all his torments.95 Lessing touched here on a powerful trope of heroic
age morality, which, as we have seen, had fired Winckelmann’s imagi-
nation and defined both a wistful aspiration and a historical problem
for German Philhellenism. Lessing’s attack on Smith was followed
by a biting critique of Cicero, whose Tusculan Disputations had dis-
dained the expression of pain to such an extent that it had overlooked
the constancy of Philoctetes.96
Underlying the critique of Cicero was another specifically philhel-
lenic notion that Lessing shared with Winckelmann and Herder con-
cerning the contrast between the Greek and Roman games. Lessing
suggested that Cicero’s opinions were rooted in a society where ideas
about the observation of pain were dictated not by the theatre but by
the brutal gladiatorial arena. The slightest expression of feeling there,
he wrote, would have aroused sympathy, and if this had happened
often it would have put an end to the cruel spectacle. The point of
the tragic stage, however, was the opposite. Seneca’s tragedies were
also full of characters like gladiators and that was why Roman tragedy
remained so inferior.97 Lessing’s heroic age had thus defined itself
against Winckelmann’s ethereal form of constancy that equated the
heroes with their gods, against the grim bravery of the barbarian
north and finally against stoic or stoicizing ideas.
In Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe explained that Lessing’s
Laocoon had been a significant formative experience for him.98 In
1798 he published an essay on the group in his Propyläen.99 It was a
response to the essay of Aloys Ludwig Hirt, published in the Horen
in 1797, and, which as Michele Cometa explains, had challenged
Winckelmann’s idea of a moral response to the torment of the gods
and moved toward the idea of a natural reaction to a physical attack on
the body, to which it could react in no other way.100 Cometa argues
that Goethe’s Laocoon was following in the footsteps of a seculariza-
tion of the group undertaken not only by Hirt but also by Wilhelm
Heinse, whose overly sensual idylls otherwise appeared to Goethe
to signify a distasteful influence. Goethe, Cometa argues, sought to
liberate Laocoon from religious and mythological associations and

indeed from Herder’s comparison of it with Christ and with the book
of Job, in a favor of a purely human rendering.101
The art of sculpture, Goethe wrote in his essay, is rightly held in
high esteem because it can bring representation to its highest peak,
since it removes from man everything that is not fundamental to him.
In this group, Laocoon was divested of his name, his priesthood,
his Trojan nationality. The artists had removed, Goethe observed, all
poetic and mythological evidence.102 As a young man in Strasbourg,
Goethe had been privy to the thoughts that later crystallized in
Herder’s essay on sculpture, including its inherent truthfulness, one
of the themes of Herder’s essay. It was the foundation of that human-
ization of the Laocoon that he now undertook. The group was a
combination of striving and fleeing, of activity and suffering, a syn-
thesis possible only at the precise moment chosen by the astonishing
wisdom of the artists.103 The final step in the humanization of the
group was its liberation from a merciless fate, the very fate on which
Winckelmann’s characterization of a dignity directed to the heavens
had rested. Goethe argued that the poison had hardly begun to have
an effect, that there was no deadly struggle by what was really a fine,
striving, and healthy body. Moreover, the elder son appeared to be
on the verge of escape, mitigating uncompromising fate in favor of
hope.104 Where Winckelmann saw Laocoon’s intimation of a heav-
enly constancy, Goethe saw it as naked humanity negating divinely
ordained fate. Winckelmann’s Greece endowed its heroic humanity
with a divinity palpable in artistic representations and conducive to an
inviolable dignity even in the face of the greatest despair and adver-
sity. Goethe’s Greece, more symbolic than historical, was the scene of
conflict between gods and men but also the intimation, as we shall
see, of a new theodicy.
Lessing was above all a dramatist, a playwright and theatre critic of
great philosophical ambition. His search for the grounds of the spec-
tator’s sympathy led him to see in Greek art, symbols, and allegory,
the traces of a sublime balance between humanity and excellence,
between nature and courage. Winckelmann was a historian dedicated
to establishing the premises of beauty so that future artists may suc-
cessfully abide by them. In his Remarks on the History of the Art of
Antiquity, published in 1767 as a supplement to his great work, he
elaborated on the relationship between sculpture and divinity that
contained the secret of Greek beauty. The Greeks, he explained,
venerated statues, which they believed had fallen from heaven, and
believed they were filled with the deity they portrayed. Yet it was a
combination of “this superstition” and their festive spirit that con-

tributed to the rise of art in Greece, and the artists were busy from
the earliest times, making statues of the victors in the games. It was
the highest honor among the people, to be an Olympic victor; he
regarded it a blessing (Seligkeit) and the whole city of the victor felt
itself to be favored. The victors were buried in great ceremonies.105
Thus the festivities themselves culminated in the religious quality of
the victors. The sacred quality of sculpture became civic, public, and
festive.
If in Winckelmann’s historical appraisal, the foremost symbols of
Greek art were born of this festive sacralization, they were also made
possible by the position that Greece held in a philosophical geogra-
phy of symbolic representation, a strand of historical development
that ran parallel to his wider account. This strand was manifest in
his treatise on allegory. Agreeing with William Warburton and what
would later be the opinion of Robert Wood, Winckelmann argued
that hieroglyphs were arbitrary signs that did not correspond clearly
to the signified. Among the Greeks, by contrast, wisdom started to
become more human, and was freed from the cover behind which
it could scarcely be seen. It was in this form that it appeared to the
known poets, and Homer was their foremost teacher.106 This transi-
tion from Egypt to Greece, from obscurantist mysticism to humane
clarity, was then partly reversed in a cyclical progression, in late antiq-
uity. Winckelmann explained that he had not made use in his advice
on allegory of any mystical images, since artists could make little use
of them. Such was the case of the egg in the worship of Bacchus, at a
time when the religion of the Greeks and Romans was covered in the
fog of the superstition of other nations.107
A contrasting model of the philosophical history of symbols was
provided by Herder’s essay Nemesis: ein lehrendes Sinnbild, of 1784.
Nemesis was, Herder wrote, one of the most meaningful and fine
poetic creations of the Greeks, an idea that was difficult to render
into German.108 Its more severe attributes in the lines of Hesiod and
those of Euripides had been replaced by milder ones in Aristotle, for
whom it meant the unwillingness to permit happiness to the unwor-
thy. Aristotle had turned it into a fine moral idea.109 The daughter
of the night of the earlier poets became the “daughter of justice.”
Drawing on Pliny and Pausanias, Herder told the story of the statue
at Rhamnus near Athens. Two of the most famed students of Phidias,
Alcamenes and Agoracritus had competed to create a representation
of the goddess Venus. Since Alcamenes was an Athenian, he was
favored by his countrymen. Thus Agoracritus turned his Venus into
a Nemesis and Phidias helped him to complete it. Nemesis thereby

received from Venus her beautiful attributes.110 How could Venus
represent a Nemesis? Winckelmann had asked in his Remarks on the
History of the Art of Antiquity. The matter could be resolved by ascer-
taining which features were common to both. The bent arm raised
above the chest represented both the just measure with which actions
were rewarded or punished by Nemesis and also the modesty and
restraint that the sculptor Praxiteles later wanted to convey in his
Venus. Therefore Agoracritus, Winckelmann explained, could give to
his Venus the name and the meaning of Nemesis without physically
altering it.111
Herder was at pains to divest his Nemesis of all unsavory or ter-
rifying associations, which, he said, philosophers and others had
been too prone to attribute to it. She had nothing to do, for example,
with the Eumenides. She was, instead, the goddess of measure and
restraint, the strict overseer and tamer of desires, the enemy of arro-
gance and excess. Winckelmann himself, he said, had not discerned
the meaning of the figure with enough care, associating her with fate
or confusing her with a goddess of revenge.112 Yet the most striking
contrast between the two interpreters turned rather on the nature
of the most salient Greek ethic that they each distilled from Greek
symbols and fable. Universal concepts like virtue and vice could not
be rendered visually in the oldest times, Winckelmann observed in his
Allegory, since in the language itself such signs were missing, as we
know from Homer. What was later the Greek word for virtue, arête,
meant only physical bravery and wisdom signified only competence
in mechanical things. Arête was, as we have seen, a magnanimous
masculine virtue, which disdained even life itself if a great enterprise
failed.113 Winckelmann’s avowedly pagan arête was suffused with the
same defiant constancy born of the same emulation of the gods that
he read into Laocoon. Herder’s Nemesis progressed instead toward a
humane ethic shorn of all direct determination from the heavens or
the underworld. The message of Nemesis was that man had to learn
to abide by a sense measure in desires and enterprises by himself, a
virtue named sophrosyne.
Sobriety and restraint were the foundations upon which Greek
sages had built their understanding of justice and morality. “It did
not escape their clear eye,” Herder lauded the Greeks, “that beyond
the great turns of fate, against which man, the true ephemeral being
on earth can do nothing, most things depend on himself, and that
he carries with him everywhere the smaller scales of fate.”114 The
ethical core of the Nemesis statue could be discerned only when one
dismissed the claims by figures like Banier and Simon that Nemesis
was a bloodthirsty goddess of war.115 Sophrosyne was the virtue of
restraint and this was the message of Nemesis. To this end, Herder
mused, an Easterner would have given her a jug of confusion in
her hand, with which she sank the soul of those lacking control in
drunkenness or self-abandon. The Greeks, by contrast, retained for
her the symbols of justice and happiness: the wheel, the reins, the
scales, and thus portrayed Nemesis as benevolent toward the whole
of humanity.116
Many cultivated peoples, Herder explained toward the end of the
essay, had had excellent didactic proverbs that they derived from the
experiences of world history and of human life, and which expressed
a great deal in a single entity, sharpening the sense of the individual
for the good and the true. The orient too had offered sublime and
clever sayings on the articles of happiness and practical wisdom. Yet
no one had matched the Greeks in the combination of clarity and
beauty they brought to bear upon it. “To them the muse had given
that pure vision of all forms in art and poetry, that unexaggerated
feeling for the true and the beautiful in everything, itself incapable
of exaggeration, which also in philosophy remained true to itself and
endowed their shortest proverbs, their lightest symbols with such a
clear contour, such a meaningful elegance [Grazie], which we would
search for in vain among other peoples.”117 The conviction that the
Greek eye could discern ethical principles based on a sense of balance
and measure, that it could give them form and transform them into
beautiful art, and that this art reflected a lighter, less burdened exis-
tence was the most salient philhellenic idea of this generation. The
sense of lightness was conveyed by a comparison with a modern life
plagued by an excess of metaphysics, of feeling, and of knowledge.118
It is interesting to note that in this essay, at least, the ethical beauty
of Greece and Herder’s sophrosyne were a creation of the Greek eye,
whereas Winckelmann’s arête, with its more affirmative account of
the passions, could only flourish in the rapid movement of the poetic
imagination.
How the Ancients Conceived of Death

“Herr Klotz always thinks he is on my heels,” thus Lessing began
his 1769 essay How the Ancients Conceived of Death, “but whenever,
upon his calls, I turn towards him, I see him far to the side, in a
cloud of dust, advancing upon a path which I have never trodden.”119
The antiquarian scholar Christian Adolph Klotz had attempted to
correct a criticism Lessing had made in a footnote to the Laocoon
concerning Count Caylus’s comments on ancient representations of

death.120 That criticism and what Lessing thought was its pedantic
and triumphant tone, were the occasion, as he explained, of his pres-
ent essay. But he took the opportunity to say much more than such a
provocation in itself demanded. Caylus had paid a great deal of atten-
tion to the Etruscans in his work and had prompted Winckelmann
to do the same. The artistic and philosophical vision of death that
Lessing now attributed to antiquity as a whole, but whose origins he
located in Homeric Greece, was based on an interpretation of what
was in reality Etruscan funerary art. For Winckelmann, the Etruscans
stood between the obscurantism of Egypt and the clarity and beauty
of Greece. They had made changes to Greek representations, often
adding for example, wings to deities.121
It was in his discussion of Etruscan art that Winckelmann briefly
touched on representations of death. They portrayed two genii
with black wings, with a hammer in one hand and a snake in the
other, which pull a chariot in which sat the figure or the soul of the
deceased.122 In his essay on allegory of 1766, Winckelmann had dis-
cussed a funerary stone relief in the Albani palace, in which sleep was
represented as a young genie, leaning on an upended torch, “next to
his brother, death, to speak with Homer, and in this same way these
two genii stand in a burial urn in the Collegio Clemetino in Rome.”123
Years later, the classical scholar Georg Zoëga would claim it was not
death, but rather fate that stood next to sleep.124 But in these reflec-
tions, Winckelmann went back to specifically Greek conceptions of
death. The soul, Winckelmann continued, was a butterfly and heads
with butterfly wings reflected Plato’s discussion of the immortality of
the soul. In Baron Stosch’s museum there was a butterfly sitting on
a death’s head, which a sitting philosopher meditated upon.125 Death
in youth was attributed by the Greeks to Apollo and his arrows, just
as the death of maidens was ascribed to Diana. The arrows of Apollo
and Diana were therefore a universal symbol of death, Winckelmann
observed.126 Thus Winckelmann made a sharp distinction between
the Etruscan images, to which he attributed no philosophical or ethi-
cal significance, and the Greek conceptions, anchored in epic and
myth, and containing elevated and beautiful consolations.
Lessing sought to unite in 1769 what Winckelmann had so care-
fully separated three years earlier and to ascribe to the whole of antiq-
uity what Winckelmann had restricted to ancient Greece. Lessing
too, began with a passage in Homer. “The ancient artists,” Lessing
explained, “did not represent death as a skeleton, since they portrayed
it according to the Homeric idea, as the twin brother of sleep, and pre-
sented both, death and sleep, with the similarity which we naturally
expect between twins.” Drawing on Pausanias, he said that on a chest

of cedar wood in the temple of Juno in Elis, they both rested in the
arms of Night, one white, the other black, and both with feet crossed
over.127 The Homeric idea, with the sanction of Pausanias, was the
foundation upon which Lessing built an entire imaginative edi-
fice. He defended it repeatedly against antiquarians like Klotz, who
claimed to discern representations of Amor, the god of love, where,
according to Lessing, they ought to be seeing the twins mentioned
by Pausanias. What can signify the end of life more clearly, Lessing
asked referring to the images on a marble sarcophagus, than a torch
that has been put out and is upside down? The wings of a young genie
that rested on the torch signified the surprise and swiftness of death.
The laurel in the left hand of the genie corresponded to Greek and
Roman usage, and, finally, who could not know, that the butterfly
above the laurel was the image of the soul and particularly that which
had left the body?128
The urn for ashes, the butterfly, and the laurel were the attributes
that distinguished death from sleep.129 Lessing claimed in this essay
not only that the ancients did not represent the abstract idea of death
with skeletons but also that they had established a language of sym-
bols for it which was afterward consistently respected. His objec-
tions to antiquarians who departed from this vision ultimately rested
on the charge that they had failed to discern the consistency of the
ancients. That doctrine of symbolic consistency also led Lessing to
anticipate objections that might be made to his vision. He drew a
distinction between art and poetic representation: “The poetic por-
traits [Gemälde] are of far greater scope than the portraits of art:
in particular, art can express, in its personification of an abstract
concept, only what is universal and essential in it,” since incidental
things would render it unrecognizable. The “poet, by contrast, who
raises his personified abstract concept into the class of active beings,
can allow it to act up to a certain point, against this concept itself.”
Moreover, Homer distinguished between ker and thanatos. The for-
mer could mean an early, violent, and inopportune death, whereas
the latter was a natural death or the condition of death itself.130 For
Simon Richter, Lessing’s essay aimed at establishing a euphemism for
death that would assist an escape from corporeality, from materiality,
nature, and literal meaning. This accounted for his interpretations of
language and for his leap from Homeric allegory to Roman funerary
art.131 But the ambition to discern an unbroken tradition of funer-
ary representation was more than an escape from direct depictions of
mortality. It was the claim that a consistent symbolism could not only
evoke but also sustain a milder humanity, that could preserve it from
the culture of the gladiatorial arena.
Herder’s essay of 1786, divided into a series of letters and his
second engagement with the subject, had the same title as that of
Lessing. He doubted whether one could read such a neat and con-
sistent symbolism into funerary art, noting also that the Romans
and Etruscans loved the festive depiction of centaurs and genii that
Lessing had read as solemn representations of death. The genii were
in any case merely symbols of rest and guardians of stillness.132 In the
third letter, Herder took up Lessing’s point about the clarity of the
Greek language but he insisted that the distinction was between ker
and moira, with moira the goddess of fate, signifying the hard neces-
sity of fate. This was the principal concept of the ancients concerning
death, and, Herder added, “the philosophically most worthy concept,
which man can create for himself about a necessity so contrary to his
will and yet so commensurate with his nature. Since the idea of a
high commanding fate passed out of the mind of man, his soul crept
along with glances of petty caution and with the anxieties of a low
resilience.”133
Whereas Lessing’s Greeks had elaborated a codified system of
signs that art could employ to craft the image of death in a gentler
light, Herder’s Greeks sought instead to nobly evade its countenance.
Thanatos was a terrible being to the Greeks, he wrote. Death was to
them so horrible and hated, that they did not dare utter its name.134
The dead, Herder wrote, had to cross the ocean or a tremendous
current. How did they get across? “One chose happier ship captains
[Schiffer]” These were birds, fish, genii in service, or dolphins. In
other grave paintings the transit was a festive bacchic procession.135
In any case, art in antiquity was a clearly defined visual language
obscure to us, Herder observed.136 Death and sleep had never been
portrayed together on a Greek grave. Indeed, if anywhere, this had
occurred in the grave paintings of the early Christians. This was a
correction of Lessing’s assertion to the contrary. It had only been
later that superstition had corrupted the original sentiments to arrive
at the Totentanz , the grotesque spectacle of the Middle Ages, equally
emphatically denounced by Lessing.137 Herder’s Greeks, despite their
oblique references to death and their gentle evasion, were more resil-
ient than Lessing’s. Yet both discerned in the funerary lexicon and
symbols of Greece, an ethic that predated the advent of superstition
and which spoke of the absence of many psychological burdens insep-
arable from modern lives.
C H A P T E R 3
The Women of Athens I: The Varieties

of Enlightenment History
The Visibility of Athenian Women

Jean Le Rond D’Alembert suggested in his article on Geneva, written
for the Encyclopédie in 1757, that its only significant disadvantage was
the lack of a public theatre.1 His cheek elicited a celebrated, detailed,
and sophisticated response from Jean-Jacques Rousseau.2 His mag-
nificent riposte, the Letter to D’Alembert on the Theatre, was dated
March 1758. As well as offering a detailed image of the civic idyll
that he saw as the antithesis of the vices promoted by the theatre, it
discussed the nature and power of women.3 No other figure loomed
so large for German scholars in the late eighteenth century who stud-
ied what came to be called the “characteristics” of the female sex,
transcending even the starkest political divisions at the time of the
French Revolution.4 One aim of the Letter was to draw out the con-
trast between ancient and modern institutions and what it revealed
about the morals and virtues of each.
One of the chief measures of such virtue was the role and, cru-
cially, the visibility of women, a topic at the heart of the historical
problem of Greek women. The ancients, Rousseau wrote, had in gen-
eral a very great respect for women “but they showed this respect by
refraining from exposing them to the public judgment and thought
to honor their modesty by keeping quiet about their other virtues.”5
Rousseau was referring to Pericles’s famous funeral oration in which
the latter stated that the highest virtue a woman could aim for was
not to be spoken of in public.6 The only roles on the ancient stage,
he observed, representing women in love and marriageable girls were
those of slaves and prostitutes. Open vice, he concluded from this,
shocked them less than offended modesty. The contrast with modern
times for Rousseau undoubtedly favored the ancients.7 Though later
corrected by a careful reader who wrote to him, Rousseau asserted

that Sparta, that light of antiquity in his mind, had not even pos-
sessed a theatre.8 The ascendancy of the theatre in the little repub-
lic of Geneva would eventually make the acting troupe the heart of
city politics and elections would take place in the actresses’ dressing
rooms.9
Ancient theatre had been great, partly because it was innovation,
partly due the sacred character of the tragedies, and because all the
plays were drawn from the “national antiquities which the Greeks
idolized.” Tragedy, of course, had initially been played only by men,
since the ancients did not tolerate the mixture of men and women on
the stage, something that in his day was a “school of bad morals.”10
Amid his praise of the ancient model, Rousseau pointed out that
women never appeared with men in public and did not have the best
places at the theatre, adding that they were not always permitted to
go and that it was well known that there was a death penalty for those
who dared to show themselves at the Olympic Games.11
Just as it was possible to recover the image of a statue from many
broken pieces, Friedrich Schlegel wrote in 1795, so it would be possi-
ble to recover a complete picture of Greek femininity from the figure
of Diotima, an image that would most pleasantly surprise the friends
of Greek antiquity.12 Her existence represented the strong possibility
that there was a whole class of Greek women whose education and
spirit enabled them to speak as profoundly and eloquently as Diotima
had in the Symposium.13 Contrary to the disdainful assertions of the
historian Cornelius de Pauw, who had said that only the great cour-
tesans were educated, Schlegel was trying to recover the female com-
ponent within the apotheosis of classical Athenian culture.14 Diotima
was therefore not an isolated instance that embodied a poetically con-
structed femininity: she was instead very real and constituted the fin-
est trace of a whole layer of Greek history.
It was clearly important for Schlegel to assert the historicity of
Diotima; that such women had actually existed at the high point
of Greek culture. Schlegel’s former teacher at Göttingen, Christian
Gottlob Heyne, doyen of late eighteenth-century German classi-
cal philology, recognized the problem, when he reviewed Schlegel’s
essays, including those on Diotima and on women in Greek tragedy,
in 1797. What Schlegel had written did not exactly correspond, Heyne
explained, to what was known about antiquity on these subjects.15
And yet the birth of this freer Greek femininity was not literary or
poetic, important though this undoubtedly became, but intensely his-
torical, as was the point of view of its adversaries, whose provocations
THE WOMEN OF ATHENS I 59
and refutations and whose background presence did much to mould

its message. Moreover, the advent of Schlegel’s Greek femininity was
part of a wider enterprise and discussion concerning the historical
condition, power, and status of Athenian women, hosted by Christoph
Martin Wieland in his journals in the mid to late 1790s, and whose
own approach to the matter deliberately affronted all the orthodoxies,
including the already difficult issue of the boundary between history
and fable.16 Wieland and Schlegel, and the pedagogue and philologist
Friedrich Jacobs, for all their radical claims about women, had, as we
shall see, different philosophical agendas and priorities and drew on
different traditions to arrive at their respective Greek feminine ideals.
But they shared an interest in philological and historical controversy.
The occasion for the first public discussion of this Greek feminin-
ity was a debate about whether ancient Athenian women were allowed
to visit the theatre and it took place mainly in the journals managed
by Wieland, the Teutscher Merkur and the Attisches Museum in 1796–
1797.17 At stake in this discussion was a key characteristic and the
very foundation of Schlegel’s Greek femininity as he had expressed it
in 1795: the relative freedom of women. In the first instance this free-
dom meant visibility at the heart of the cultural life of Attic Greece
in its heyday: the comedies and especially tragedies of the theatre,
precisely what Rousseau had praised the ancients for keeping within
strict bounds. While in later times such a debate would have been
assigned its place in more specialized discussions, late eighteenth-
century studies of such questions of antiquity did not yet belong to
the category of Privataltertümer, or “private antiquities,” which we
would now call “social history,” and which evolved a separate status
in the following century.
The eighteenth century, by contrast, studied these questions
and many others under the heading of Sittengeschichte rather than
Privataltertümer.18 This distinction is of the utmost importance for
our story. The former term, which we could render as “history of
manners,” is a much broader one that very often meant a sensibil-
ity to the intimate connection between private customs and political
history, between social life and the character and development of the
state, a relationship in which the state was seen as vulnerable and
beholden to changes in private life. It is this unitary quality of the
debate, carried out in literary journals with a wide readership among
the literate public, and the absence of disciplinary boundaries, that
meant that assertions about seemingly mundane questions of social
history could easily and more immediately acquire a wider political
resonance.
In his essay on Diotima of 1795, Schlegel agreed with the histori-

ans that the daily life of Greek women had been one of general exclu-
sion from male worlds. But he had wanted to reserve certain areas
of exception in which his Diotimas could find a niche in a shared
environment. One of these was the theatre. He took the view that
women could at least attend tragedies if not comedies.19 It was this
assertion that prompted the response of Karl August Böttiger, a phi-
lologist and pedagogue resident in Weimar since 1791, when Herder
had arranged for him to take up a teaching post there.20 Together
with Göttingen, Weimar, which was known as the “German Athens,”
was the center of learning in Germany that most intensely examined
the historical reality of ancient Greek women.21 Böttiger had become
one of the most active and enterprising of German newspaper edi-
tors and publicists.22 In the course of his career, he had become a
popular speaker in the Friday Club of the literary elite of Jena and
Weimar with talks on archeological subjects, and had become some-
thing of an expert on German as well as French and English theatre.
His enthusiasm for the theatre, which included taking some of his
students to plays, had aroused the disapproval of Herder who, as a
Protestant pastor, feared for their innocence.23 Many had been the
impulses that bound women and antiquity together for Böttiger. It
had been one of lights of Weimar literary circles, the Duchess Anna
Amalia, who had encouraged his interest in archeology and mythol-
ogy, which from the end of the 1790s became his main preoccupa-
tion.24 One of his enduring interests was the luxury, fashion, and
forms of political power that could be gained by Roman women,
comparing in one article their revolutionary activities with those of
contemporary Parisian women.25
In January 1796, Böttiger published an article entitled “Were
Women in Athens in the Audience of Dramatic Pieces?” in Wieland’s
journal, the Teutscher Merkur, in which he asserted that honorable
Athenian women, who never went about in public, were to be seen
as little in the theatre as in the assembly.26 And he went on to say
that not even the courtesans did so.27 Böttiger criticized one of the
authorities on ancient Athenian law, Samuel Petit, for having followed
Isaac Causabon in believing that there had been a law regulating the
seating arrangements for women at the theatre.28 They had been con-
fused by a comparison with Rome, where women were indeed per-
mitted to attend plays. Causabon and others, Böttiger argued, had
been taken in by witty Athenian comedians, such as Alexis, of the
New Comedy, a fragment of whose play, γυναικοχρατεια, or the rule
of women had been preserved by Pollux. These comedians, he pointed
out, liked to play around with the notion of an “inverted world” and
hence they would talk about women having seats reserved for them at
the theatre. Nothing could be more natural than the comic subject of
Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, which he associated with this “new-fangled
right of Women,” (citing this in English) and its champion, Mary
Wollstonecraft.29
Böttiger, however, did not fail to avail himself of the same come-
dians when they made observations that favored his case.30 As a final
argument he pointed out that such misogynistic works as those of
Euripides could not have been performed in mixed company and
compared it to modern English drinking clubs that “did not spare
women” in their harsh wit. Sparta represented a significant contrast
to Athens. Women were more at liberty to visit the theatre and some
of the games.31 His refutations had some credibility for subsequent
studies and as late as 1898 he was cited as the main authority of the
nonattendance camp of this question.32
Böttiger’s categorical refusal to allow any exceptions to the theatre
attendance prohibition, which went beyond even Rousseau’s austere
assumptions, threatened to obliterate the only public participatory
trace of Friedrich Schlegel’s historical Diotima. He manifested his
displeasure at Böttiger in the preface to the collection of essays enti-
tled The Greeks and the Romans, in which the Diotima essay was pub-
lished for the second time, and which appeared early in 1797.33 In
January, Böttiger wrote to Friedrich’s brother, August Wilhelm, with
whom Friedrich was in the closest personal and intellectual contact,
saying that he had gotten into trouble with the latter over the the-
atre issue.34 Friedrich Schlegel had until then been in friendly regu-
lar contact with Böttiger, who had acted as a go-between for him
and Wieland in order for some essays and translations of Schlegel’s to
appear in Wieland’s journals.35
In March 1797, Böttiger published a rebuttal of Schlegel enti-
tled “Were Athenian Women Really Excluded from the Theater?”36
Quickly grasping the point that mattered, he said that “Herr Schlegel
cannot bring himself to exclude Athenian women, which he would
very much like to raise to the rank of educated women, such as the
Platonic Diotima, from the sublime school of Athenian citizens, the
theatre.” In a city where men were careful not to utter the slightest
indecent word in front of them, Böttiger argued, visits to the theatre
by women would have contravened “all the sound Athenian manners
[Sittsamkeit] enshrined in law.” To appear nowhere in public was “the
first and holiest of the ethical prescriptions [Sittenvorschriften] of
Athenian women and girls.”37 Schlegel had accused him of neglecting
a passage of Plato’s Laws that he said proved the contrary. Plato had
said that if prizes in the poetic contests were to be granted to those
who had generated the most enjoyment, then the old men would
grant them for the Homeric rhapsodes and the educated women to
tragedy. In this instance, Böttiger pulled the historical carpet from
under Schlegels’s feet. He said Plato’s reference to educated women
was more likely to refer to those in his ideal state, “ennobled with
every element of male culture.”38
That there was a female contribution to Greek culture and that
this was based on the historical reality and visibility of a class of
educated Greek women were the two points that Böttiger now tried
to refute. Drawing on his love of art and archeology, he introduced
a final twist in the argument designed to bury the notion of his-
torical Diotimas. When the Athenians wanted to honor their heroine
Leana, he said, they had represented her in a monument as a lion-
ess and when the painter Polygnotus wanted to paint his beloved
Elpinice, daughter of the great Militades, he could do no other but
represent her as the legendary Trojan woman Laodice, in a painting
depicting the conquest of Troy. And so, Böttiger concluded, even in
images womanhood could only show itself under the name of a god-
dess or heroine.39
On March 13, 1797, Schlegel thanked him for sending him a copy
of the article, commenting that he was glad to have given occasion
for a discussion but that some of what Böttiger had said had “gone
beyond what was right” concerning himself. In any case, his point, he
wrote, had been not to make all Athenian women into Diotimas, but
rather to highlight the difference between Dorian (Spartan) and Attic
(Athenian) femininity.40 For Schlegel then, Attic-Athenian literature
contained the traces of a historical Dorian-Spartan femininity, where
women were freer and which had come into contact with Athens.41
The energetic publicist Böttiger had the last word on the matter but
behind the issue of the visibility of women at the theatre stood the
wider problem of the corruption of manners that such visibility might
intimate, a problem inextricably linked with sensuality, luxury, and
excess.
The Problem of Luxury

In November 1780 the Societé des antiquités of Cassel, one of those
small German principalities with a prince who was a patron of
scholarship, announced the subject of the essay competition for the
following year: “What was the luxury of the Athenians from the time
of Pisistratus till Philip of Macedon and how did it gradually bring
about the fall of the state?”42 The premise of the question left no
doubt as to the power attributed to luxury and its intimate relation to
the integrity of the state. The winner of the competition in 1781 was
Christoph Meiners, the professor at Göttingen and future author of
the immensely popular four-volume History of the Female Sex (1788–
1800). The eighteenth century had seen the culmination of a com-
prehensive challenge to a whole range of intellectual traditions hostile
to luxury, the most successful of which, and the one which engaged
all these hostile traditions in a wide-ranging rebuttal, was that of the
protagonists of the Scottish Enlightenment, particularly Adam Smith
and David Hume.43
“Luxury,” wrote David Hume in 1752, “is a word of an uncertain
signification and may be taken in a good as well as in a bad sense. In
general it means great refinement in the gratification of the senses
and any degree of it may be innocent or blamable, according to the
age, or country, or condition of the person.”44 In the first half of the
eighteenth century the contest over luxury had turned partly on the
question of the military fitness of the state, where the opponents of
luxury decried the “effeminacy: engendered by sensual and associated
excesses.” The more comprehensive defense of luxury mounted by the
new theories of commercial society advanced by Hume and Smith
had yet to be articulated.45 If Sparta was the focus of the idealization
of ancient frugality then Rome was the object of study of decline and
corruption where luxury played a role of varying magnitude. The rise
of Rome, and particularly the decisive confrontation with Carthage,
an opulent commercial power, was seen in terms of a praiseworthy
austerity by Montesquieu in 1734 and Rousseau in 1749.46
“What has chiefly induced severe moralists to declaim against
refinement in the arts,” David Hume explained, “is the example of
ancient Rome, which joining to its poverty and rusticity, virtue and
public spirit, rose to such a surprising height of grandeur and liberty”
but that having learned, supposedly, from the conquered provinces
the “Asiatic luxury,” it had been corrupted. Yet it would be easy to
prove against these writers, he said, that what they ascribed to lux-
ury had really been caused by ill-government.47 Between those who
decried Roman luxury as a chief cause of ruin and those, like Hume,
who absolved it of this charge completely, Montesquieu occupied a
middle position. In his essay of 1734 Montesquieu was more con-
cerned, like Theodor Mommsen a century later, to emphasize the role
of the expansion of the Roman state as the cause of its downfall.48 But
in the Spirit of the Laws of 1748, the treatment of sumptuary legisla-
tion was the occasion for a link between luxury, the wealth of women,
and the health of the republican state.
Sumptuary laws had been denounced by some eighteenth-century
defenders of luxury as a feudal institution designed to block the rise
of those from the lower estates and protect aristocratic interests.49 It
was in the Roman Republic at the moment of its decisive world-his-
torical confrontation with Carthage that the link between sumptu-
ary laws and the wealth of women was made by Montesquieu: “The
laws of the first Romans concerning inheritances thought only to
observe the spirit of the division of lands; they did not sufficiently
restrict the wealth of women and thereby left a door open to lux-
ury, which is always inseparable from this wealth.” The ill became
felt, Montesquieu explained, at the time of the Punic Wars (with
Carthage), which as we have seen, was understood by him and oth-
ers as a glorious contest between virtuous frugality and exuberant
opulence. This was the time (169 BC) when the Voconian Law,
which greatly restricted the inheritance rights of women, was pro-
mulgated. Cato the elder, another heroic figure for critics of luxury,
“contributed with all his power to the passage of this law.”50 It was
meant to deprive women, not of all inheritances, but only consider-
able fortunes.
Montesquieu confined himself to explaining that such laws had
been “in conformity with the spirit of a good republic, where one
should make it so that this sex cannot avail itself, for the sake of
luxury, either of its wealth or the expectation of wealth.” But he had
mitigated the force of this concession to the value of that law by say-
ing it had been contrary to natural feeling and that good men had
evaded it and arranged for their daughters to receive their inheritance
either by not enrolling themselves in the census or by arranging a
trust fund.51 A century later, in a study of the Voconian Law pub-
lished in 1843, Johann Jacob Bachofen, the Basel jurist and historian
later famous for his theory of “Mother Right,” made a more explicit
and emphatic link between that law and the survival of the Roman
state during its key formative crisis. Women were the main driving
force behind the excessive fortunes threatening to undermine the
military prowess of Rome. Whereas Montesquieu had balanced two
moral imperatives, there was no question in Bachofen’s study about
where right lay.52
It was this union of a single moral imperative with the great-
ness and stability of the state that Christoph Meiners applied to the
history of luxury in Athens, a narrative in which women played a

significant role. His essay was published as the History of the Luxury
of the Athenians in 1781.53 In his brief remarks on the condition of
women under various forms of government, Montesquieu had not
established a historical scheme with a discernible chain of causality
that presented a succession of historical periods and systematically
assessed the impact of various actors and their conduct on the course
of development.54 It was Meiners’s intention, working in the tradi-
tion we have termed Sittengeschichte, to hint at just such a scheme.
At the opening of the book he disingenuously stated that his was a
middle position between the most extreme defenders and the most
emphatic detractors of luxury. But one trait of his narrative gave the
lie to this disclaimer. He was consistently of the view that the vanity
and infidelity of women were to be reckoned among the more serious
aspects of national corruption.55 He defined corruption at the outset
as that which is designed “to enlarge and satisfy our senses or certain
ruling passions, especially vanity and ambition.”56 If libertine love
or even infidelity to the marriage bed were more common in polite
ages, Hume had written in 1752, when it was regarded only as a piece
of gallantry, drunkenness, a much more odious vice, was much less
common.57 Such a value judgment could not be further from the
opinion of Meiners, who regarded Hume as too much of an apologist
for luxury, and for whom women, or rather Athenian courtesans, had
given a vital impetus to luxury and its corruptions at critical junctures
in Greek history.
Luxury was absent from Athens in the earliest times Meiners
asserted, and those authors who were said to have hinted otherwise
had been misinterpreted or had themselves been mistaken.58 Diodorus
had been mistaken to speak of Ionian sensuality and weakness at the
time of Solon. Yet in all the laws of Solon, he said, there was no
trace of this but rather of the contrary.59 The most distinguished citi-
zens of Athens did not amass great material possessions and Meiners
was fond of citing the example of Alcmaeon, who “made his fortune
neither through trade, nor agriculture, nor cattle-rearing,” but from
chariot races. Other distinguished families did not have much of a for-
tune and at this time of poverty the frugality of Athenians manners
(Sitten) were “nothing other than pure and unspoiled.”60 The finest
age of Athens had been, he wrote, the 30-year period after the first
Persian invasion of 490 BC. He referred to the passage of Plato’s Laws
that designated an “age of the rule of the laws,” in which the better
part of the citizens were occupied with competitive games, with the
hunt, and with affairs of state rather than sensual pleasures. Though
not seen in public apart from at feasts, women, Meiners suggested,

fell victim, perhaps earlier than men, to the luxury of vanity and sen-
suality. They even developed a craze for rare birds— Ορνιθομανια.61
Drawing just as much on Xenophon’s Oeconomicus as Meiners, the
historian Cornelius de Pauw, discussing the subject of women’s lux-
ury in Athens in his Recherches philosophiques sur les Grecs seven years
later, wrote that “the women, adopting the most extravagant modes,
carried particularly the use of paints to an excess hitherto unexampled
among civilized nations.”62
Having established that Athens’ status as trade and imperial cap-
ital brought about the new needs and desires that fomented vanity
and luxury, and drawing heavily on Xenophon’s censorious mem-
oirs, which had denounced the growing neglect of bodily exer-
cises, Meiners delineated the role that a certain class of women
had played at this critical juncture in history. Of all the kinds of
luxury that came about between the eightieth and the ninetieth
Olympiads, he explained, none was more advantageous for painters
and sculptors but more harmful to manners (Sitten) than the fast
spreading penchant for the love of courtesans, first exercised and
taught in Athens by Aspasia. This art, like the others, originated
in Greek Asia and only later entered Europe. Its first capital in
Greece had been Corinth, the birthplace of Phryne, famed for her
extraordinary beauty. “Just as artists and fighters,” Meiners wrote,
“show their strength and talent at Olympia and other places, she
made the whole of assembled Greece, at the feast of Neptune in
Eleusis, the witness of her unblemished beauty and walked down
into the sea naked and with loosened hair.” These courtesans were
not only tolerated but were also priestesses with temples and feasts.
In Corinth, the defeat of Xerxes and the Greek victory had been
attributed to the prayers of those consecrated to the service of the
goddess of love.63
Eleusis was one of the most important religious centers in Greece
and in this passage Meiners was in awe of the religious power that
had been combined with the “art” of the courtesans. But ultimately
this art was part of a manipulative and power-seeking ploy on the part
of this category of women. Aspasia, he said, had filled Greece with
them and he mentioned the common accusation made of her that
she had been the instigator of Pericles’s wars. But it was the cultiva-
tion and perfection of her art more than her interventions in poli-
tics that were decisive for Meiners: “By this she damaged the whole
nation more than if she had been the instigator of the Peloponnesian
Wars. Because of the courtesans, not only was the health of the young
men weakened early but they hindered the formation of their hearts
and spirit . . . The thirst of noble ambition and the desire for glory
and great deeds was snuffed out.” The courtesans even embarked on
fleets with expeditions and wrote books about their arts, as if they
were philosophers.64
By the age of Demosthenes, Meiners lamented, courtesans where
everywhere.65 Though not the creators of luxury, Aspasia and her
successors, pounced on an Athens bloated by trade and profits.
Flattered by the presence of fine artists and sculptors, they developed
with cunning and power-seeking ingenuity, arts that had decisively
eroded Meiners’s own masculine ideal of youth engaged in games,
in the hunt, and in affairs of state. The story of luxury in Athens was
the story of the foundations of a more serious and formidable power
inimical to the vitality of the state. In this way, Meiners arrived,
ironically, at a similar conclusion to his contemporary Adam Smith
when the latter passed judgment in the Wealth of Nations on the
relationship between women and luxury as follows: “Luxury in the
fair sex, while it enflames perhaps the passion for enjoyment, seems
always to weaken, and frequently to destroy altogether, the pow-
ers of generation.”66 Questions about the significance of women in
matters of luxury and narratives of corruption could ultimately be
resolved by the comparisons and theses advanced in wider historical
accounts.
The History of the Female Sex

In the absence of treatises dedicated specifically to the subject, late
Enlightenment Germany offered three forms of inquiry for those,
like Schlegel, curious about the life of ancient Greek women.67
First, the work of philologists, like Carl Gotthold Lenz or Böttiger,
whose confident and at times strident exegesis might irritate the
more open-minded. Second, the genre of historiography known as
“conjectural history,” in which the origin and development of social
institutions was discussed in broad historical sweeps that paid visits
of varying length and detail to Greece, Athens, and their women.68
Third, earlier legal treatises on ancient Athenian law, specifically
those of Pettit and Meursius available only to readers of Latin, and
which, as we have seen, were attacked on this question from a phil-
ological point of view by Böttiger.69 In this section, we shall be
primarily concerned with the second of the three, returning to the
philological response to conjectural history in the following chap-

ter. Its most extensive and detailed formulations, as part of wider
works, were prepared in G öttingen in the late 1780s, an effort led by
Christoph Meiners and Ernst Brandes.70 G öttingen was celebrated
by Wilhelm Dilthey in the twentieth century for having systemati-
cally developed the principles of a new science of history.71 It was
arguably the most important German university of the second half
of the eighteenth century.72
The rehabilitation of the Greek women of history was premised
not merely on the debate about their rights, power, and condition in
ancient Greek and Athenian society, but also on the implicit contest
with other comparative scenarios of a putative antiquity. Foremost
among these was that of ancient Germany as described by Tacitus,
where women were said to be more respected and present in pub-
lic life, a set of ideas extended to “Gallic” and “Celtic” peoples
more generally. “A woman must not imagine herself exempt from
thoughts of manly virtues,” Tacitus had written, “or immune from
the hazards of war. That is why she is reminded, in the very rites
that bless her marriage at its outset, that she is coming to share a
man’s toils and dangers, that in peace and war alike she is to be his
partner in all his sufferings and achievements.” 73 He had also said
the ancient Germans believed “there resides in women something
holy and prophetic and so do not scorn their advice or disregard
their replies.” 74
The broader Tacitean account of Germanic, Celtic, and Gallic
women, with its narrative of original equality and political personal-
ity, as well as a series of often “manly” virtues, was a common theme
of eighteenth-century historiography. Edward Gibbon’s first volume
of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published
in 1776, described it in unambiguous terms: “The Germans treated
their women with esteem and confidence, consulted them on every
occasion of importance, and fondly believed that in their breasts
resided a sanctity and wisdom more than human. Some of these inter-
preters of fate, such as Velleda, in the Batavian war, governed, in the
name of the deity, the fiercest nations of Germany.”75 The lives of
ancient Athenian women and their relation to public affairs could
not appear more different. Whereas the ancient Germans seemed to
unify the religious personae of the feminine with its prophetic qual-
ity, the religious persona of Greek femininity in this period, as we
shall see, was born of the physical beauty of famous courtesans, a
religious power that stood, not in harmony, but in tension with the
civic and political world. We find the Tacitean outlook in the work of
Antoine-Yves Goguet in 1758, in that of Lord Kames in 1774, and in
that of figures as far apart ideologically as Christoph Meiners in 1788
and Theodor von Hippel in 1792, who used it as historical evidence
in his plea for greater rights for women.76
This narrative, ubiquitous and impervious to political divides, was
itself an alternative not only to philhellenic notions of a more empow-
ered Greek femininity but also to an understanding of sacred scrip-
ture that was premised on an original prelapsarian holiness of the
feminine. It was mentioned in the work of the Glasgow law professor
(and disciple of Adam Smith) John Millar in 1771, whose version of
the condition of ancient Celtic women was drawn from Julius Caesar’s
unflattering picture rather than from Tacitus.77 German readers of
Luther’s Bible would also have found in Genesis 3:15 a verse that
says: “I will put enmity between you and the woman and between
her seed and your seed.” It was possible to read into this an original
innocence of the feminine and its enduring resistance to evil and that
text was interpreted in eighteenth-century Germany as presaging, at
the time of the creation, the Virgin Mary and the coming of Christ.78
It is important to remember that all these scenarios were most often
included in the same volume, offering a composite comparative per-
spective that betrayed the author’s preferred hierarchy of moral and
political virtues for women. The philhellenic ideals of Greek feminin-
ity for classical Athens, therefore, had to contend with the Tacitean
and the prelapsarian understandings of the ancient condition of the
female sex.
In 1788, Meiners published the first volume of his History of
the Female Sex, a large and ambitious project that, designed for the
instruction of young middle-class ladies, was the ultimate exercise in
Sittengeschichte or a history of manners, embedded in a racial scheme
of the history of humanity.79 Together with de Pauw’s Recherches
Philosophiques sur les Grecs published the same year, it represented
the latest modern authority for German readers on the condition of
women in ancient Greece and particularly in Athens.80 Other, less
recent but still contemporary and often-cited commentators on this
subject included Antoine-Yves Goguet’s Origins of the Laws, Arts
and Sciences, and the Abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, whose multi-
volume work Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce dans le milieu du
IVe siècle was a comprehensive survey of Greek life and history and
the standard modern reference work in Germany at that time for that
subject.81
An Original Democracy and

Comparisons to Tacitus
Legend has it that when Cecrops, the mythical king of Athens, was
building the walls of the city, he saw an olive tree and a fountain
spring out of the earth. He sought out the Delphic Oracle to ask
what it meant. The oracle said that Minerva, represented by the olive
tree, and Neptune, represented by the water, each claimed the right
of giving their name to the city and that the people were to decide on
it. Cecrops assembled all his subjects, men and women. Minerva car-
ried it by one vote, that of a woman. “We should not be surprised,”
Goguet commented, “that in the first ages, the women among the
Greeks were admitted into their public assemblies, and had a right to
vote: they enjoyed the same advantage among many other nations of
antiquity. The women were admitted in our national assemblies by
our ancestors the Gauls, and they took no resolution without their
advice. It was the same with the ancient people of Germany.”82 Later
when Attica was damaged by a flood, it was believed that Neptune
was enraged. To appease him, the Athenians resolved to punish the
women and decided that they should not be admitted to the assem-
blies. Goguet does not offer an account of the historical mirror of this
legend, in other words, the demise of that original political equality
in history.
Thirteen years later John Millar, in his Observations Concerning the
Distinction of Ranks in Society, a book widely consulted in Germany,
hazarded an explanation for the disenfranchisement and disempow-
erment of women in general. Very close to Adam Smith, his mentor,
he had become professor of civil law at Glasgow in 1761. “It may
explain this piece of ancient mythology,” Millar wrote, “to observe
that in the reign of Cecrops marriage was first established among
the Athenians.” Children became used to the authority of the father,
“who from his superior strength and military talents became the head
and governor of the family and as the influence of the women was
thereby greatly diminished, it was to be expected that they should in
a little time be entirely excluded from those great assemblies which
deliberated upon the public affairs of the nation.” Millar claimed, in
passing, the same distinction for the distant antiquity of his nation
that Goguet had claimed for his, saying that among the ancient
Britons women had been allowed to vote.83
What in writers like Goguet and Millar were passing references
to the national characteristics of a very distant antiquity were made
by Meiners into an ordering principle for the entire history of
the female sex. In 1787 he published a short essay “Contribution

towards the Study of the Female Sex Among Different Peoples” in
the Berlinische Monatsschrift, the same journal that eight years later
would publish Schlegel’s manifesto on Greek femininity.84 It served
as the announcement for the project that would begin to appear the
following year and contained in a nutshell his underlying premise:
“I will show in greater detail elsewhere that the good or ill treat-
ment of women among every nation (not counting insignificant
exceptions) stood in the closest relation to the strength or weak-
ness of its mind and body and with the excellence or abjectness
of its disposition.” Since G öttingen at that time had become the
assembly point of travel reports from all over the world, Meiners
felt entitled to proceed according to an ethnographic scheme.85All
extra-European peoples were accused of varying degrees of super-
stitious disdain and fear of menstruation and pregnancy, which led
to various instances of cruelty. The “Mongolian peoples,” together
with the American Indians, came in for the harshest condemna-
tion.86 The “Celtic peoples” represented the antithesis of this mis-
treatment. And yet it was “one of the puzzles of the history of
peoples” that the ancient Greeks were the only nation of Celtic ori-
gin that had similar ideas not only about such impurity, but about
women themselves and treated them in a similar way as the Asiatic
(morgenländisch) peoples.87
In the first volume of his History of the Female Sex, Meiners wrote
that according to Tacitus the ancient German woman had not been a
slave but rather a life-comrade (Gefährtin des Lebens). Their foremost
virtue in his account was, again, decidedly martial. “Even in the middle
of the struggle,” he wrote, “women and mothers mixed with the lines
of the combatants.” They did not hesitate to put to death, Meiners
observed with approval, any cowards who fled the task of defending
their people. Bravery and love of freedom had been preserved among
the Celtic belles “undiminished till the beginning of our century.”88
This was certainly a strident observation for a writer who claimed
that the purpose of his work was to show his young female readers
how to choose an appropriate husband and thus avoid the fate of
the Eastern women.89 The Celtic women, Meiners enthused, draw-
ing on the recent work of the legal historian Carl Heinrich Dreyer
as well as Tacitus, were not only not excluded from society and were
not only present at feasts and temples, but were also admitted to the
foremost secrets of the druids. To them was also attributed the holy
gift of divining the future.90 The clue to the significance of all these
remarks and boasts was given by Meiners’s passing comment, after
describing the military virtues of ancient Germanic women, that

“such women deserved a different treatment to that of the childish
women of the East.” In other words, despite his avowal of a system
that judged the worth of nations on the basis of their treatment of
women and vanquished enemies, ultimately, it was the women them-
selves who were to blame for the treatment they got. And it was this
point of view, together with the idealization of Tacitean Germany and
Dreyer’s German antiquity that colored his consideration of Greece
and Athens. The only Greek woman who implicitly approximated the
Germanic martial ideal was Telesilla of Argos, a poet who had rallied
the women to the defense of the city against a Spartan attack. Under
her leadership the women of Argos had taken over the ramparts and
repulsed the assault of one of the Spartan kings, Cleomenes, and
chased the other, Demaratus, away.91
The Laws of Solon and Life in Athens

The most important point of departure for discussing the condition
of women in Athens was the interpretation of the laws of Solon, the
legendary reformer of the early sixth century BC.92 For the life and
character of Athenian wives, Xenophon’s treatise on the household
and his remarks comparing the Athenian and Spartan constitutions
provided the most important point of orientation.93 To learn about
the condition of women in Greece, Meiners wrote in the section of
his history dedicated to it, we had to know what Xenophon said in
Oeconomicus and Solon in his laws. This would make it easier to decide
if men and women in Greece were happier and if the latter fulfilled the
conditions of venerable women to a greater degree than the peoples of
Europe today.94 All the laws of Solon that concerned the “other sex”
(the usual designation for women in Meiners’s text) revealed, accord-
ing to Meiners, either the oriental spirit of the celebrated lawgiver
or else the Eastern vices and inclinations of the Athenian women.
The first point to note, he said, was Solon’s absolute silence on their
education. To Solon, he wrote, women appeared to be not confined
enough.
Drawing on Pettit’s commentary on Attic law, Meiners pointed
out the rights given by Solon to fathers and guardians enabling them
to punish women for transgressions. And yet Solon’s failure to restrict
the size of dowries meant that rich maidens sometimes became “rulers
of their men,” as often happened in the Orient.95 Meiners’s dystopia
always included the paradoxical existence of the “Oriental seclusion”
and oppression of women combined with the enhanced possibility of

their personal dominance over the men in their household.96 Solon’s
laws on women represented for Meiners an unsavory proximity to
the Orient. By contrast, Solon’s role in Millar’s account was only to
“have made regulations for preventing the women from violating the
decorum which was esteemed so essential to their character.” Those
referred to, were the provision whereby no matron should go from
home with more than three garments nor a larger quantity of provi-
sions than could be purchased for an ebolus and that at night a matron
should always have an attendant and a lighted torch carried before
her.97
It is important to note that the Athenian women discussed here
were essentially those of the upper classes. In his treatise on the his-
tory of ancient slavery published in 1789, Johann Friedrich Reitemeier
pointed out that the poor women of Athens took on various forms
of paid work and were by no means confined to the house. As for
other classes, Reitemeier claimed that women’s dowries earned them
greater respect and favored their freedom. “Thus woman,” he wrote,
“was less and less the slave of man, and began indeed to get closer
to his society.” 98 The seclusion question therefore directly concerned
the value of any Greek precedents for modern German middle- and
upper-class women. We have seen that on this question Meiners made
an immediate racial link to the Orient: the Athenians had too much
Slav and Eastern blood and that is why their treatment of women was
so bad.99 Millar simply observed that “it is probable that the recluse
situation of the Grecian women, which was adapted to the circum-
stances of the people upon their first their advancement in civiliza-
tion, was afterwards maintained from the influence of custom, and
from an inviolable respect to their ancient institutions.”
Whereas for Meiners, seclusion went hand in hand with vice and
with an exaggerated power of manipulative women in a household
to which they were confined, for Millar, it prevented the improve-
ment of the art of conversation. “Hence it is,” he wrote, “that the
Greeks, notwithstanding their learning and good sense, were remark-
ably deficient in delicacy and politeness of manners and were so little
judges of propriety in wit and humor as to relish the low ribaldry of an
Aristophanes, at a period when they were entertained with the sublime
eloquence of a Demosthenes, and with the pathetic compositions of a
Sophocles and an Euripides.”100 In a section entitled “Progress of the
Female Sex,” in his Skteches on the History of Man, Lord Kames wrote
that Greek women were never seen in public and “if my memory serve
me, an accidental interview of a man and a woman on the public

street brings on the catastrophe in a Greek tragedy.”101
Unlike the women of Tacitus’s Germany, Athenian women were
never consulted. The women of Athens, wrote Goguet in 1758, never
had as much ambition as those of Sparta: “They lived, in general,
very retired in their apartments, scarce ever appearing in public, and
without any free communication with men, a custom which had place
amongst most of the people of Greece.”102 At the heart of the seclu-
sion question, as it was later discussed by the hopeful believers in
a cultivated and distinguished Greek femininity, was the possibility
of education. The dependence of one sex on the other, Reitemeier
observed in 1789, was the oldest form of servitude but the one that
changed the most according to the degree of education (Bildung).103
But Reitemeier’s sense of progressive development in Greece was the
exception. It would never have occurred to the husband, Meiners
asserted, to ask his wife for advice, since, due to her lack of educa-
tion and constant confinement it was impossible she should know
anything useful. Isomachus had said, according to Xenophon, that
his wife was the person he consulted least of all. Even when they had
the best wives, Greek men demanded of them nothing except that
they should bear them children and supervise the running of the
household.104
Cornelius de Pauw adopted a middle position in the seclusion
debate in his Philosophical Researches on the Greeks, the first volume
of which appeared in 1788. He said that while the virgins of Athens
were guarded and “almost condemned to similar confinement with
those of Asia,” married women enjoyed a greater degree of liberty,
a secret, he wrote, revealed by Xenophon. Yet this greater degree
of liberty turned out to be merely greater indulgence for any “acts
of weakness.”105 Two themes of de Pauw’s assessment of the situ-
ation of Greek women are of importance for our story. The first is
the one he shared with Meiners and the other serves as an alterna-
tive explanation for ancient Greek misogyny. In a curious passage,
de Pauw described the strict and painful regimen of special nutritive
juices to be consumed by the virgins of Athens and the contraptions
designed to shape their waist. “These details are sufficient to prove
that all was artifice and constraint with the women of Athens, while
the men issued from the hands of nature endowed with all the graces,
such as Autolycus has been represented by Xenophon. Plato describes
Charmis like a star in the firmament, surrounded constantly by a
crowd of admirers, while the same was inscribed on the porticos of
the town, and the facades of the houses about Demus, the son of
Pyrilampus, to transmit to posterity the fame of such an accomplished
mortal.”106 Dismissive about the beauty of women, de Pauw instead
quoted an ancient author: “The Athenians, says Isocrates, are not to
be distinguished from the other Greeks by an advantageous size or
any superior force of body: but no nation, in that part of the world,
ever produced men of such extraordinary beauty.”107 The propensity
to homosexuality, which de Pauw called a “corruption of instinct” in
the Greeks, was also denounced by Meiners as helping to account for
the disregard and ill-treatment of women.108
But de Pauw also provided an explanation for Greek mistreatment
of women different to that of Meiners: “The Athenians invented the
term Mysogyne, to define a class of men, who, like Euripides, vented
continual imprecations against women, or fled from their sight with
Melanion to inhabit the most solitary recesses of the desert, like wild
beasts, renouncing at once all obedience to civil ties and the laws
of nature.”109 Misogyny was a malady contracted by some Greeks
because the cold winds coming from their mountains predisposed
them to this form of melancholy, rather than, as Meiners would have
it, the result of the evolving relationship between an unhappy racial
mixture and social mores common to all Athenians.
The Place of Race in a Global History

of the Female Sex
We have seen that Schlegel’s Diotima and other rehabilitations of
Greek womanhood would have to contend implicitly with Tacitean
and prelapsarian claims about an original or ancient condition of
woman even if they did not claim to supersede them. They also faced
being undermined, furthermore, in both affirmative (Winckelmann
and Humboldt) and critical (de Pauw and Meiners) versions, by
the aesthetic primacy of a Greek masculine form. But it was the
notion of race that posed the greatest challenge to Diotima. In late
Enlightenment historiography, the possibilities of any historical femi-
ninity were determined by the appraisal of the peoples in which it
existed, by the scheme of development in which the latter were incor-
porated. For the conjectural historians it was the progress of opin-
ions, themselves resulting from changes in the occupational structure
of societies, that was decisive. But for schemes that turned on race,
the progress of manners was inextricably linked to the racial character
of each people.
The two Göttingen treatments of the history of women, Meiners’s

multivolume History of the Female Sex and Ernst Brandes’s single vol-
ume On Women of 1787, came about in the philosophical faculty
of the university. It was Brandes himself who had raised the profile
of the faculty, which had originally played the more humble role of
“mediator” between the branches of knowledge. “This faculty,” he
said, “was the salt of the earth of which all the others have need.”110
No historian in Göttingen, writes Friedrich Lotter, evinced such
a wide range of interests as Meiners.111 The first principle of the
Sittengeschichte that assessed the historical place of Greek women,
was a claim on an empirical universality. Meiners had first been called
to Göttingen on the basis of a philosophical tract published in 1772
that had defined philosophy as an empirical psychology.112 He was a
Lockean empiricist. The starting point of his empiricism was bodily
reality. Accordingly, in his Outline of the History of Mankind, an essay
of 1785, the human body was the first of his three genres of historical
inquiry. The second was the mind (Geist) and the third was character
and morals (Sitten). It was this last heading, Meiners wrote, which
opened the way to inquiry on the history of virtue and vice, of the
purity or corruption of morals of entire peoples, as well as concepts
that nations have of prosperity, of morality (Sittsamkeit), honor, and
shame, and, furthermore, the history of religions, forms of govern-
ment, and the most important kind of laws to be found everywhere
on earth.113
It was a history that consciously sought to work out the differ-
ences and also the hierarchies of human existence, of races. The
trouble with differentiation in the history of man as it had so far
been practiced, according to Meiners in 1785, was that it had been
pursued on the narrow basis of skin color, which was in turn linked
to climate. What was needed was a consideration of other hereditary
factors like capacities and manners.114 It is here that he often inserted
as one of the chief indicators of the standing of a race, the treatment
of strangers, of enemies, and of women. It is here also that Greece
was assigned its low place in the hierarchy.115 This preference for
divisions and hierarchical arrangements, Marino writes, was a central
feature of the “Göttingen spirit of research.”116 Indeed, few other
centers of learning in Europe could have boasted of such a compre-
hensive collection of travel reports as those assembled for the library
under the auspices of Heyne, combined with such an intense and
prolific use of them.
Göttingen was not only the assembly point of travel reports from
Carsten Niebuhr’s journey to Arabia, of those of James Cook to
the South Sea, one of the participants of which, Georg Forster, was
to marry Heyne’s daughter Therese and would become Christoph
Meiners’s chief antagonist. Its position as the center of academic
exchange from “Halifax to St. Petersburg” also made it the center of
discussion concerning the competing theories about man.117 It was
from these reports and older sources that Meiners devised his clas-
sification of the races. He assured his intended middle-class female
readership that after the horror stories of the East, Celtic women’s
history was premised on freedom and law.118 Gradual perfection
(Vervollkommnung) was granted only to the Celtic races. This was
the basis of Meiners’s Tacitean idealization of ancient Germanic
women.
“From that auspicious commencement,” wrote Lord Kames in
1774 after describing the process by which men could no longer sit
idly by while their wives toiled like slaves, “the female sex have risen
in a slow but steady progress, to higher and higher degrees of estima-
tion.” Like his fellow Scot John Millar, Kames was keen to emphasize
that “conversation is their talent” and that the advancing estimation
of women went hand in hand with an unfolding moral sense and more
polished manners.119 Kames explicitly used the term “conjectural” to
describe his enterprise. It had been Dugald Stewart, who had coined
the term to describe the historical methods of Adam Smith.120 In
its application to a history of the female sex Kames described it as
follows: “The progress of the female sex, a capital branch of the his-
tory of man, comprehends great variety of matter, curious and inter-
esting. But sketches are my province, not complete histories; and I
propose in the present sketch to trace the gradual progress of women
from their low state in savage tribes, to their elevated state in civilized
nations.”121 The concern of conjectural historians, as Höpfl explains,
was to trace the “typical” path that, by gradual stages, had led man
on the passage from savagery to refinement. The point of conjectural
history was also to show, as Walter Bagehot said, “how from being a
savage, man rose to be a Scotchman.”122 For Kames and Millar, the
two figures of the Scottish Enlightenment most concerned with the
progress of women, that progress consisted in the gradual liberation
of the conversational vocation of modern European women, a lib-
eration made possible by the change of manners brought about by
different economic structures. For both, it was the power of popular
opinion that was a universal constant. If Kames commented on how
it had it become unseemly for men in some parts of Africa to sit idly
by while their wives worked, Millar had been fascinated by how the
esteem for military virtue had transformed the possibilities of fatherly
authority in early times when children were more attached to their

mothers.123 If the economic and occupational structure, and indeed
climate, created the conditions of possibility, it was the revolutions in
opinion that were decisive in tracing that typical path by which the
condition of (European) women had been unburdened from heavy
labor, oppression, and disdain.
Late eighteenth-century readers would have found passages on the
lives of ancient Greek women separated but by a few lines or para-
graphs from comparisons with the treatment of wives among the tribes
in the Orinoco basin: the Hottentots, the inhabitants of Siberia, and
the ancient Germans and Gauls. Sometimes the botanist and traveler
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, who had visited Greece and the Near
East the previous century, would be used as an authority on the man-
ners of modern Greece when discussing the lives of the ancients.124
This geographical and chronological continuum and the level-playing
field in terms of comparison posed an important challenge to any
philhellenic view premised on Greek uniqueness, at least, as far as the
lives of women were concerned. This continuum was the common
denominator of the historiography on women in this period.
Both Scottish “conjectural history” and Meiners in Göttingen
rejected the classical idea of the lawgiver. They belonged to a mindset
described by Robert Wokler as rejecting the belief that politics deter-
mined morality and opted for the reverse.125 History and the progress
of the female sex were not shaped by the great insights of Lycurgus or
the wisdom of Solon but rather by the workings of moral processes,
in turn determined by a variety of causes. The primacy of the moral
dimension as opposed to the political molding of manners was the
first premise of the history of manners developed in Göttingen. First
of all, in contrast to “conjectural history,” it aimed to be compre-
hensive rather than an account of a “typical path” ending in modern
commercial society. The cause and expression of this comprehensive-
ness was its ethnographic quality. It was a story of races rather than
nations. This was an auspicious time for historical speculation based
on ethnographic information. The 1770s and 1780s were fascinated
by the discoveries in the South Seas and Captain Cook’s voyage.126
Göttingen, as we have seen, was the bibliographical center of travel
reports and such was the demand for them that Georg Brandes, an
important official in the university and the Electorate of Hannover,
wrote to Heyne that too much store was set on them.127 It was in this
period that the study of human nature as a whole was closely linked
to empirical investigations of savage societies.128 Man, observed Götz
von Selle in his history of the University of Göttingen, was less to be

understood in one’s own world than for example among the Tahitians
and the Huron.129
In January 1779, Georg Forster arrived in Göttingen as a young
naturalist who had accompanied Captain James Cook on his voy-
age, the first literary German to have sailed round the world.130 He
attained immediate fame with the publication of A Voyage Round
the World in 1777.131 He was rapturously received by the academic
community at the university. In Weimar, Herder became an ardent
admirer and it was here, in contrast to Göttingen, that women took
part in the receptions that welcomed the accomplished traveler.132
The main feature of the ethnographic history of manners was its
rejection of neutrality or relative neutrality in the assessment of the
differences between the races. Lotter has described the process by
which Meiners rejected the elements of neutrality he had found in
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach or Sömmerring’s discussion of race.133
It was this strident pursuit of racial hierarchy that set him on a col-
lision course with Forster, who in 1786, already involved in British
parliamentary debates on the abolition of slavery, asked his father-
in-law Heyne that Meiners no longer be allowed to publish reviews on
ethnological matters in the main organs of the university.134
Meiners’s History of the Female Sex and the place he accorded in
it to Greek women were premised on the result of the ethnographic
confrontations of the 1780s in Germany, which broadly speaking,
also pitted Kant against Forster and Herder. For Kant, racial dif-
ferences existed in embryonic form in the original undifferentiated
species, but once the dynamic of differentiation got under way, the
races were completely fixed. In his study of 1752 entitled Histoire
naturelle de l’home, the Comte de Buffon had discussed the degenera-
tive aspects of human nature, change and variation being inescapable
for all created matter. In his famous essay of 1775, Blumenbach had
posited the Caucasian race as the normal, most harmonious type, but
his own skepticism about classification had prevented him from mak-
ing studied value judgments.135 From such premises it was conceiv-
able that someone like Meiners would raise the issue of degeneration,
without the Kantian caveat that mankind would eventually return
to its primordial unity. Forster, who criticized Kant for applying a
priori categories to races, a term that he disliked, opted for a polygen-
etic view of human origins—that is, there was no single original race
from which others could have deviated. He energetically defended the
equal dignity of all races.136
Once neutrality had been fought off and the criteria of differentia-
tion extended to include body, heart, and mind, the next step toward
Meiners’s brand of ethnographic history of manners was to try to
prove a necessary connection between social systems and anthro-
pological data. This, says Marino, was relatively new. Drawing on
eighteenth-century literature on Oriental despotism like Boulanger’s
1762 study Recherches sur l’origine du despotisme Orientale, Meiners
tried to show that it was the “weaker” peoples who succumbed to
it.137 Following the tradition of Leibniz, the great Göttingen politi-
cal historian Schlözer had classified people according to language.138
Meiners’s classification of peoples was much closer to that of Theophil
Friedrich Ehrmann, whose Kurze Überischt der Völkerkunde appeared
in 1787 and based its classification on bodily form, moral character,
and then form of life, manners (Sitten), customs, and opinions.139 For
Schlözer, the great milestones of history where the great inventions,
and his focus was the political state. For Schlözer’s great enemy in
Göttingen academic politics, Gatterer, it was the life of nations. This
was Universalhistorie, where individual peoples and political states
were the units of historical development. This was what Gierl calls
the “identity of nation, people, state, culture and civilization.” In
Göttingen, Meiners was a defender of the popular philosophy of the
group around Feder and Spittler, one whose efforts were directed
against Universalhistorie. What was left over in this struggle, which
was still practical, empirical, and concrete, Gierl writes, was race.140
This was the organizing principle that served Meiners’s Geschichte
der Menschheit or “History of Mankind,” which he explicitly distin-
guished from Universalhistorie.141
The “History of Mankind,” with the development of manners
(Sitten) as the end point of the inquiry, was a strident discipline that
claimed to have superseded “Universal History” in its understand-
ing of causality and which aimed at a far greater comprehensiveness
than the typical path traced by “Conjectural History.” If Universal
History was political in the Aristotelian sense of seeing political life
unfolding in the state as the highest object of historical contempla-
tion, the History of Mankind was political in that the manners that
stood at the apex of its investigation denoted a political character:
Meiners repeatedly stated that the worth of a people could be mea-
sured by their treatment of women and vanquished enemies. Whereas
the successors of Universal History treated the history of women as
completely separate from anything properly political, Meiners, made
the history of women an integral part of the understanding of the
political character of the various races.142 Greek women were part
of a comprehensive history of manners in which race was the chief

determinant. Its rigidity left little room for the progress in social
interaction with men allowed by the conjectural historians and by
Reitemeier. And where political participation and respect for the wis-
dom of women were conceded by the historians, they tended to locate
these in the freedom of the northern woods and not in the theatres
and assemblies of classical Athens. These, then, were the formidable
opponents that Schlegel’s Diotima and other sympathetic treatments
would have to overcome.
C H A P T E R 4
The Women of Athens II: Courtesans,

Heroines, and the Greek Polis
Miletus: Friedrich Jacobs and the History of

the Female Sex
For a tradition, stretching from Schlegel in the 1790s to the Glasgow
classicist A. W. Gomme in the 1920s, and which is still resonant
today, Antigone and Diotima could not but reflect to some extent the
really existing women of Athens that surrounded their creators.1 For
others, the Antigones and Andromaches reflected instead a bygone
age of power and respect that had been enjoyed by aristocratic women
in the heroic age and which had been eroded by the rise of Athenian
democracy.2 Their opponents, always more numerous, have resorted
to Xenophon’s treatise on domestic life and to Lysias’s court speeches
in the fourth century to emphasize the universal subordination, sim-
plicity, and separation of respectable women from public life, from
the street, and from the intellectual and political pursuits of their hus-
bands in classical Athens.3 Where Schlegel and Gomme emphasized
the paradigmatic nobility and prominence of female characters in lit-
erature, others, like the pedagogue Friedrich Jacobs and Christian
Martin Wieland, sought firm historical ground for a freer Greek
femininity by examining the level of education available to spirited
women in Athens. 4 And since the most educated and spirited women
of Athens, or so it was believed, were the hetaerae or distinguished
courtesans, it was with them that such an endeavor had to begin.5
These famous women like Lais, Phryne, and Theano, were foreign-
ers who settled in Athens. Thus the enlivening impulse given to the
question of women’s lives in Athens, came not from the city itself,
but from Miletus in Ionia, birthplace of Aspasia, the most famous
hetaira.6
Whatever the means chosen to ground a freer Athenian femininity

historically, the task facing its advocates was to overcome the taboo
concerning the naming of Athenian women, which, as we have seen,
Böttiger had cited triumphantly in his refutation of Schlegel.7 In 1799
the philologist and pedagogue Friedrich Jacobs published the first
part of his Contributions to the History of the Female Sex, Principally of
the Hetaerae in Athens, which appeaed in Wieland’s Attisches Museum.
In the opening pages he described the state of historical knowledge
concerning women in ancient Athens:
Concerning the upbringing, education and domestic condition of the

matrons of Athens, we have only very incomplete records. Such was
the nature of the matter. One spoke little of them. “The best woman,”
Thucydides said, “is the one of whom least is said, either good or
ill.” And Plutarch, who quotes these words, adds: “The name of a
respectable woman must, just as her body, be shut inside a house.”
The majority of Greek writers which have been preserved from the best
ages of Greece which, in any case, are at issue here, describe the pub-
lic life of the citizens, whose splendour threw a deep shadow on the
insignificance of domestic life. If however, some curious foreigner, an
Anarcharsis, had visited Athens at that time, and preserved for us the
results of his observations, it is even probable that we would be better
instructed about the outward condition but not about the measure,
the education and the enlightenment of the matrons of Athens.8
No single Athenian woman, Jacobs lamented, had shone because

of her wisdom and “they therefore lie nameless and untouched in the
House of Hades.” And yet this by no means ruled out her virtue as
a mother and educator of young men, through which she ennobled
the harder sex. Only the hetaerae enjoyed the company of men of
all kinds, whereas the matrons were restricted to contact with their
own sex and to visits of their nearest relatives.9 Indeed, Jacobs agreed
with his friend Karl August Böttiger that women were not in fact
allowed to visit the theatre.10 He agreed with the general view of the
very restricted life of women in Athens and the limited possibilities
of their advancement. But he took strong exception to Cornelius de
Pauw’s statements. After a brief introduction in which he said that
the question had often been raised with respect to Greek antiquity,
whether in the relations between the sexes “an image of true human-
ity was mirrored there” and that it had more often been answered in
the negative, Jacobs took up the gauntlet thrown down by de Pauw.
He quoted de Pauw’s statements in the Recherches philosophiques sur
les Grecs of 1788 that said that nothing had been more damaging
THE WOMEN OF ATHENS II 85
to morals than the ascendancy that the hetaerae of Athens had had
over respectable women, whose education was so neglected that the
Graces turned away in horror from their countenance.11
Jacobs’s ultimate motivation in writing the Contributions has so
far remained unclear. Why did he find de Pauw’s assertions offen-
sive and why did he choose to pursue his interest in the pedagogical
condition of women precisely with the hetaerae, the very example de
Pauw used to shame the educational level of Athenian women? One
answer is that the demonstration of a learned interaction with men on
an equal footing provided by these women was intended as a support
for his pedagogical goals for women.12 Another is provided by the
historiographical task that Jacobs had set himself. He was looking for
balance and measure. At the beginning of the first instalment he had
called the condition of slavery and the condition of unnatural rule
that women attained in overly refined circumstances, equal expres-
sions of barbarism.13 In an otherwise bleak historical landscape, to
which he evocatively alluded at the start of his piece, the hetaerae
offered, at least at times, a middle path studded with bursts of intel-
lectual brilliance, wit, and above all, an ability to live and deal with
powerful men.
De Pauw, Jacobs wrote, was a clever author who possessed more the
quick-wittedness than the patience of a critical historical researcher
and whose work was essentially an indirect satire of the contemporary
world rather than a critical and exhaustive treatment of the evidence
of antiquity.14 Jacobs’s argument and the point at issue were histori-
cal. He immediately acknowledged, in his first numbered note, his
two predecessors in the historiorgraphical dispute, Friedrich Schlegel
and Carl Gotthold Lenz, both of whom he praised for distinguish-
ing between the different epochs and peoples of Greek antiquity in
their treatment of women.15 Like Schlegel, who in 1794–1795 had
evinced the same passion and the same argument based on the prom-
inence and character of the women of literature so central to Gomme
in 1925, Jacobs sought, not to repudiate everything that had been
said about the real life of Athenian and Greek women, but to extend
the realm of the enlightened and spirited women, raise their number
and the worth of their accomplishments, and to assert this against
the sweeping and dismissive statements of a Christoph Meiners or a
Cornelius de Pauw. His concern with education rather than Schlegel’s
heroines of literature was one of the factors that led him to the het-
aerae and thus to meet de Pauw on his own ground.
Jacobs has been seen as the originator of a modern tradition that
has defended Athens and ancient Greece from the charges of imposing
“seclusion” upon and of exhibiting contempt for their women.16

Never, he said “were the matrons disdained.”17 As a pedagogue with
a lifelong interest in women’s education, his aim was to reconstruct
the intellectual, literary, and educational world of Athenian women
in the fifth and fourth centuries. The peaks of this landscape had
always been the hetaerae. There could be no better place for a study
of the famous Athenian courtesans than Wieland’s Attiches Museum.
Wieland had a lasting interest in the hetaerae and Lais in particular.
Jacobs undoubtedly offered historical material as source for the work
of his friend.18 Indeed the reconstruction of the life portraits of the
hetaerae became one of the chief projects of the Attisches Museum.
Jacobs had become a collaborator through Böttiger, whom he had
known since he had settled in Gotha in 1791; and when he sent
the first piece of the Contributions to Wieland, it was Bötigger who
reported that the former had approved it.19 That Wieland took but
two days to do so and also without asking for any corrections bears
witness to the proximity of their respective intentions.
The greatest number and richest hetaerae were to be found in
Corinth; the most famous and clever in Athens. The companionship
in which many of them lived with statesmen, orators, philosophers,
and poets, “gives them a certain historical importance.” They cer-
tainly took center stage in the New Comedy.20 This distinction, which
Jacobs makes in the first instalment of the Contributions, denoted the
difference between his primary interest in the phenomenon and that
of Meiners in the 1781 prize essay. Meiners, as we have seen, had
made the Corinthian story about the prayers of the hetaerae hav-
ing saved the city from the Persians the culminating illustration of
their exaggerated veneration. Jacobs, at this point, placed the story
in a footnote in which he observed that they enjoyed a certain honor
in Corinth not matched elsewhere in Greece.21 He was interested in
their role in Athenian high society rather than a narrative of advanc-
ing corruption. For Jacobs as opposed to Meiners, the phenomenon
of the hetaerae was articulated by the wit and the social and political
prominence of an Aspasia of Miletus more than it was by the anoma-
lous religious status enjoyed by them at Corinth.
The pendulum of female status moved for Jacobs between two
extremes. “The age of barbarism and rawness grants no rights to
woman. Her work is slave work; her tender embraces themselves a con-
jugal duty. The age of over-refinement by contrast, grants the female
sex an exaggerated power of rule.” Both, he said, were equally bar-
baric.22. Those who challenged the idea that women’s lives in Greece
were akin to slavery had offered too many examples to be ignored.23
The note appended to this remark mentioned Lenz and Schlegel as

proponents of a freer femininity. The battle lines had been drawn
between historians on the one side and philologists on the other. For
Jacobs, the tragedy for ancient Athenian women had not been, as the
historians alleged, that they were all treated like slaves but rather that
they were faced with an unfortunate choice with respect to education.
It was precisely because the matrons were respectable that the prob-
lem was so acute. The only “noble and comprehensive education for
a woman” was that which took place in free contact with men, but in
Athens this freedom went hand in hand with the loss of virtue, since
only the hetaerae had that privilege. And so was lost the “finest fruit
of that freedom.”24 Jacobs insisted that there was a complete “wall
of separation” between the matrons and the hetaerae, countering
the view that the morals of Athenian women were generally suspect.
Moreover, it was the Athenian democracy that strengthened the bond
and sanctity of marriage: “So long as an Athenian citizen could still
regard himself as a governing member of a free state, it was in the
interests of each to ensure the continuity of the rights of sovereignty
in his family and to secure his own political importance by means of
bonds which sacrificed his own free inclination and which demanded
a certain loyalty to his own family.”25
Although the point was meant to strengthen the respectability
of matrons, Jacobs here anticipated the argument that the advent
of democracy had spelt the end of the possibility of an occasional
“matriarchy” or rule of a woman, usually a queen, and brought about
stricter male political control. In 1790, Carl Gotthold Lenz had spo-
ken about the power and respect enjoyed by Arete, who had arbi-
trated disputes between men.26 Lenz had also implied that the heroic
age, with its simpler morals, was indeed a freer age for women than
the high point of classical Athens. In a lyrical passage reminiscent of
Rousseau’s Letter to D’Alembert (Lenz was indeed a Rousseau scholar
who published a book on Rousseau’s Relations with Women 27), he
had commented on how young men and women innocently met each
other at feasts and dances such as the one portrayed on Achilles’s
shield and that they happily submitted to the arranged marriages cho-
sen by their parents.28 Though he stated he was on the same side
as his fellow-philologist, Jacobs’s classical Athens was a far cry from
Lenz’s heroic age and the women in the respective settings faced very
different realities and choices. Athens offered dazzling prizes in terms
of education and, indeed, in terms of proximity to civic life but they
were available only to those who irredeemably crossed the boundaries
of respectability. Moreover, both the philologists and their historian
adversaries broadly shared a narrative of moral decline for Athenian

society setting in around the time of Alcibiades. While heroic age was
a self-contained whole, Athenian life had a problematic trajectory.
The onset of moral decline in Athens was a further facet of the
very poignant paradox that Jacobs was trying to convey about the
educational and civic prospects of ambitious Athenian women. It was
around the time of Alcibiades that prominent men began to be seen
more and more with hetaerae. They became the partners of philoso-
phers and statesmen. In Jacobs’s Athens this opened up for them both
the world of education or Bildung and a heralded a new, if indirect,
proximity to affairs of state. Their names began to take up center stage
in the New Comedy, which, turning away from matters of state to pri-
vate houses, gave their world a certain prominence.29 Once they had
crossed the boundary of respectability, the price, Jacobs explained,
was the “destruction” of their personality. They entered the world
anew with new hopes and new names.30 The witty Athenians gave
the hetaerae names according to how they came to that condition
and these nicknames were even used in court speeches.31 In other
words, as Athenian moral decline set in, talented women had more
access to the kind of partnership with men that brought them to the
heart of philosophy and politics and even attained something of that
visibility conferred by names and which was otherwise denied them,
though even these were names that were not their own. Jacobs had
met Böttiger’s challenge about the names of women but at a high
price.
After these remarks Jacobs offered the readers of the Attisches
Museum a “gallery” of the most famous hetaerae. He explained that
Athenaeus’s collection of anecdotes (itself drawing on numerous
sources now lost), the only full treatment of the subject, was not a
coherent whole. For the most part, and no doubt to increase the enter-
tainment value of the Contributions, they wreak havoc in Athenian
society and politics. Lamia, a good flute player who had been cap-
tured near Cyprus, became the partner of Demetrios Poliocres, who
forced Athens to gather a large sum that was handed over to her
and her female friends. Not content with this, she also sought con-
tributions.32 Lamia was an excellent example of the phenomenon
that Jacobs sought to bring home to his readers: the extremes that
governed the lives of these women, often entering the Greek world
in slavery as booty of war and in this case ending up commanding
large sums of money and even dedicated altars and feasts from the
Athenians.
As we have seen, Winckelmann and his readers, including Jacobs,

were fascinated by the religious status accorded to beauty in Greece. A
famous example of such a case, which revealed so much about Athens
was, of course, Phryne. Born in Thespia in Boethia and originally
called Mnesarete, she had been very poor but her move to Athens had
transformed her prospects. She became the partner of the famous
sculptor Praxiteles and the orator Hyperides. “The first,” Jacobs said,
“eternalized her beauty through his art; the other saved her from
threatening danger through the uncovering of her charms.” Jacobs
retold the famous story: A disappointed suitor named Euthias had
accused Phryne before the Helida tribunal of impiety, the usual device
when one wanted to get an enemy in trouble in Athens. Hyperides
defended her and seeing that he had not convinced the judges, he
thereupon disrobed Phryne. “A religious fear overcame their hearts
and they were reluctant to kill a priestess of Aphrodite and a represen-
tative of her power among men.”33
Phryne was significant because she was the most beautiful of the
hetaerae. Jacobs’s discussion of this reveals the rubric under which the
religious persona of Greek femininity was largely understood in the
eighteenth century—something shared by all sides of the argument
about women. It was prudent of Phryne, he opined, not to go around
showing herself everywhere. She did not go to the baths. It had been
a clever idea, however, to show the whole of Greece the fullness of
her charms for a few moments. It had been at a ceremonial gather-
ing at Eleusis, at the feast of Poseidon. She went down to the edge
of the sea, loosened her hair, and waded into the waves naked. She
was said to have served the sculptors Praxiteles and Apelles as models
for Venus, though Jacobs doubted the veracity of this.34 A story told
by Pausanias described a column by Praxiteles that stood in Thespia
with a likeness of Phryne and a golden one in Delphi. This was not
in order to honor the hetaerae, Jacobs explained, but beauty. “Here
as in innumerable cases,” he concluded, “the Hellenes revealed their
pure veneration of physical beauty, with no reference to moral worth
or the civil standing of the object.”35 The religious personality of the
feminine among the Greeks from this point of view was evinced in
the fear of the judges at the prospect of offending Aphrodite; by their
awe in seeing a woman descend into the sea and by their statues and
sculptures, which honored what they embodied.
Jacobs left till last not only the most famous of the hetaerae but
also the nub of his case. Aspasia, famous as the lover of Pericles, came
from Miletus in Ionia, which Aristophanes in the Lysistrata had called
a principal school of exuberant arts of the hetaerae.36 The French his-

torian Antoine L éonard Thomas, a friend of Denis Diderot, had writ-
ten a treatise on the history of women entitled Essai sur le caractère,
les mœurs et l’esprit des femmes dans les différents siècles published in
Paris in 1772.37 Christoph Meiners had explicitly denounced the his-
tory at the opening of his own in 1788.38 Though on the same side of
the historiographical dispute, Jacobs’s was the more nuanced of the
accounts when it came to the hetaerae of ancient Greece. And his pur-
pose incorporated an element of entertainment foreign to the moral
earnestness of Thomas. Yet when it came to his concluding illustra-
tion, that of Aspasia, he allowed that what Thomas had said of the
hetaerae might be taken to apply only to her. “The hetaerae,” Thomas
had written, “who lived publicly in Athens, where without neglecting
Philosophy, heard poetic and political speeches, gradually acquired
a taste for these objects. The formation of their mind lent life and
soul to their conversation. Now their abodes became schools of plea-
sure; poets earned here the easy knowledge of wit and of gracefulness
and the philosophers took from their conversations ideas which had
escaped their own reflections. Socrates and Pericles found themselves
with an Aspasia like St. Evermond and Condé with a Ninon. With
them one sought taste and refinement and in exchange one gave them
respect and fame.”39
It was the only citation of a contemporary historian in the
Contributions and it shows Aspasia as the fullest realization of the
paradox with which Jacobs had endowed the history of Greek women
in his opening remarks. The highest exemplar of female Bildung, who
had even acquired the respect of Socrates and Pericles in the late fifth
century, was also the most famous hetaerae and one who repeated
the pattern of salacious confrontations with the Athenian institu-
tions that entertained the readers of the Attisches Museum. She was
accused of having started the war against Megara after the Megarans
had kidnapped two of her hetaerae students, itself in retaliation for an
Athenian robbery of a Megaran woman. For this, and for her alleged
power over Pericles, Jacobs observed that she was called Omphale and
Deanira.40 They were associated, therefore, with powerful and sinis-
ter women of royal ambition who had subordinated prominent men.
The point that Jacobs was trying to convey was that this sinister set
of appellations was another aspect of the price that prominent female
Bildung paid for being considered also a teacher of rhetoric. The tran-
sient and dependant attainment of Bildung was linked by Jacobs in
his concluding remarks on Aspasia, with the issue of names, which
as we have seen, runs through the whole story. After the death of
Pericles, he wrote, “her name disappears, like a blazing meteor, into

the dark of night out of which it had climbed.”41
Troy: Carl Gotthold Lenz and the Women of

the Heroic Age
It was during Friedrich Schlegel’s reading for the ambitious project of
outlining a new history of Greek literature that he came across a short
volume by Carl Gotthold Lenz, a long-time resident of Jena who had
completed a doctorate in 1789 and taught at Pastor Wichmann’s insti-
tute in Celle. The volume was entitled History of Women in the Heroic
Age and was published in 1790, dedicated, among two others, to
Christian Gottlob Heyne, whom Lenz had also heard at Göttingen.42
Lenz, as his preface immediately made clear, saw his work as a contri-
bution to the new genre that had recently been so popular, the history
of the female sex. 43 This text combined the discussion of the 1770s
and 1780s on the condition and character of ancient Greek women
with the history of Greek literature. Even if “universal reasoning on
the women of all ages soon failed,” Lenz observed, the heroic age by
contrast, offered a “complete picture” that “acquaints us with the life
und the mores [Sitten] of the women” of that age in all their contexts.
His only guides, he confessed, were Homer and Hesiod, the only
writers still relatively close to that time. Poets, he added, must take
the place of historians as much when it comes to the heroic as to the
chivalric ages.44 It had been the tendency to combine the later writ-
ers with the testimony of Homer. The assessment of the Ionian Bard
from our point of view had led to unfavorable ideas about women in
this period. One culprit was Goguet, who saw the heroic age as no
better than barbaric. But another, even more influential, was Robert
Wood, author of the Essay on the Original Genius of Homer writ-
ten in 1769, who had compared the manners of the Greeks in the
heroic age to the peoples of the East.45 The women were said to live
in dreadful oppression and shut out from social intercourse. Love and
friendship were said to be foreign virtues to them. And the newest
historian of the female sex, Meiners, followed the lead of Goguet.46
Lenz ended the preface by saying that he owed it to the truth and to
an “often unjustly or one-sidedly judged sex” to show that it had been
otherwise.47
Lenz offered Heyne a philological attack on Heyne’s son-in-law’s
archenemy, Christoph Meiners. The latter was already under heavy
attack from that son-in-law, Georg Forster, the friend and political
fellow-traveler of Schlegel’s real-life Diotima, Caroline Böhmer.48
Both the historiography and the personal politics and relationships

of Göttingen provided the impetus behind the portrayal and assess-
ment of Greek femininity. Based solely on the relevant passages of
Homer and Hesiod, Lenz crafted a world, the hues of which con-
tested the periodization of Enlightenment histories, where the early
ages of Greece were rough and “unpolished.” His was a heroic age,
which, exceptions and nuances acknowledged, tended toward simple
and benevolent manners. The Trojan War had started because of the
offence Paris committed against the custom of hospitality, and not
as Meiners had said, because of the sins of a woman. It was an age
of mildness and relative equality.49 Lenz made two important claims
about the women of the early Greek world. The first relates to their
public personality. The second concerns the appraisals of their femi-
ninity and character.
Lenz felt on sure ground when confronting figures like Meiners
and Goguet because of his knowledge of the texts that he said they
had handled all too briefly and he berated the historians for not being
sound philologists. He was careful not to lose credibility by making
sweeping statements. He conceded, therefore, that the greater part
of women’s lives was spent within the household but he emphasized
that in the case of the ruling classes these were large enterprises and
that women were respected managers.50 Indeed, “the participation
of the principal princesses and women in all the affairs of the house
and the small distance between those women who commanded and
the slaves evokes a very favorable sense of the simplicity and decency
of customs of those times.” In a comparison calculated to infuriate
Meiners, who thought the chivalric age ostentatious and detrimental
to morals, and which Lenz used repeatedly, he compared this ease in
household business between the sexes to the age of chivalry among
the “highly praised Celtic peoples.” This was an unmistakable refer-
ence to Meiners’s racial scheme. In direct opposition to Meiners’s
account, Lenz discussed positively the women who attended to the
returning knights, taking their weapons from them and serving them
at table.51 He praised the egalitarian circumstances of the household,
showing how the principal women happily sat talking to their slaves
and sharing pain and joy with them.52 Yet beyond these idyllic images
there was the old vexed question of the visibility of women on the
streets and in the city.
“In any case,” Lenz observed, “the appearance of a woman in
public places was no rarity.” He referred to the scene, and here tak-
ing in Troy as well, when the women surrounded Hector to ask
about the fate of their loved ones.53 Lenz must have had in mind the
often-cited story about the women of Athens cowering in the door-

ways after a serious defeat during the Peloponnesian War asking
furtively about the fate of their relatives, a story used sneeringly by
those who thought little of the status of Athenian women. Women,
he asserted, were permitted to go out freely in public in the heroic
age accompanied by some slaves, the only proviso being that they
were veiled. In another paean to the equality of the time, he pointed
out that this applied to slave women too.54 Although frequenting the
streets on errands or visits was the most obvious and belabored issue
concerning the public presence of women, it was the festive part of
the spectrum, theatre, religious festivals, games, which was, as we
have seen, no less hotly debated and contained the most interesting
and unsettling possibilities. One passage of this treatise is particularly
striking. It shows how precarious were the boundaries for the schol-
ars in this period, between one form of regulated, civic, and festive
participation by women, and the lawless, wild, and disturbing reveries
that jumped out from the pages of Euripides and Aristophanes.
Although women were generally occupied in household matters,
he explained, they sometimes took part in public affairs, principally
in public celebrations, either alone or together with the men. Hector
asked his mother Hecuba to lead the matrons of Troy to make a dedi-
cation to Pallas on the Acropolis and to sacrifice 12 bulls to her.
They went up in procession toward the temple that was opened by
the priestess Theano. We learn from this, he said, that goddesses also
had female priests and that these could marry. Perhaps Cassandra
too, who on the way up to the temple had seen her father returning
from the Greek camp with Hector’s body, was a priestess. Certainly,
he said, Virgil in the Aeneid and later Heyne had thought so.55 After
briefly commenting on a sacrificial meal ordered by Nestor at which
his daughter and daughters-in-law as well as his wife were present,
Lenz stated that the female feeders of Dionysus in Thrace celebrated
the feasts of Bacchus with staffs of Thrysus, for which they had been
chased by King Lycurgus.56 Almost imperceptibly the scene moved
from public piety on behalf of a city to the religious symbol of the
Thrysus, to the Thracian countryside, and to a transgressive religios-
ity inimical to the city. It was the woman priestess rather than the
household manager, whom Lenz always portrayed as sensible, fru-
gal, and faithful, who subverted an ordered civic persona in favor of
an unloosed and unpredictable, religiously empowered femininity.57
Though figures like Meiners and de Pauw had themselves stood in
awe of the religious power of the hetaerae at Corinth and the religious
devotion evoked by the physical beauty of a Phryne, for them the
departure from respectable norms or the failure to attain them in the

first place was to be found among the matrons themselves, locked in
an environment that did not encourage or permit their virtue. Lenz
even argued that Clytemnestra, who murdered Agamemnon, had not
been an “evil woman” all along. After all, she had resisted Aegisthus’s
advances for a long time, but presented instead a warning about the
effects of gradual seduction (i.e., she was not mainly to blame).58
Lenz’s philological riposte had rehabilitated the matrons and, implic-
itly, the city. Even if his focus was a much earlier period, he made clear
he was contributing to the wider debate. He shifted the burden of the
problematic phenomena beyond its walls.
Lenz sought to lend greater credibility to his rehabilitation of
heroic age wives by demonstrating his conscientiousness when it came
to the need for a balanced account. It was hard to write about them,
he lamented, but there had been an Antea who had tried to seduce
Bellerophon and seeing her advances rejected, had accused him to
her husband of making advances himself. There had been an Eriphyle
who had stolen a golden necklace from her husband. But every age,
he observed, has its Anteas and Eriphyles.59 Lenz concluded his study
by saying, “I would have had to bring the history of the female sex
under the rubric of slavery if I had shared the opinion of different
scholars, to which Johann Friedrich Reitemeier, has recently added
himself, that indeed even the honorable women stood in a kind of
servitude.”60
Dresden: Friedrich Schlegel and the Feminine

Characters of Greek Literature
In a lecture entitled “The women of Greek antiquity,” delivered in
Basel in 1853, Jacob August Mähly pointed out that the subject of
male friendship, an ideal raised to its heights in the last part of the
Iliad was of the “utmost importance for our topic.” It was not only
that the men spent so much time in the gymnasia and palaces. When
one reflected, he explained, that individual states favored the noble
manifestation of such a friendship because they saw in it a powerful
lever of noble deeds, one will see it as logical that the female sex was
deprived of beautiful fruits that it could have claimed for itself with
a more plausible justice. He then quoted a scholar who said, “That
which was the highest fame and highest enjoyment, the highest flour-
ishing of Greek life and the first love of a male youth, from all of
that, women were excluded.” The scholar was Friedrich Schlegel.61
Mähly pointed at an important combination of factors: namely, an
emotionally charged mutual dedication embodied both in the heroic

epic and in public institutions of everyday life that had a direct link to
the noble deeds that sustained the city states in competition with each
other and as a flourishing society. He pointed out that the intense
reality and ideal of male friendship long outlived the heroic age.
Seventy years before Mähly, the most concise statement of this set of
relationships had been given by Herder in his Ideen:
And so the public games gave Greek education a very particular direc-
tion, in that it made bodily exercises the main part of it and brought
the advantages gained from it the attention of the whole nation. Never
has a branch carried finer fruit as the small ivy and fig, which crowned
the Greek victor. It made the young men, beautiful, healthy and lively:
it gave maneuverability, measure and well-being to their limbs: it
ignited in their soul the first sparks of love of fame and even post-
humous fame und engraved in them the indestructible resolve to live
publicly for their city, their country, what is most valuable, it implanted
in their minds that taste for interaction with men and male friendship
which distinguishes the Greeks. Woman did not constitute, in Greece,
the whole contest of life, to which the young man was committed;
the beautiful Helen, after all, could only give occasion to a Paris if the
enjoyment or possession of her had been the goal of all manly excel-
lence. The female sex, however beautiful the examples of every virtue
it brought forth in Greece, remained a subordinate aim of male life,
the thoughts of noble youths were directed towards something higher;
the bond of friendship, which they formed among themselves or with
experienced men, took them into a school, which an Aspasia would
hardly be able to grant them. Hence the male love of the Greeks in
several states, accompanied by that emulation, that instruction and
that constancy and sacrifice, whose feelings and consequences we can
read in Plato almost as the novel of a strange planet.62
Herder stated the problem that Greek historicity had thrown up for
the conception of a philhellenic femininity. Friedrich Schlegel’s essay
On the Representation of Female Characters in the Greek Poets, written
in Dresden and published in 1794, and his much more famous and lon-
ger essay On Diotima, published in 1795, made an elaborate case for
the existence and the ethical significance of an alternative Greek femi-
ninity. But, like Jacobs’s Contributions, it contained important para-
doxes. If the debate on Greek women in the 1780s and 1790s turned
on various aspects of their status with regard to public life and their
visibility, all such questions ultimately led to an appraisal of their rela-
tionship with ancient free constitutions. In the mid-1790s this was not
merely an academic question. The muse who was Schlegel’s Diotima,
Caroline Böhmer, was sympathetic to the French Revolution and he

himself criticized Kant in an Essay on Republicanism written in 1796,
for not having gone far enough in advocating democratic politics in
his Perpetual Peace.63 At the age of 17, Schlegel began reading the
Greek classics, mainly Plato and the tragedians. Appropriately enough
for someone who so desired to emulate Winckelmann, Schlegel also
admired, in 1789, the sculptures of Dresden that had once fascinated
the former. In 1790 he began his studies in Göttingen, formally in
jurisprudence but also attended the seminars of Heyne. By 1793, he
had made the decision to undertake a study of the essence and origins
of literature.64
In the late summer of 1793, the young Friedrich Schlegel rushed to
the vicinity of Leipzig. Shortly before, his brother had secretly smug-
gled Caroline Böhmer, daughter of the great Göttingen Orientalist
Johann David Michaelis, out of Mainz and into northern Germany.
Since August Wilhelm had to take up his duties as a household tutor
in Amsterdam, he entrusted the care of the revolutionary fugitive
to his younger brother Friedrich. Caroline had frequented the circle
of Georg Forster, erstwhile enemy of Christoph Meiners and sup-
porter of the French Revolution and of its ephemeral German satellite
on the left bank of the Rhine, the short-lived Republic of Mainz.
Here she had also become pregnant with the child of a French offi-
cer. Caroline became something of a real life Diotima for the young
Schlegel. The months spent with her did a great deal to shape his idea
of womanhood, and its role in his Greek studies.65 It is significant
that Caroline Böhmer, the flesh-and-blood template for the idealiza-
tion of Greek womanhood, was an active political participant in the
geographical periphery of the French Revolution, at its greatest point
of contact with Germany during the Jacobin phase. Schlegel explicitly
disavowed Jacobin sympathies.66 But a lively, democratically minded,
and educated woman played a significant role at a time when his stud-
ies of the history of Greece were intensifying.
Lenz had already reclaimed some ground from the historians when
Schlegel, the young philologist with historiographical ambitions, stud-
ied the position of Greek women. But while Lenz sought to project a
simple Rousseauian idyll onto the heroic age, Schlegel’s desire to find
the historical-aesthetic high point within a cyclical understanding of
art and history led him to a very different approach. Lenz had tried
hard to counter the commonplace assertions about the “barbarism”
of the early ages, an uphill struggle that had gone against the grain
of the dominant variety of the Scottish and Göttingen approaches
to the history of women. He had even disavowed any responsibility
for whitewashing the history of women in classical Athens. United

in their opposition to the historians, the younger philologists could
not agree among themselves about the locus and character of their
respective ideals. Jacobs had placed Bildung at the heart of the para-
dox about Greek womanhood that he had seen exemplified by the
flamboyant hetaerae. Lenz, a reader of Rousseau, had put Tugend
or virtue in the place of Bildung and defined it in terms of simple
courage and everyday tenderness in a generally egalitarian social envi-
ronment. In his essay On the Representation of Female Characters in
the Greek Poets, published in 1794, Schlegel announced that “a suc-
cession of the most outstanding female characters out of the great
poets, presented in chronological form, will give us a portrait of the
Greek ideal of beauty in feminine character, how it gradually formed
itself, attained completion and then came to degenerate.”67 It was an
aesthetic variant of Bildung but one with as much of a vigorous claim
to historical reality as Lenz.
The women of that time, Schlegel noted, did not have the oppor-
tunity of the ennobling sociability enjoyed by the men: “The leg-
ends of heroes and gods filled their [the men’s] imagination with
great images, which often contained the ideas of ancient wisdom.
Collective joyfulness was the seed from which the flower of beauti-
ful sociability would soon bloom.” If the female soul, he added, is
not raised to nobility by a higher spirit, it sinks to degradation.68
Schlegel seemed to imply that “beauty” in feminine character, even if
he described it as a “simple nature and a modest beauty,” could only
grow in the soil of some kind of greatness. That simple nature and
modest beauty had to be evoked by an ennobling context and the
reality or memory of noble deeds. They had to animate the feminine
soul to bring out its beauty. This was a contrast to the virtues of faith-
fulness and tenderness attributed to women as an unreflective reality
in the unrefined and socially less differentiated heroic age conjured
up by Lenz. Schlegel’s women had to be moved by a “higher spirit”;
Lenz’s women merely reflected the simple and faithful manners of
their environment, while Jacobs’s women aspired to Bildung and a
name that could be uttered in public even at the cost of destroying
their original personality. Schlegel’s women were neither Jacobs’s
phoenix, building a new and prominent, educated life out of the ashes
of their respectable persona nor were they Lenz’s loving matrons liv-
ing in friendship with their slaves.
Once again, it is Rousseau’s Letter to D’Alembert of 1758 that
gives us a clue to the underlying dichotomy that separated the Greek
femininity of Schlegel from that of Lenz. It is particularly pertinent
because Schlegel, in this instance, was also taking about the theatre,
which, as we have seen, he insisted that Athenian women could attend.
It illustrates something of a fault-line in eighteenth-century thought,
so concerned with the ideal pedagogical scenario and its formative
models.69 Rousseau had criticized the tragedies of the French theatre
(admittedly of a different hue to Sophocles) among other things for
setting up unrealistic role models; the scenes of tragedy did not depict
the lives of ordinary citizens but those of exalted characters whose
mindsets and choices were of a different stamp.70 The formative
models that led to nobility of character were to found, ideally, in the
immediate vicinity, which he depicted as the good people of the Swiss
countryside near Geneva. The image of young men and women meet-
ing each other in innocent festivals and dances, which Lenz delighted
in when recounting stories of the heroic age, could have been taken
from a passage at the end of Rousseau’s Letter, though Rousseau also
emphasized the supervision of benevolent elders.71 Schlegel was more
skeptical about the interaction between the sexes during the heroic
age. The Homeric heroes, Schlegel disdainfully observed, knew of
no other perfection of a woman than her youth and her physical
attributes.72
From the very beginning of his chronological presentation in 1794,
Schlegel acknowledged the salience of what Mähly would assert with
reference to him 60 years later: the ideal of male friendship in ancient,
indeed, archaic Greece, set a very high benchmark of nobility and
emotional intensity. Mähly had pointed out that this was linked in
the minds of German scholars to the vitality of Greek states. Schlegel
evinced a profound admiration of Homer’s evocation of powerful
feelings:
The spirit of love for women had not yet in this age in general assumed
the character of the noble and the beautiful. Heroic friendship by
contrast, is the most beautiful combination of masculine and warring
greatness and tender feeling. It is the noblest fruit of this age, and
marks its character so much, that even from the darkness of the most
ancient legends the heroes shine forth for us in pairs, Castor and Pollux,
Hercules and Jolaus, Theseus and Pirithous. All outstanding heroes of
the Iliad are accompanied in friendship by a brave comrade. That such
heroic brotherhood is sublime and powerful can be taken as a given.
How noble and tender it was, is something of which Homer has left us
an eternal portrait in the friendship of Achilles and Patroclus.73
In contrast to Lenz, Schlegel characterized Penelope as “unasham-

edly self-seeking” and far from any ideal. Yet despite the raw manners
common to goddesses and heroic age women, Homer still captured

something of a natural femininity in an inimitable fashion. The rare
instances of feminine nobility were all the more captivating, he said,
because of that.74 The portrayal of Helen was the “most demand-
ing task,” which ran the danger of rendering her contemptible. Yet
without hiding what she had done, Homer never once gave occasion
to offence in that portrayal. Describing the famous scene of Helen’s
encounter with the elders of Troy, when the latter’s initial hostility
had been overwhelmed by her beauty, Schlegel commented that “in
this episode there is a trace of the almost boundless admiration and
veneration of female beauty, which is so natural and at the same time
so characteristic of the heroic peoples of ancient times, and which
everywhere crosses over into legend.” One recalls, he said, the nymph
Calypso and the enchantress Circe. It was not without significance,
he added, that both are immortals, “in order to show that the power
of female attraction and the bond of female love are stronger as all
earthly power and effects and are of an altogether wonderful and
magical character.”75 This was, as we have seen, a common trope
in the eighteenth century about the Greek attitude to femininity:
no matter how well or badly women were treated, physical beauty
aroused a veneration that quickly acquired religious potency.
But Schlegel, for whom the age depicted by Homer came under the
rubric of “nature,” confined the salience of this phenomenon to that
period. Just as Homer was pure Nature, he said, so Attic tragedy was
pure ideal. From that more than from anything else we could learn
the Greek ideal of beauty in feminine character. 76 Yet within Attic
tragedy there were also important divisions that manifested them-
selves to Schlegel in the rigorous search for the high point of feminine
character. Aeschylus had left us Clytemnestra as his fullest feminine
character. The most striking aspect of her was the sheer strength with
which she bore everything; she was a “heroic criminal.” Aeschylus’s
Niobe would no doubt have shown us an image of sublime courage,
the superiority of human strength, in the utmost pain, to the power of
fate and would thus have been an occasion to delineate a great charac-
ter. Schlegel posited that greatness was the beginning of beauty, just
as Rilke was later to posit that beauty was the beginning of the ter-
rible.77 If nature was not disturbed in its progress, perfection could
come out of a hard sublimity. And so after Aeschylus, the advent of
Sophocles was to be expected. It was in Sophocles that Greek litera-
ture reached the furthest goal of its powers. It was here that the most
beautiful (das höchste Schöne) of feminine character was reached.78
Powerful attributes in female personalities developed during the
dominance of nature therefore acted for Schlegel as the hinge of the

different stages, acquiring a historical logic of their own.
There was nothing hubristic and no aspiration to greatness in
Lenz’s heroines, who were more straightforwardly “virtuous” than
“hard.” Even Clytemnestra was really a virtuous woman who had
gradually been led astray, rather than a “heroic criminal.” In Schlegel’s
more nuanced account, hubristic greatness, irrespective of morality,
had to be seen as the precursor of ideal ethical beauty. That ideal, in
the form of the highest innocence and gentleness had been reached
in Sophocles’s Ismene, who suffered in silence. Antigone acted and
wanted only the purest good (das reine Gute) and brought it about
without effort; she went to her death with lightness. All powers were
perfected and united in this character of “divine goodness,” which,
when visible to men, was the highest beauty.79
Schlegel pointed out that Athenian theatre closely followed public
opinion, which in turn reflected the state of manners, since art in
Greece followed life very closely. Sharing the premise of the account
of Athenian morals that had been published by Christoph Meiners
in 1781, for him it had been the age of Alcibiades where corruption
had begun. It was not that education was lacking. On the contrary,
all human powers flourished in the greatest fullness at this time.
What was missing was harmony, a sense of order and of proportion.
Accordingly, Euripides’s women, when they showed nobility of char-
acter, did not do so as in Sophocles, in terms of their constancy but
as the outbreak of sudden, unbounded passion. Medea and Pheadra
were significant examples. Sophocles had lent his characters as much
beauty as the law of the whole and the requirements of art had
allowed; Euripides put into his characters as much as passion as pos-
sible, regardless of its nobility. Passion was his specialty and he knew
its depths well.80
For Schlegel, the Sophoclean high point was bounded by untem-
pered strength on the one side and by indomitable passion on the
other. They threw up a “heroic criminal” Clytemnestra and a crazed
Medea respectively. Euripides’s women were the product of a loss of
harmony and of measure; of the ordered combination of qualities that
had fleetingly been able to put together an Ismene or an Antigone.
Interestingly, the outbreak of extreme passion even out of noble feel-
ings, such as in Euripides’s Trojan Women, was rendered in Schlegel’s
scheme more inimical to noble feminine character than the cold crim-
inality and hardness of Clytemnestra. Taking account of all possibili-
ties, the pendulum of powerful Greek femininities swung for Schlegel
between the harmonious grace and noble heroism of Antigone and the
religious awe inspired by an Aspasia. Perhaps the fragility of Antigone

and the wildness of Medea, Aspasia, and Clytemnestra prompted the
search for a more robust and lasting harmony in feminine character
in Greek antiquity.
Athens: Schlegel and Diotima

The Diotima of whom Socrates spoke in Plato’s Symposium, Schlegel
explained at the opening of the essay Über die Diotima, was an image
not only of beautiful femininity but much more that of a complete
humanity.81 Her conversation with the sage was one of the most beau-
tiful remains of antiquity.82 In 1926, the philosopher Alfred Baeumler
would accuse Schlegel and others of his generation of diluting the
specifically feminine, from which such fruits of German intellectual
history as the Historical School of Law and a better understanding of
ancient mythology were said to have originated.83 Asking the ques-
tion of who Diotima was, and how her image seemed to contradict
the usual view about Greek women, would be the occasion, Schlegel
averred, to correct the common prejudice about them. What such
an investigation collected would order itself into a portrait of Greek
femininity. It was a question of putting together the pieces like those
of a broken statue, which would yield a not altogether incomplete his-
tory of Greek women.84 The common view, he wrote, was that honor-
able women among the Greeks had no education and were completely
excluded from interaction with men; that in fact they were oppressed
and despised and that only the courtesans had a higher form of educa-
tion. Those who held this view would assume, like Ernst Brandes had
done in 1787, that Diotima could only be a hetaira, an idea to which
so much could be objected that it had to be dismissed.
Asia Minor, Schlegel observed, was the fatherland of the het-
aerae, Corinth their richest settlement, and Athens the school were
they attained the highest education and interaction with statesmen.
According to heathen manners and customs, there was nothing objec-
tionable here. The universal foundation of ancient worship, Schlegel
observed, “was the deification of material life; the higher, spiritual
ideas which were also scattered within it were an exception, the secret,
better seeds of the divine on the wild field of heathen sensuality.”85
Two aspects of Schlegel’s famous essay are worth examining in detail.
The first is the relationship between different Greek femininities and
the changes in the Greek and particularly Athenian political order.
The second is the unfolding conflict of two feminine religious per-
sonalities. The two aspects came together in the way in which those
religious personalities each correspond to a feminine civic persona,

that is, their role in the city state. It is this dialectic between religious
personality and civic persona, and between the enactment of religious
life within and outside the city state, which allows us to see what was
at stake in these debates. With respect to Athens, the essay formed an
arch of argument that reveals the inherent tension between classical
democracy as understood by the young Schlegel and the articulation
of his ideal of femininity.86
At first Schlegel followed Winckelmann in his portrayal of the mild-
ness of the Athenians: Solon’s laws had protected women, and later,
Menander’s treatment of the hetaerae in his works had shown that
they had not been excluded from the education of the beautiful and
noble.87 But in the course of a comparison with Sparta and Dorian
life, as we shall see, much of Athenian mildness came undone. The
first portrait of the development of femininity that Schlegel offered
concerned its correspondence with types of political order. Ionian
education, he explained, was centered on the imagination; it neglected
morals (Sitten). The original constitution was oligarchic and Aristotle
had commented that women in oligarchies were without morals (sit-
tenlos). This quickly degenerated into tyranny and ended in slavery
under foreign Asiatic rule.88 As we have seen, this identification of a
decay or absence of female morals in the ancient world with the rise
of tyranny in an Oriental guise was nothing new. Meiners had made
it the basis of his entire historical narrative.89 Like Friedrich Jacobs,
Schlegel also invoked the hetaerae to break the taboo on naming
women in Athens. Their names and characters matched the character
of distinct political ages. Praising Aspasia as the one to whom the
greatest men of her age owed even their finest education, he added:
Just as in works of poetry and rhetoric, as in visual art and music,

and as with every component of moral education and of public life, so
this social relationship in the course of its development corresponds
to the character and style of the different ages and to the stages of
the Athenian state and of the dominant public spirit, which we see
reflected and find in the character of the most famous hetaerae, how-
ever odd this might sound. Aspasia places us in the noble age of the
great Pericles; Lais fits into the opulent time of Alcibiades. Thais, how-
ever and the other characters as they have been described by Menander,
carry the mark of the finest intellectual culture, which however had
already sunk into weakness.90
And yet the names of the famous Athenian women did not convey
the ideal that Schlegel was working toward. He was not satisfied, as
Friedrich Jacobs would be, simply to point out the paradox of com-
bining a “higher” education with a status originating in slavery and
purchased at a high price. The name of Diotima seemed to point in
another direction. And so Schlegel began to outline the reasons why
she could not have been a hetaira. First of all, she did not speak like
one in the Symposium —she was no Lais. Moreover, she had a priestly
office dedicated to the god of harmony and was therefore a “seer.”
“The stream of her speech is poured with a holy enthusiasm, which
no Venus hetaira can show.” “No slave,” he exclaimed, “exercised
this holy art of Apollo!” 91 The two religious personalities, that of
the typical eighteenth-century fascination with the Greek worship of
beauty in the form of hetaerae, and the association with the oracle
and Apollo, the “office” of seer, represent the two ends of Greek
female religious power within the city state. The center of gravity had
moved from the educated hetaerae of Venus to the educated priest-
esses of Apollo.
The identification with the oracle, moreover, was significant
because it was acknowledged as one of the few pan-Greek institu-
tions.92 The name of Diotima thus implied a national dignity. The
religious personality of the feminine in Schlegel’s imagination had
made a transition from the physical power of nature to the embodi-
ment of divine harmony. Politically, it had moved from cultivated if
scurrilous companionship with statesmen and philosophers to the
dignity and authority associated with the oracle that spoke to cities.
This was implicitly a more noble form of power from which men not
only learned, as they had done in the company of an Aspasia, but
to which they, like Socrates had done, also deferred. The power of
a Phryne, who inspired a religious awe as she disrobed in Eleusis by
the sea, and that of a Diotima who spoke sublime words about love
to the wisest man in Athens, was very different. Yet they were both
within the spectrum of the religious authority that the Greeks were
said to attribute to femininity. Schlegel was implicitly challenging the
salience of one end of that spectrum in favor of the other.
The hetaerae, he remarked, were excluded from the feasts attended
by female citizens and it was a peculiarity that in Corinth, where
thousands of girls of outstanding beauty graced the temple of Venus,
they took part in the feast of that deity.93 The feasts of Corinth, a
city that was seen in the eighteenth century as emblematic of the
Greek worship of female beauty, were in that respect a civic anoma-
ly.94 Where then could there be female participation within the civic
context—where was the true home of Schlegel’s Diotima? Diotima
the literary character had undergone a journey from one extreme of
female personalities, with a corresponding place in the civic order

and religious imagination, to the other, that is, from a hetaira to a
priestess of Apollo and a “seer.” Diotima the symbol’s true homeland,
and the point at which Schlegel’s own ideal began to unfold, was not
to be found in Athens. The first way-station on the journey was the
Pythagorean women. So if Diotima was not a hetaira after all, then
either she was simply unique in history, Schlegel wrote, or there was,
contrary to the common opinion, apart from the hetaerae, another
class of Greek women, among whom intellectual education was pos-
sible, and which accounts for her conversation. Proclus had said in
his commentary on Plato’s Republic, Schlegel wrote, that Socrates
had been prompted to recommend the same education for both gen-
ders out of the conviction that the end (Bestimmung) of both was
the same. There had been women among Pythagoras’s students and
Proclus had named, alongside Theano and Mycha, also Diotima. Her
office of seer, and her speech, which was not unrelated to the myster-
ies, corresponded to Pythagoreanism as it had existed shortly before
the time of Plato.95
At this point, Schlegel was satisfied that he had given at least one
proof that educated and intellectually distinguished women had
existed in ancient Greece. A second example against the common view
that Greek women lacked all higher education was that of Spartan
customs. This was the hinge of Schlegel’s essay. The Pythagorean
League, he said, was an early attempt to arrange customs and the state
in accordance to a higher reason, to unite philosophy with Dorian
politics and music, and to counter the overwhelming propensity to
democracy, not without some love for the Egyptian caste system. The
space thus carved out for a freer, educated femininity where women
took part in exercise and music at the same time and on the same
terms as men, was antithetical to Athenian democracy. Pythagoras,
who had based his constitution on Dorian manners, had not suc-
ceeded politically, Schlegel said, because Greece was not prepared to
accept casts, because Dorian life was not compatible with his phi-
losophy, and because democracy was unstoppable.96 The Pythogrean
League established in Croton and Tarentum had waged war against
democratic adversaries and, since Dorian customs had lasted longest
in Sparta, perhaps we could learn something about Pythagorean
women in its traditions.97 Here they were said to take part in music
and gymnastics and to interact freely with the men.98
“A most lively, sensual and spiritual excitability,” Schlegel wrote
of the Greeks in this essay, “is the foundation of their education, the
spirit of their history, and not just their virtue and greatness, but also
their weaknesses and vices originate in this extraordinary liveliness

of the mind and excitability of character, which not only surpass the
boundary of our belief but almost of our imagination and which is
nevertheless the firm thread of the scholar of antiquity, who with-
out an excitability similar to that Greek liveliness, will never raise
himself above mediocrity.” 99 What had been Plato’s thought other
than the development of the Pythagorean seed, Schlegel asked. The
Pythagorean community, Plato’s prescriptions in the Republic, and
Proclus’s commentary, as well as Dorian customs, had raised human-
ity above the distinction of genders.
The realization of this principle in a community dedicated to phys-
ical and intellectual education was the ideal that Schlegel’s Diotima
as symbol represented even if Schlegel’s Diotima as literary character
retained something distinctly feminine in her relationship to Socrates
in the Symposium. This humanity, which was to liberate femininity
from a separate existence premised on essential differences, was there-
fore Dorian rather than democratic. For the character and manners
of the female sex were undoubtedly nobler and more happily situated
in the Dorian states than in the Ionian countries or among Athenian
manners. The highest ideal that could be realized in a state, and had
been realized at the height of Attic tragedy, was the purification of
masculinity and femininity in a higher humanity, and the attempt,
even if unsuccessful, remained worthy of fame.100 The final appeal
Schlegel made in defense of this mitigation of sexual difference in
favor of humanity was to visual art, saying that Greek art, in pre-
senting femininity, had always subordinated the sexually arousing to
the beautiful.101 The Jacobin Diotima embodied by Caroline Böhmer
had been superseded by a Diotima whose origins were to be found in
a predemocratic Dorian world, just as Lenz had located his ideal femi-
ninity in the remoteness of the heroic age. Dorian education, with its
emphasis on exercise and music was a more durable foundation for
freer femininity than either the fleeting grandeur of an Antigone or
the wily intrigues of an Aspasia. Both writers had located the full-
ness of their ideal outside of Athens even if important glimmers of it
reached the city. In this they conceded a point to their adversaries and
left fundamental questions unresolved.
C H A P T E R 5
I PHIGENIE AUF TAUR IS : German

Theatre and Philhellenism
The Meanings of Goethe’s I PHIGENIE AUF TAUR IS

Toward the end of 1778 the small dukedom of Weimar, Saxony, and
Eisenach, in the middle of Germany, was faced with the necessity of
providing their ally, Frederick II, King of Prussia, with troops for
his impending campaign against Austria in the War of the Bavarian
succession. One of the duke’s ministers, the young writer and
poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe, was charged with organizing the
recruitment. The young Goethe had arrived at the Weimar court in
November 1775 at the behest of the 18-year-old Duke Carl August,
who had been deeply impressed by Goethe’s first novel, The Sorrows
of Young Werther, published in 1774, and which was a Europe-wide
sensation. He advised the duke that it was better to select and recruit
the men themselves than to wait for the Prussians to do it, since they
would approach it in a far less delicate fashion and probably take away
married men indiscriminately.1 Goethe also worried about the textile
workers of nearby Apolda because the war would interrupt their trade
and endanger their livelihood. It was in the midst of his duties over-
seeing the military recruitment that Goethe wrote the play Iphigenie
auf Tauris, adapting the famous play by Euripides. Its ethical pathos
and delicate prose rendered it one of the most central statements of
Weimar Humanität, that higher and more humane morality, aes-
thetic, and theology, which German letters have since cherished in the
chief authors of those decades.2 His friend Karl Ludwig von Knebel
remembered him sitting at a table, early in 1779, surrounded by
recruits, writing Iphigenie.3 Other Iphigenias of the period included
exciting battles and confrontations. Goethe’s Iphigenie, by contrast,
was written amid anxious and unwanted military preparations; its

final reconciliation had a more than merely poetic resonance.
The legend of Iphigenia was perhaps the most heartrending com-
ponent of the plays known as the Tantalid cycle, that is, the story
of the house of Tantalus, whose head, Agamemnon, led the Greeks
in the siege of Troy. Agamemnon, the descendant of men who had
committed atrocious deeds, was confronted at Aulis with the terrible
demand of the priest Calchas, that he sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia,
so that the gods might release the winds and carry the Greek fleet
across the sea. The armies of Greece had gathered at Aulis after all
Greek princes save Achilles had sworn an oath to protect whoever
became the husband of Helen, earthly embodiment of divine female
beauty. Since Paris had made off with Helen to Troy, Menelaus was
robbed of his wife and the oath was invoked, with all its military
obligations. Agamemnon suffered greatly but succumbed. Iphigenia
bitterly decried the terrible verdict but then in great dignity and self-
lessness, accepted it, saying to her mother in the final act, you bore
me for all the Greeks in common, not for yourself alone.4 This was
the plot of the Iphigenia in Aulis.
The goddess Diana saved her from the sacrifice and spirited her
away at the last moment to Taurica, where she was to act as her priest-
ess. In the meantime, her mother, Clytemnestra, bitter opponent of
Agamemnon’s decision at Aulis, murdered her husband in an act of
revenge, with the help of her new lover Aegisthus. Her son Orestes,
taken away to safety as a toddler, grew to avenge his father and even-
tually killed both his own mother and her tyrannical lover, who had
usurped power in Argos. Pursued by the furies for having shed mater-
nal blood, he was tried and acquitted by one vote—that cast by Athena.
The oracle told him he would find respite from the furies if he brought
back the statue of Diana that resided in Taurica and was said to have
fallen from the heavens. His arrival there with his loyal friend Pylades,
encounter with, and rescue of his sister Iphigenia, constitute the mate-
rial of the Tauride Iphigenias in Greek and modern drama. Iphigenia’s
duties as priestess in Taurica included the ritual sacrifice of foreigners
who arrived on its shores. It was when she was about to sacrifice her
own brother, that she became aware that he was Orestes. All three
great tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, had turned all
the components of the cycle into a series of tragedies. Of all of them
it was Euripides’s two Iphigenias, which provided seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century dramatists with the most promising material for a
reckoning between fate and morality and for a plot that satisfied the
wish for a wide array of emotional and dramatic devices.5
IPHIGENIE AUF TAURIS 109
Goethe’s Iphigenie was in many respects the search for a new

theology that could reconcile man, freed from his own destructive
passions, to a benevolent, humane deity. Only the vocal medium of
theatre could articulate the fears and passions that occasioned the
need for a new theology with sufficient emphasis and clarity and with
an adequate appeal to immediate empathy on the part of the audi-
ence. This was an intimate search and the prose version of Iphigenie,
first performed in April 1779 in the tight-knit Weimar court circle,
was not published until 1842. Instead, it was circulated in manu-
script copies and became known by means of indiscretions on the
part of trusted recipients, like Johann Caspar Lavater. Only the verse
Iphigenie of 1787 was to be published in Goethe’s lifetime.6 Werther,
like Faust after him, had struggled with the New Testament almost as
much as he had struggled with the ambivalence of nature.7 Goethe’s
Prometheus had posited an irreconcilable division between Olympian
gods and men. The upright, honest, ascetic but loving Iphigenia,
priestess of Diana, was both a negation and sublimation of the restless
striving, defiance, and self-preoccupation of Prometheus, Werther,
and Faust. But she was also an answer to Zeus and to the Abrahamic
God, who had not stilled the passions nor affirmed or addressed the
endless creative drive of the Genie, the talent in search of form and
object, which these figures embodied with varying nuances.
In the work of Winckelmann, the young Herder, and Lessing,
German Philhellenism had possessed a didactic moral enthusiasm.
They had discerned in Greek sculpture and epic a unique youthful
vitality and a compelling beautiful form. The truthfulness and hon-
esty, the mildness of character and religion, the authenticity in action
and bearing, the admirable and pure passions of friendship and hero-
ism, all of these had been discerned there in different instances. For
them, they had been inseparable from a whole complex of customs
and institutions, from Greek history itself, which not only brought
them about, but the understanding of which was required for their
proper appreciation. The sculptures and epic were recovered holisti-
cally, that is, as part of a Greek world.
Iphigenie brought about what we might call a moral revolt in
German Philhellenism. Its ethical import was divested of the histori-
cal context and holistic assimilation of Greek life that had character-
ized the appreciation of sculpture and poetry. The modern individual
voice of Iphigenia pushed consciously away from the original Greek
context, dropping the chorus, and pointing toward a modern humane
morality in Greek form. The salience of Iphigenia’s unbending humane
principles, an important innovation of Goethe’s within the tradition
of the play, approximated in certain moments an exultation of duty,

which T. W. Adorno was to regard as an anticipation of the moral
doctrines of Immanuel Kant.8 The play provided a new form of access
to the moral and aesthetic wealth of Greek antiquity: a live dramatic
representation, clothed in Greek forms of expression and evoking the
dilemmas of Greek mythology in order to articulate contemporary
moral and religious aspirations. At its heart was a generous theologi-
cal imagination, as opposed to the demanding historical imagination
of the earlier philhellenic decades. After Winckelmann’s call for the
imitation of Greek sculpture in 1755 and Herder’s appeal for the vali-
dation of early Greek poetry in its context in the late 1760s, Goethe’s
Iphigenie of 1779 and 1787 was the third passionately advocated route
to moral and aesthetic renewal through ancient Greece.
Freedom and Morality in Goethe’s and

Schiller’s P lays in the s and s
One night in the spring of 1782, a young military doctor attached
to the court of Stuttgart in the duchy of Württemberg secretly got
into a carriage and made his way unnoticed out of the duchy and
to the safety of the city of Mannheim. This daring and risky escape
from an oaf of a duke who had prohibited him from writing plays
made possible one of the richest literary careers of the eighteenth
century, that of Friedrich Schiller. A professor of history in Jena from
1789, the recipient of ducal patronage thereafter, eventually also in
Weimar, Schiller established his reputation as a historian, philosopher
of aesthetics, poet, playwright, and publicist.9 In each of these disci-
plines, he articulated and unfolded the different facets of his under-
standing of freedom, coupling it by turns with the passions, with art
and morality, with worldly aspirations and transcendental longings.
His engagement with Greek antiquity evolved through the prism of
the different personalities of freedom, their claims and conflicts, and
through the search for their reconciliation. Goethe’s Iphigenie was an
important way-station of that engagement, even if he was very criti-
cal of Euripides’s version.10 For Goethe and Schiller, Iphigenia was a
powerful female personification of moral power. In order to under-
stand this phenomenon it is important to trace the career both of the
faces of freedom and of the female heroines in their theatre.
“The law has condemned to a snail’s pace, that which would have
been an eagle’s flight. The law has not yet formed any great man
but freedom spurts out colossi and extremes . . . Ah! That the spirit of
Hermann still glowed from the ashes! I imagine an army of fellows
like me, and Germany should become a republic, compared to which

Rome and Sparta would be nunneries.”11 These were the defiant
words of Karl Moor, soon to be proclaimed Hauptmann, or captain
of a robber band, in Schiller’s play Die Räuber, published in 1781 and
first performed at Mannheim in January 1782. Moor made the fiery
remarks upon reading Plutarch’s Lives, a text that inspired visions of
republican virtue and heroism, of self-abnegation in the name of free-
dom, and which was a favorite of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Die Räuber
became an instant success and made Schiller’s name overnight, with
one reviewer proclaiming him the German Shakespeare.12 Karl was
on the point of returning home and abjuring his lawless and wild
existence. His brother Franz, resentful at nature for having made
him particularly ugly, and jealous of his father’s love for his brother,
tricked his father into disinheriting and disowning Karl, thereby frus-
trating the consummation of what had been a clear biblical allusion
to the return of the prodigal son. Franz’s devilry and intrigue elicited
in Karl a bitter resignation and the acceptance of a criminal career,
combined with an irrepressible and idealistic dedication to freedom:
“What a fool I was to want to return to the cage—my spirit thirsts for
deeds, my breath for freedom.”13
The leading men of Schiller’s early plays in the 1780s, Karl Moor
in Die Räuber and Ferdinand von Walter in Kabale und Liebe, were,
first and foremost, rebels. Karl led his men in a victorious confron-
tation with the authorities in the bohemian woods and Ferdinand
bitterly defied his father’s politically motivated marriage plans. But
their righteous indignation was undergirded by a furious, violent, and
uncompromising romantic idealism. Both kill their beloved. They do
so in service to an ideal that postulates happiness and harmony in the
beyond, in Ferdinand’s case with the added pathos of a mistaken belief
that his beloved had betrayed him. The relief from the injustices and
grinding pettiness of a society divided into social estates nourished in
these plays a sense of freedom as a higher morality that resided in the
afterlife, with God. This progression, delicately presented by Schiller
in heartrending tragic plots, anticipated the hierarchical understand-
ing of morality and freedom that would characterize his philosophi-
cal work in the 1790s; the sense of both as an aspiration to higher
forms of life, the path toward which was loaded with obstacles and
complications.
Goethe’s protagonists, always eponymous characters, were often
more unambiguously heroic. Götz von Berlichingen, his first success,
was published in 1773 to great acclaim within Germany.14 The young
Goethe was under the spell of Herder in the Strasburg period and read
the work of the historian Justus Möser, who had attacked the tyranny
of Roman law in favor of the old Faustrecht (right of private justice) of
independent knights.15 The sixteenth-century Götz fought a gallant
but losing battle in the name of legal and political autonomy against
the unseemly intrigues of an incipient courtly absolutism. A more vic-
torious advocacy of a similar cause would characterize Schiller’s ver-
sion of William Tell, first performed in Weimar in 1804.16 Goethe’s
Egmont, published in 1788, placed this confrontation, again with a
heroic and noble defeat, on the eve of the Dutch wars of indepen-
dence in the sixteenth century.
Schiller’s men struggled with the trials of the progression that
allowed one form of freedom to feed into the higher, transcendental
morality. Goethe’s men, particularly Egmont and Torquato Tasso,
struggled with the fatalistic affirmation of an autonomy that brought
them to deadly danger or dissolved the foundations of their life and
patronage. Yet only by assessing Iphigenia against the backdrop of the
female characters will we be able to understand the full import of the
specifically philhellenic dimension of the famous play, that is to say, its
relationship to the unresolved conflicts and longings that dominated
the dramatic work of the two authors. Karl Moor’s lover Amalia, in
Die Räuber, mirrored his delight in the freedom of an adventurous
and fighting existence, albeit with a melancholic nuance. She sang
a version of Hector’s farewell to Andromache, a poem that Schiller
published for the first time in this play.17 She and Karl had sung the
different verses together, she explained. Like for the young Herder
and the young Goethe, the Iliad represented for the young Schiller
a sublime portrayal of early heroic self-command and independence,
a joyful proximity to nature in the form of combat and danger. It
was the Homer of the Sturm und Drang.18 Amalia’s sonorous resort
to the Iliad ennobled the danger and implicitly sanctioned Karl’s life
as the bitterly resigned but still idealistic robber baron in the woods:
Can you, Hector, eternally forsake me,

Where the murderous iron of Achaia
Offers grim sacrifice to Patroclus?
Who then will teach your babes
To throw spears and honor gods
If Xanthus draws you to its depths?19
Amalia, then, was Andromache, which, as the Greek etymology of

the latter name betrays, was a loyal ally, even when she did not know
what Karl was actually doing until the very end, and the knowledge
was paid for with her life. A very different death was that of Klare,
Egmont’s beloved, in a Brussels soon overrun with Spanish troops
and inquisitors. Klare contrasted herself, first of all with the formi-
dable Duchess of Parma, who governed the Low Countries before the
arrival of the feared Duke of Alba. She could not find herself in the
world in the same way, she said. The duchess was great, passionate,
and determined.20 But it was only when Egmont was taken prisoner
that this contrast occasioned a rupture in her life. It was precisely her
freedom, in contrast to his captivity, and, despite her spirited appeals,
her inability to rally his admirers and friends to his rescue, which
made her despair of the world and end her life. Yet the unpolitical but
loyal Klare imagined a gentle death and idyllic afterlife with imag-
ery from Greco-Roman antiquity: “I wander closer and closer to the
blessed fields, the consolation of that abode of peace is already beck-
oning me.”21
Klare and Amalia both embodied the pathos of loyalty and did
so in a largely unproblematic way. Their conflict was more with
external circumstances than within their soul. The high point of
internal conflict and the most poignant expression of an attachment
to duty was expressed by Luise Millerin, Schiller’s most compel-
ling female creation of those years. Her dignity and moral rectitude
stood comparison to Iphigenia, but the sharper confrontation of
conflicting loyalties rendered her a stark and instructive contrast.
She appeared as the beloved of Ferdinand von Walter in Kabale
und Liebe, published in 1784, and which was originally to be called
Luise Millerin.22 She was thus without a doubt the central char-
acter, and the play thereby structurally approximated Iphigenie.
Millerin was intelligent, articulate, and confident. In the beginning
she shared with Ferdinand the rejection of the divisions and pre-
tensions of estate society but gave that rejection an otherworldly
inflection. As a girl of modest background, she was not expected
to marry Ferdinand. She told her mother that she renounced him
“for this life” but that all titles would disappear when God came, as
her father, the musician Miller, had said. Beautiful thoughts would
count more than ancestors. “I would then be noble,” she concluded,
“and then what advantage could he have over his girl?”23 Here it
was unclear whether it was a kind of unspoken republicanism or
the afterlife that rent the chains of the estates. Her devotion to her
father was the intimation of a pathos of duty which threatened to
overcome her passion for Ferdinand. Her acceptance of necessity
and of the impossibility of marriage met with Ferdinand’s shocked
accusation: “cold duty against fiery love!”24
In the final act, she sank back into that passion and the anticipa-
tion of a future harmony now distinctly associated with death. She
used the specific distinctions and imagery of the ideas of death in
the philhellenic portrayals of the subject by Lessing. In a letter she
showed to her father, she invited Ferdinand to accompany her on the
journey to the afterlife, implying it was the only courageous route.
Consoling her father, she said, “only a wailing sinner could see death
as a skeleton; it is but a noble boy, just as they paint the god of love,
but less mischievous—a calm, amiable genie, who offers his arm to
the exhausted soul of the pilgrim across the divides of time.”25 Yet she
repudiated in horror this gentle imagination when she remembered
her duty to live for her adoring father. She resolved to live just when
Ferdinand, incensed at her presumed treason, resolved to kill her,
and died a Christian death: “Dying forgave my redeemer.”26 Just as
Amalia had blended the Homeric and modern German worlds, so
Luise Millerin blended the Greco-Roman gentleness of death with
her own social egalitarianism and loving passion. But the union of
duty with a Christian orientation, and finally, a Christian death,
superseded the unmistakably philhellenic motif about death. It would
fall to Goethe to reconcile duty, freedom, and Greek form, a Goethe
who in Verona, as we shall see, would starkly contrast ancient and
Christian representations of death, just as he came to render Iphigenie
in verse.
French Iphigenias from Racine to La Touche

Jean Racine took Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis and gave it the pas-
sions, trappings, and complexities of the seventeenth-century stage.
His Iphigénie en Aulide of 1674 was a masterpiece of the modern
tragédie classique. He expanded the scene of action, extended the
motivations, enriched the entanglements, and added new charac-
ters. From this date any assimilation of Euripides would be born
under the shadow of Racine and of French drama. Seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century audiences demanded plots with twists and turn-
ing points occasioned by human passion and intrigue rather than the
unbending dictates of fate. One way to do this was to use the device
of the oracle, a staple of Greek drama, in order to clothe in riddles
precisely those human intrigues that would constitute the denoue-
ment of the play. Racine used this device in Iphigénie en Aulide and
Goethe would use it in Triumph der Emfpindsamkeit in 1778. 27 The
first conflict, therefore, which dramatic assimilations and adapta-
tions of classical material had to face, was that between the salience
of fate in ancient drama and the demands of modern audiences for

complex human machinations. One reason for Racine’s success and
popularity was that to a great extent he reconciled the two entities:
this is why he chose the aulidian and not the taurican Iphigenia.
The latter, he told the playwright Joseph de la Grange Chancel, did
not have sufficient material for a fifth act.28 Iphigenia in Aulis, fac-
ing a sacrifice ordained by the gods that she could not escape, but
at the same time surrounded by figures with a passionate stake in
different outcomes, allowed room for fate and intrigue to nourish
each other.
Racine’s masterpiece was translated into German by no less
a figure than Gottsched in 1732 and became a classic of German
Enlightenment theatre.29 Alongside this text, Pierre Brumoy’s trans-
lations of Greek works in his Théâtre des grecs of 1730, with a new
multivolume edition in the 1780s, provided the key reference points
for any engagement with the material.30 As Norbert Miller has shown,
by the middle of the century, the sacrifice of Iphigenia had attained a
“paradigmatic status” in all forms of art, not least in the work of the
painter Giambattista Tiepolo.31 None of this would have come about
without Racine. The opening scenes of his play saw Agamemnon
lament the “thousand virtues” of the daughter he was called upon
to sacrifice.32 Her arrival in Aulis, tricked by her father into believing
she was coming to marry Achilles, occasioned the enchanted wonder
at her beauty on the part of the assembled armies.33 But Racine bal-
anced the salience of Iphigenia with the role of Achilles, whose own
struggles are as central to the plot as the qualities and fortunes of
Iphigenia.
Racine’s Achilles was a warrior, whose affinity to the raw man-
ners and passions of the heroic age accompanied his every action
and reflection. By making him the pivot of the play, the author paid
a handsome tribute to a kind of Greek authenticity, taking archaic
Greece, with all its barbarous customs at face value. This gives the lie
to or at least qualifies Walter Rehm’s observation in 1936 that Goethe
had removed Iphigenia from the French courtly setting and returned
it to its authentic Greek form.34 What precisely Greek form was and
what was philhellenic as opposed to just good drama about interpre-
tations of Euripides is thus one of the central questions with which
we are concerned. In any case, Racine’s Achilles displayed heroic age
features with an exuberance that indicated the author’s delight in
them. He had captured and robbed Eriphyle, a woman of unknown
origin whom he had brought back as a slave. Few actions were more
characteristic of heroic age commanders.
Whereas Euripides’s Achilles had not anticipated the proposed wed-

ding with Iphigenia, Racine’s had, and became her ardent lover. This
petty and selfish passion, Schiller later observed, could not have been
reconciled with the high gravity and the important interest of the
Greek piece. And yet Schiller preferred the French Achilles, since the
Greek is not only less gallant but too inconsistent in every instance.35
Euripides had made Menelaus Agamemnon’s main interlocutor con-
cerning the advisability of the sacrifice. He eventually repudiated his
own advocacy of Iphigenia’s death, sympathizing with her father, and
it fell to Agamemnon to warn of the consequences of not going ahead
with it. Racine instead made Odysseus the unbending supporter of
the deed, thereby a furious opponent of Agamemnon’s weak moments
and an unyielding rival of Achilles, who enflamed with love, vowed to
stake everything to save Iphigenia by force of arms.
Racine’s addition to the cast, the haughty slave girl Eriphyle, had
come to Aulis to prevent the wedding, since, as Clytemnestra and
Iphigenia angrily pointed out to her, she was in love with Achilles.
This combination of circumstances with the heroic age character
of Achilles allowed Racine to blend modern courtly Romanticism
with the manners of archaic Greece in what was a brilliant synthesis.
Eriphyle confided to Doris, her confidant, that it was precisely when
Iphigenia was condemned to die that she was most jealous of her:
“the hero, before whom the remaining mortals tremble, who knows
no tears other than those he causes to flow, who was hardened against
them since childhood, and who, if he has truthfully reported, has
tasted the blood of lions and bears, has for her sake learned to fear:
she saw him crying, saw how his face changed color. Und you pity her,
Doris? Indeed, what misfortune would I not contest with her for the
sake of such tears?”36
Two further turns in the plot strengthened Racine’s synthesis. First,
Agamemnon was persuaded to go ahead with the sacrifice after all,
not, as in Euripides, because the whole of Greece would fall upon him
if he did not, but rather because he did not want to yield in glory and
fame to Achilles.37 Second, Racine’s Iphigenia added a second motive
to that of duty and obedience in accepting her own sacrifice. She said
to Achilles: “Go, I stand in the way of your honor. Prove yourself to
be the hero promised to Greece.” She added that he should allow the
widows of Troy to lament her death and that it should one day open
the account of glorious happenings.38 Iphigenia’s bellicose exhor-
tations were an important invention of Racine’s, and the centrality
of Achilles’s honor would have resonated powerfully in 1674 in the
midst of Louis XIV’s great campaigns, in a courtly regime governed,
as Montesquieu would observe in The Spirit of the Laws in 1748, by

the principle of honor.39
“I believed to have found in Iphigenia in Taurica the subject which
I sought,” wrote Racine’s successor and disciple, Joseph de la Grange
Chancel, in the preface to his Oreste et pylade ou Iphigénie en Tauride
of 1697.40 “I found scenes simply worth translating,” he continued,
“but I admit that I found at the same time difficulties capable of
making me abandon the enterprise. I saw on the one hand that the
great Corneille, in his reflections on theatre, had placed that subject
among those which ought not to be treated.” But on the other hand,
Racine had hesitated a long time between the two Iphigenias before
deciding the tauride one did not provide enough for the final act. The
ancients, he observed, could resort to a machine, that is, fate, when
other resources were lacking but that which was tolerated among
them, “would condemn to failure the most beautiful of our trag-
edies.” All of this, he declared, had not made him turn back. He had
seen, after all, how Racine had invented Eriphyle and made her take
the place of the catastrophe favored by the ancients.41 If Racine could
be accused of having given Euripides all the trappings of a French
court drama, with love rivals and confidants, at least the scene at
Aulis with the whole of Greece assembled, and his own evocation of
heroic age masculinity mitigated and qualified this aspect of his adap-
tion. The lesser dimensions and lower stakes of the tauride setting
made courtly changes more salient and La Grange’s plot accentuated
this.
Like Racine, La Grange gave Iphigenia a powerful female counter-
part, this time in the person of the Scythian princess Thomiris, and,
moving further than his master in the direction of courtly drama,
he also gave her a confidant. Whereas Goethe would set the play
in the sacred grove, La Grange chose a palace. As the title of his
play already indicated, he struck a balance between the two tau-
ride themes: Iphigenia’s escape from king Thoas and the friendship
between Orestes and Pylades, which in later plays was the pinnacle
of sentimentality. La Grange’s Iphigenia was very different from the
virtuous and selfless beauty with a touch of jealousy portrayed by
Racine. She was characterized by calculated dissimulation at every
step. She invented a story about the goddess’ rage inside the temple
in order to stay the sacrifice of the captured Greek who arrived in
Taurica.42
She was initially ready to sacrifice Orestes before knowing he was
her brother, relishing the prospect of punishing a criminal and deliv-
ering the universe of a monster.43 Before this point she had been
prepared to sacrifice Pylades, saying she wanted to appease the god-

dess, after he had insisted on dying, believing Orestes was already
dead. “I will pierce his heart . . . I will extinguish with his blood his
proud ardor.”44 Nothing could be further from Goethe’s imagination
when he stood before the image of St. Agatha in Italy in 1786 and
said his Iphigenia would not utter anything that St. Agatha would not
say.45 It was Thomiris who reminded Iphigenia that one sacrificed not
to the gods, but to one’s passions, the point that Goethe’s Iphigenia
would herself make to King Thoas.46 Thomiris took the prisoners
under her protection and warned Iphigenia in threatening words
against proceeding with the sacrifice.47 In the end, Thomiris brought
about a coup d’état in Taurica and thereby facilitated the escape of
Iphigenia and the two prisoners. As a final affirmation of her earthly
quality, La Granges’s Iphigenia married Pylades.48
Guimond de la Touche’s Iphigénie en Tauride, performed in Paris
in 1757, returned the scene to the temple of Diana but retained the
courtly apparatus and explicitly designated Orestes and Pylades as
kings.49 For the first time, and as the title implied, Iphigenia gov-
erned the center of the action uncontested. Eliminating the Eriphyle
and Thomiris figures that Racine had established, La Touche cre-
ated the humane Iphigenia, whose plight and nobility dominated
the unfolding plot. The whole of the first act was taken up with the
contrast between King Thoas’s cowardly and murderous superstition
and Iphigenia’s anguished opposition to the demand for human sac-
rifice. “All my blood is in revolt,” she averred, and “humanity beats
in my heart.” Her priestess-confidante Ismenie assured her that these
crimes were occasioned by fate and not her heart. Iphigenia responded
that the author of nature repudiated the work of cruel peoples.50
Iphigenia’s humanity, just as in Goethe’s version, was undergirded
by the intimation of a gentler theology. And yet her power to hold
back Thoas’s thirst for blood was limited, since the oracle had warned
him to beware of Orestes and that every Greek must fall victim to his
preventive measures. She reported, with great regret, to the two pris-
oners that she could not hold back the sacrifice and that her efforts
could save but one of them. A secret inclination bound her to Orestes
and she chose him to be her messenger to her home in Argos.51 But
Orestes’s strong desire to die convinced her to reverse her choice. At
this point she deviated from her anguished humanity and appealed to
the gods for the strength to carry out a sacrifice in the name of her
brother, not knowing that it was her brother she must slay.52
Asking questions of the stranger about her homeland, she discov-
ered her sibling before her. Her subsequent suspension of the sacrifice
aroused the ire of the fearful Thoas, who reminded her of the terrible
prognostications given by the oracle if he did not kill the foreigners.
Iphigenia responded that it was to truth that one must sacrifice and
that she wanted to send word to her family by means of the strang-
er.53 This courageous truthfulness in a confrontation with Thoas
was something that Goethe would incorporate in his portrayal of the
story, but at a later point in the play and in the face of a Thoas who,
as T. W. Adorno would later point out, was anything but a true bar-
barian.54 La Touche’s Iphigenia united her truthfulness to an act of
courage that was the all the greater because her interlocutor was less
enlightened than Goethe’s equivalent. The denouement of the play
was the kind of action and confrontation that delighted the audi-
ence. Orestes confronted Thoas, defiantly announcing he had come
to take the statue of Diana and that he wished to avenge and console
the earth, to wash in Thoas’s blood the atrocity of a destructive cult.
Pylades arrived just in time with a troop of Greeks, Thoas was killed
and the statue was taken.55
German Iphigenias: J. E. Schlegel and

C. F. Derschau
German mid eighteenth-century theatre dedicated itself to one side of
La Grange’s delicate balance and offered the audience the friendship
of Orestes and Pylades in the spirit of an intense, sickly sweet senti-
mentality. Iphigenia was often reduced to an intermediary between
the two friends desperate to die for each other or to live in insepa-
rable union. Orestes and Pylades: A Tragedy, written by the 18-year-
old Johann Elias Schlegel in 1737, was first performed with the help
of his school friends at the Fürstenschule in Pforte in 1738.56 “The
young poet,” wrote his brother in the 1761 preface to his works, “had
no other guide than the chapter on tragedy in professor Gottsched’s
Dichtkunst, but his models were Sophocles and Euripides, whom he
read and understood early.” The play was then performed at the the-
atre in Leipzig in 1739.57
The author, at least in his later reflections, was animated by a
desire to return to Greek manners and values and expressed in a
letter published by his brother in 1761, what can be described as
a philhellenic manifesto for German theatre.58 The letter repeatedly
echoed Winckelmann’s evocation of simplicity (Einfalt), as the qual-
ity to which German theatre, emancipating itself from the French
model, ought to aspire. The confused entanglements of their nov-
els, he polemically asserted, also characterized French tragedy, which
came down to a series of declarations of love, the refuge of a mod-

est imagination, since nothing was easier than to portray a beautiful
woman as cruel or to place obstacles in the way of tender hearts. But
we do Germans a disservice, he averred, when we make our heroes
into women and when we present to them as exemplars, people who
hang on every glance of the beloved.59 One did better to read history
in order to understand Greek character than French drama. Schlegel
aspired to turn an approximation to true Greek character in German
theatre into a school of morals that would counter French baroque
drama:
The character of heroes, as the ancients portrayed them, is particularly

shown in their aversion to lies and intrigues. Only Ulysses is presented
as sly and is hated by all precisely for that . . . In our modern pieces,
however, one often finds nothing but intrigues spun out one against
the other; and that because we think that it is thus demanded by the
political cleverness of great men. Indeed, our stage is at present a bad
school for good morals. Love entanglements, intrigues of heroes and
the sayings of opera morality, of which tragedies are also full, are just
as dangerous.60
Schlegel concluded his praise of the Greeks with a risky political

point: “The ancients had a further advantage which it is not given
to our age to imitate. The Greeks were a free people. They did not
have the high opinion of kings which we have. It is unbearable for
us to hear a hero speak as other people. He must speak and recount
in an extraordinary fashion. Thus we have not retained this simplic-
ity in retelling.”61 The last point gives a Greek-republican inflection
to a point emphatically made by Rousseau in his famous Letter to
D’Alembert on the Theatre, published a few years before this edition
of Schlegel’s works. Rousseau had asserted that it was dangerous for
a simple morality to be exposed to dramatic actors whose ideas and
ways of speaking were always raised to a high pitch of the extraordi-
nary.62 This appeal for a return from the ornate to the simple in the-
atre, with an affinity to Winckelmann and Rousseau, anticipates what
Ernst Gombrich, in reference to the power of the same two authors,
would later attribute to trends in the history of art at the end of the
century.63
The young Schlegel’s play opened with Iphigenia lamenting her
plight, as she did in Euripides and in Goethe, but instead of recount-
ing the story of the house of Tantalus, she regreted that her marriage
to Achilles did not take place. Her passion was thus more salient at the
opening than her piety or humanity.64 Orestes and Pylades arrived in

Taurica dressed as Trojans, since Thoas was an ally of Troy and only
Greeks were sacrificed. Iphigenia inadvertently caused them to be dis-
covered as Greeks when they were found with an urn on which she
had inscribed Orestes’s name and with which she wanted to honor her
brother, presumed dead. She offered her own blood to Thoas, saying,
“Here you have Greek blood!” in order to spare the two foreigners.65
But since one of them had wounded a shepherd, Thoas determined
that one must die. Orestes and Pylades vied with each other to be
identified as the culprit. In his Iphigenia in Tauris, Euripides had
emphasized the motif of shame in that noble dispute between the two
friends. The one did not want to go back to Greece with the shame
of having survived, indeed with the suspicion of having killed the
other, or allowed him to die.66 This motif was present in Schlegel but
subordinated to the ardent passion of friendship. Indeed, Iphigenia
disdained it and reproached Pylades for caring too much what others
think and letting this decide his fate.67 The philhellenic impulse of
the young Schlegel was therefore selective. Unlike Racine, he did not
delight in ancient customs and judgments born of rustic rights and
harsh expectations of Greek commanders.
Approximating again his later statements of ideal character,
Schlegel’s Iphigenia tried to hold back Orestes’s avowed wish of vio-
lence against Thoas, pointing out that the latter had become her lord
and king by the right of arms.68 Where Schlegel’s Iphigenia asserted
Thoas’s lordship by the right of arms, Goethe’s Iphigenia looked
toward the gratitude owed to hospitality and pointed to the moral
imperative of serving her generous protector.69 Schlegel’s Iphigenia
eventually invented a clever ploy to save the prisoners and take the
statue and she delighted in her defiance of Thoas: “The king, who
otherwise ridicules me as helpless, will see how a woman turns him
into the vanquished one! I hate intrigue and trickery against friends.
But the common enemy which plagues Greece and who through his
cruelty is unworthy of the goddess,” deserved what was coming to
him.70 In the end, however, it was not Iphigenia’s cleverness but that
of her superior in the priesthood, Hierarchus, which decided the out-
come in favor of the Greeks. It was he who tricked Thoas with a
false oracle and the superstitious tyrant died from a wound inflicted
by the Greeks, while crying out for revenge. Hierarchus, as the new
ruler, liberated them. His motives were the moral of the story: “If
the word of the gods had not saved you from the proximity of death,
your loyalty and virtue would have saved you. They free Greece from
our enmity. We honor your bond and the loyalty of this sister.”71
The friendship of Orestes and Pylades disarmed the ferocity of the

Tauricans and therein resided the superiority of Greece.
Like his predecessors, the playwright Christoph Friedrich Derschau,
felt compelled to justify his choice of the Tauride Iphigenia in his play
Orestes and Pylades, or the Testimony of Friendship, which was pub-
lished in 1747 and performed at the court in Vienna in 1758 on the
occasion of the Empress Maria Theresa’s birthday.72 Although the
French masters Racine and Corneille had not deemed it worthy of the
stage, he wrote in a letter appended to the play, Euripides and Cicero
had shown what an impression this tale had made in the imagination
of the time, and Joseph La Grange had already undertaken a repre-
sentation of it.73 Derschau followed the French model of emphasiz-
ing the royalty of Orestes and Pylades and of providing confidants
and otherwise courtly roles in abundance. Iphigenia was absent in
the title of the play just as she was absent in the entire first act. Less
didactic and patriotic than J. E. Schlegel, Derschau’s play aimed to
entertain rather than to convey an elevated idea of ancient Greece. Of
all the modern Iphigenia plays that preceded Goethe’s in France and
Germany, his offered the most sickly sweet and pathetic celebration
of the friendship of the two male protagonists. Iphigenia, rather than
representing the summit of physical beauty and rising to the pitch of
moral dignity granted her by others, was left to marvel at the loyalty
of Pylades and Orestes to each other.
In Derschau’s piece a proud if disoriented Orestes arrived in
“Taurica” to find that his friend Pylades had already established him-
self there as a respected military commander with realistic aspirations
of marrying Tomiris, daughter of King “Troas.” Orestes defiantly
revealed his identity to the king, who happened to be the brother of
Orestes’s victim, Aegisthus.74 Troas angrily ordered him to be pre-
pared for a sacrifice to be carried out by the priestess Iphigenia. Not
yet knowing who the victim really was, Derschau’s Iphigenia was will-
ing to perform her duties, saying “may this blood banish the dreaded
plagues. Diana, accept it and may it please you!” Moreover, she was
also keen to take revenge on the Greeks for having agreed to offer her
own body to the gods at Aulis.75 Her encounter with her brother then
followed the established conventions. She was horrified at what she
was about to do, then overjoyed at seeing him. Orestes fell into the
trance in which he believed himself to be in the underworld: “Does
Pluto, whose prize I am at this moment, send you to the infernal gates
towards me, to lead your brother into the land of the spirits and to the
judgment seat of Minos?”76 This scene, incidental to Derschau, would
become central to the meaning and unfolding of Goethe’s story.
The second and third acts were mostly taken up with Pylades’s
sentimental and defiant declarations of love for Orestes. Troas told
him he was to be his successor only for Pylades to disdain his wedding
with the princess and the whole kingdom for the sake of Orestes, now
condemned to death. The third act contained a long monologue on
his love for Orestes as well as a confrontation with Tomiris, who was
disdainful of his preference for friendship. Iphigenia, again an adjunct
to such scenes, reported that the oracle foresaw a “crowned victim”
at the altar. Once again, the quintessentially Greek institution of the
oracle was turned into a handy device for modern plot entanglements.
Pylades took this as an opportunity to die for his friend and claimed
that he was Orestes, something denied, of course, by the equally ded-
icated Orestes.77 The cruel and impulsive Troas decided to kill them
both. The climax of the play in the fifth act was the description given
by Tomiris’s confidante, Zarine, of the procession taking the two men
toward the temple and their sacrifice. “Their eyes were turned with
pleasure towards each other, in whose glance one discerned a satisfac-
tion that triumphed over death and Troas.”78 Compared to this, the
actual resolution of the play seemed but an afterthought designed to
fulfill the simpler criteria of entertaining spectacles: Orestes, “lion-
like” and seconded by the arrival of Greek soldiers, killed Troas, and
Tomiris became queen.
Wieland and the Young Goethe

Iphigenia in Aulis offered the touching spectacle of a horrible sacrifice
demanded by military ambition and pride, which turned itself into a
heartrending self-sacrifice, the dramatic peak of the tantalid cycle.
The same theme of the self-sacrifice of a beautiful young woman of
royal rank, but in a very different context, was at the heart of the myth
of Alceste. She appealed to the gods to take her into the underworld
that her husband Admetus may live. Her appeal and death was the
subject of eighteenth-century opera with interpretations by Händel
in 1727 and 1749, by Gluck in 1767, and by James Thomson, whose
Edward and Eleonora of 1739 had removed the gods and placed the
same theme in the age of the crusades. In 1773, it was the subject
of a short Singspiel by Christoph Martin Wieland, the famous writer
and publicist, whose Teutscher Merkur would become one of the most
important literary and philosophical magazines of the later eighteenth
century.79 Like Iphigenia, then, Alceste was a myth that could be
assimilated by modern theatre with a variety of goals and in varying
contextual settings.
If we cast a backward glance toward Winckelmann’s Laocoon

remarks of 1755, as well as a forward glance toward Herder’s Nemesis
essay of 1784, both of which we have already examined, it becomes
clear that there were three forms of appropriation of Greek legends.
First, that of Winckelmann, which gave a universal paradigmatic
meaning to Greek statues. A Greek legend, as manifested in that one
work of art, told us a great deal about the entire Greek world that had
brought that statue into being; about its customs and ethics, about
physical exercise and political relations. It was premised on an under-
standing of the ancient context. The distance between that world
and the contemporary one was at the forefront. Second, Herder in
1784 had taken Greek myths to be symbolic of a Greek treatment of
ideas that spoke to modern theological anxieties and ethical ideals.
It was a way-station that bridged context-oriented and contemporary
approximations to antiquity. Though the reader was still consciously
and didactically led into a quintessentially Greek world, our access to
ancient Greece was no longer predicated on a conscientious assimila-
tion of its original context.
In Wieland’s Alceste and then in Goethe’s Iphigenie, the trend
toward a third position was manifest, even while Goethe retained
in many respects, as we shall see, key aspects of the second. Here
it was Greek form that served the exposition of contemporary fears
and aspirations. We are not led into a specifically Greek reality in
a didactic fashion, but rather invited to see our own emotions and
ideas through the prism of a Greek legend. Moreover, while sculpture
lent itself more readily to contextual explanations, since it invited a
reflection on its conditions of existence, drama could deliver indi-
vidual motifs that, abstracted from their context and enlivened by a
live stage, would remove both the contextual and didactic criteria for
the appropriation of the Greek world, making the latter the backdrop
and distant inspiration of contemporary emotional spectacles. In the
third form therefore, Greek legends and motifs were but the occasion
for the treatment of modern problems. The shades of philhellenic
sentiment could therefore be understood as contextual, didactic and,
to borrow a phrase from Carl Schmitt’s study of Romanticism, “occa-
sionalist,” with combinations of the first two and of the latter two
animating the work of several authors. Only the first and third were
separated by an irreconcilable opposition.80
If our understanding of the term Philhellenism is generous, then
all three approaches belong within the philhellenic family, an idea
that points in the direction of a more populist, even democratic
assimilation of Greek material, since drama and opera reached a far
larger audience than Herder’s or Winckelmann’s essays. If our under-

standing of the concept is narrower, then only those who strove to
discern the meaning of Greek ideas and the genesis of Greek art,
across the barriers of time, religion, and custom, those who sought to
distill from their reflections that which was essentially Greek, would
qualify as Philhellenes. We would arrive at the exclusive validation of
a more esoteric and aristocratic encounter with antiquity. This lat-
ter understanding is more consistent with the aspirations and self-
image of the German Bildungsbürgertum and its reconstruction of
the German encounter with Greece. It heightened the sense of the
German achievement and of the peculiarly deep affinity between
Germany and Greece, a view adopted in the 1920s and 1930s in vari-
ous forms by Walter, Rehm, Wolfgang Schadewaldt, Erich Aron, and
others, as well as, from a very different and critical perspective, Eliza
M. Butler.81
Wieland’s Alceste, was written in the spirit of the literary genre
known as Empfindsamkeit, which, as Thorsten Valk has shown in
his study of the young Goethe, was both a product and a correc-
tive of Enlightenment demands for individual autonomy and the pri-
macy of reason.82 It privileged feeling and the open expression of
profound emotion, rendered it intellectually and ethically meaning-
ful. Wieland’s Alceste began with the eponymous character pleading
with the gods to save Admetus.83 Her sister Parthenia announces that
a sacrifice would appease the Fates, feminine incarnations of death,
whose significance as the polar opposite of Iphigenia’s humanism and
hope, would be the subject of important debates about Goethe’s play
in the twentieth century.84 Alceste offered her life to the underworld
and awaits the Fates: “To you I consecrate my life. They have heard
it! They are coming, they are coming! I hear the flight of the black
wings, they are coming down! They are taking the victim to the altar
of death.”85 Admetus’s despair led to a moment in the fourth act
where he imagined seeing the shadow of Alceste in the underworld:
“Do you already wander, beloved shadow, on the banks of Lethe?
Ah! I see her walk! She walks alone in sad majesty upon the fields of
twilight. The lesser souls yield before her steps, and look upon the
heroine with astonishment.”86
The arrival of Hercules signaled the decisive turning point. He told
Admetus that Alceste was worthy of his tears; that she was the pride of
her gender; that she deserved to have her image in marble worshipped
by coming generations; that every year on the day she gave her life
for her husband, the pious women of Thessaly should adorn the grave
of the heroine with wreaths of flowers.87 Hercules, offspring of the
gods, was able to rescue her from the underworld but when Admetus
asked him how he accomplished this, he replied: “do not desire to
know it! A sacred veil, which the gods themselves do not dare to draw,
lies upon the secrets of the spirit realm. The hand of the Eumenides
seals my mouth!”88 Both Admetus’s vision of the underworld and
Hercules’s concession that the dark deities of the underworld had a
secure domain, would be features of Goethe’s play. In this respect,
and as one important modern current of interpretation reminds us,
the power conceded to a merciless and terrifying underworld in these
plays directly qualified and countered the image of death among the
ancients, which Lessing, Herder, and Goethe himself, would other-
wise celebrate. The didactic Philhellenisms of Herder’s Nemesis or of
Lessing’s essays, as well as Goethe’s Italienische Reise, all of which
focused on the silent remains of graves in Italy, removed themselves
from a facet of Greek experience concerning ideas about death, which
Greek drama and later the sonorous sentimentality of eighteenth-
century plays powerfully brought to the fore.
At the end of April 1773, Wieland published a set of letters in his
Teutscher Merkur that contained a kind of manifesto about the princi-
ples of his play and a critique of Euripides’s treatment of the legend.89
Wieland’s fundamental complaint was that Euripides’s Alceste fol-
lowed the principles of rhetoric rather than those of sentiment. “How
infinitely different is the language of sentiment from the language of
the rhetorical schools! What wonderful things she can express with
one look, one gesture!” 90 His letters in the Teutscher Merkur show
better than any other document the distance between the thoroughly
contextual and holistic Philhellenism of the first generation, and the
occasionalist enthusiasm for the malleable individual Greek legend.
Herder’s essay on the history taste, which we have already discussed,
as well as Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity, celebrated
Greek art and Greek rhetoric as a powerful and creative unity, as a sin-
gle whole. Beauty and excellence were publicly displayed and publicly
rewarded. The civic pride of achievement, which Pindar expressed in
odes that sang of the ancestry and the city of the athletes, had con-
tributed to an idea of Greece as permanently assembled, constantly
sitting in judgment, in politics, in art, and in theatre. For Wieland,
it was precisely this that stood in the way of Empfindsamkeit, of
sentiment.
Euripides, wrote Wieland in the first letter, “makes the voluntary
sacrifice of Alcestis a public affair. The whole of Thessaly takes part.”
The piece thereby lost, he argued, the most touching scene—the
moment of that voluntary sacrifice.91 In the second letter, Wieland
sought to purify the raw Greek manners of Euripides for the require-
ments of the eighteenth-century cultivated audience. The tears that
Euripides’s Alceste shed over her marriage bed, the trouble she had
tearing herself away from it, had “something selfish about it,” Wieland
observed, “which vitiates the value of her tenderness.” The same was
true of the oath that the dying wife demanded of her husband, to
remain true to her memory and their children.92 Wieland wanted to
create the most touching, venerable, and dignified figure, which the
tone of his letters intimated was an artistic challenge more than it was
an ethical or theological statement. The Greek Alceste’s emotional and
physical attachment to the marriage bed was far too sensual a regret
for the German Alceste, whose departure from this world took place
in a spirit of unblemished selflessness. If Wieland’s Alceste evinced
traits that would later be adopted by the chaste and single-minded
Iphigenia of Goethe’s creation in 1779, the younger Goethe of 1773
found Wieland’s project objectionable and ridiculous. In September
of the latter year, Wieland had published an ambivalent and lukewarm
review of Goethe’s Götz and this hardened Goethe’s mood against
him.93 He wrote a farce entitled Gods, Heroes and Wieland. He sent it
to his friend Lenz in Strasburg, who was so taken with the piece that
he convinced Goethe to publish it and it appeared early the following
year.94
Many years later, in his autobiographical reflections Dichtung und
Wahrheit, Goethe explained the reasons for writing it. Wieland’s dis-
regard for the “raw and healthy nature” of ancient drama and his
arrogant self-promotion in the letters irritated Goethe and his young
friends.95 Wilhelm Heinse and the young Sturm und Drang welcomed
the piece enthusiastically.96 In the farce, Wieland found himself taken
in his sleep to the afterlife and confronted with Euripides and the
characters of the drama. Defending himself for having denied his char-
acters the regret at having to depart from life, Wieland said proudly
and laconically, “only cowards fear death.” Admetus responded that
this was true of heroic deaths, but that death when one was a father of
a household was feared even by heroes and that this corresponded to
nature. “Do you think I would spare my own life,” Admetus contin-
ued, “to win back my wife from the enemy, to defend my possessions
and yet . . . ” Wieland interrupted him and said to all of the sprits pres-
ent: “you speak as people from a different world, a language whose
words I hear but whose meaning I do not comprehend.” “We speak
Greek,” they told him. Admetus added, “is that so incomprehensible
to you?” He went on to explain the difference between Wieland’s play
and the Greek notions he claimed to have improved upon: “A young,
quite happy, contented prince, who had received from his father
realm, earth and goods and sat there with satisfaction, enjoyed and
was whole, needed nothing but people who enjoyed with him . . . and
who did not tire of giving, who loved all that they may love him, and
thereby befriended gods and men, and Apollo forgot the heavens at
his table. He should not wish to live forever!”97
Wieland is particularly shocked by the imposing physical dimen-
sions and wild vitality of Hercules, who tells him, “had you not sighed
so long under the yolk of your religion and morality, you could have
become something.” 98 That potent vitality of gigantic forms, was in
the words of Hans-Jürgen Schrader, the “titanic antithesis” that the
young Goethe’s antiquity, in contrast to Winckelmann, opposed to
modern moral and aesthetic sensibilities.99 It was intimately linked
with the understanding of artistic creativity as a wild, defiant, and
sensual force.100 It is interesting to note that it was the need to deal
with divergent understandings of death that provided the occasion and
the foundation of the argument between Wieland and the ancients.
Death was not, as in the didactic Philhellenism that contemplated
ancient graves, a peaceful and idyllic rest, but rather a terrible mate-
rial loss, a separation from the freedom of an unreflective sensuality,
embodied at its best by Admetus and Hercules.
C H A P T E R 6
The L egacies of I PHIGENIE AUF TAUR IS
Goethe’s I PHIGENIE and its Modern

Interpreters: The Problem
Iphigenie was written “from a study of Greek matters that was inad-
equate,” Goethe wrote to his friend Riemer in 1811. Had the study
been more complete, he observed, the play would have remained
unwritten.1 It was one of the few serious dramas mounted by the
Weimar amateur theatre, writes Nicholas Boyle.2 The court the-
atre had burned down in 1774 with most of the professional actors
moving to Gotha, a splendid baroque residential city. Figures from
the Weimar court and the ducal family itself became the actors.
The first performance of Goethe’s play took place at the house of
the court gamekeeper Anton Hauptmann, on April 6, 1779, where
a provisional stage had been set up. Knebel, after initially refusing,
played the role of Thoas. Goethe himself played Orestes, and prince
Constantin, brother of the duke, played Pylades, with Goethe’s friend
Seidler as Arkas, Thoas’s messenger. Iphigenia was represented by the
professional actress Corona Schröter, a platonic flame of Goethe’s.
The spectator Luise von Göchhausen wrote to Goethe’s mother a few
days later that he had “played his Orestes masterfully. His attire, like
that of Pylades, was Greek und I have not seen him so beautiful in my
life.”3 There were further performances that spring and summer at
the Ettersburg residence on a hill overlooking Weimar and this time
the duke himself played Pylades.
Goethe’s Orestes and Pylades arrived in the kingdom governed
by Thoas with the express purpose of removing Orestes’s curse,
but the oracle was ambiguous about what needed to be taken away:
Iphigenia herself or the image of the goddess she served. The scene
where Orestes encounters the sister who was about to sacrifice him
culminated in his brief descent into a trance where he imagined him-
self in the underworld, reconciled to his mother and in the company
of his father too. Iphigenia rejected Thoas’s proposals of marriage to

which he reacted by restoring the practice of the sacrifice of foreign-
ers, which she had persuaded him to discontinue. Pylades persuaded
her to deceive Thoas so they can all escape, and she told them that
the image of Diana as well as the two foreigners must be purified in
the sea. She struggled with the need to deceive her host and protector
and eventually told the king the truth. “If I begin with trickery and
robbery, how will I bring goodness and where will I end?,” she asked.4
“Forgive me brother,” she said to Orestes, “but my childlike heart has
placed our entire fate in his hands, I have confessed the whole of your
plan to him. And saved my soul from treason.”5 Violence and cun-
ning, the great fame of men, Orestes admitted, are put to shame by
beautiful truth and childlike trust.6 Finally a potentially lethal con-
frontation between Orestes and Thoas was defused by the former,
who used the interpretative latitude of the oracle to suggest that the
king could keep the image. In parting, Iphigenia persuaded Thoas to
give them his blessing rather than simply dismiss them.
Iphigenia was as conscious as Klare in Goethe’s Egmont of her
remoteness from the scene of warfare and fame, lamenting at the
opening of the play that a woman’s fortune was closely bound to that
others, often strangers and that when destructions befell her house
she was led out of the smoking ruins, through the dear blood of the
slain by the conqueror himself.7 But unlike Klare, she was without
a romantic bond. Goethe established instead her intimacy with the
various aspects of the Greek fable that were ciphers for the factors in
the struggle through which Humanität, reconciliation, freedom, and
harmony could be won: the curse of the House of Tantalus personi-
fied by Orestes’s torments, her own exile, the remoteness of the gods,
and the potential betrayal of the hospitality of the king. By what
means she and Orestes resolved this struggle and what this means has
been the subject of rich debate. Iphigenia’s independence from men
was commensurate with her vocation, of which the king’s messenger
Arkas reminded her when she laments her exile, namely that, “by
means of sweet mildness upon the inhospitable shore you grant the
shipwrecked stranger return and salvation.”8
Iphigenia’s independence spared her the fate of Klare as well as
of Louise Millerin, whose devotion to different kinds of duty was
always much less nuanced than the more reflective Iphigenia. The
complex elements of the Greek mythical world she was confronted
with elicited a richer spectrum of ethical and emotional responses
than was possible in the more binary confrontations of Goethe and
Schiller’s other heroines. In Goethe’s play, Pylades’s profession of
THE LEGACIES OF IPHIGENIE AUF TAURIS 131
love for Orestes and the latter’s reciprocation lose the salient status
accorded to them by most of Goethe’s predecessors. It was through
the struggle of Orestes and Iphigenia with guilt, exile, and redemp-
tion that their personalities were articulated, and this made Goethe’s
play markedly different.
Goethe’s drama revealed another facet of a creative problem at
the heart of the philhellenic imagination in Germany: the relation-
ship between a given artistic medium and the embodiment of ethical
aspirations. We have already seen how considerations that in given
instances favored poetry over sculpture or sculpture over poetry
affected the tenor and inflection of ethical ideals. This discussion
also points toward the first significant departure from the contextual
Philhellenism of the earlier generation. As the commentary to the
Frankfurt edition of Goethe’s works remarks concerning this drama,
it constitutes “an internalization of the dramatic conflict.” The politi-
cal theatre, “understood as the theatre of the Polis, experiences an
introversion towards the moral-humane spiritual exercise.” 9 Gone was
the public character of the drama, which as we have seen, is one of the
key claims of contextual appraisals of Greece. There is no chorus and
the number of actors is greatly reduced. With the absence of the cho-
rus the public forum disappeared, which, as Emil Staiger observed,
was indispensable for Greeks but would have disturbed Germans.10
Humphrey Trevelyan’s classic study, Goethe and the Greeks, pub-
lished in 1941, argued that Iphigenie auf Tauris was the culmina-
tion of a classical Greekdom derived from Winckelmann’s insights
on sculpture, a confirmation and continuation of his ideal: “He saw
before him a Greek youth in naked simplicity and self-assured repose,
and knew that this was the visible expression of his new wisdom.”
Goethe, he wrote, had read Anton Raphael Mengs’s Reflections on
Beauty in July 1778, shortly before starting work on the play. He
found no room there, Trevelyan continued, for the gigantic figures
of the fables, which he was trying to escape. Balance and proportion
was the goal at which Goethe had arrived. Here, as we might expect,
Trevelyan made reference to Herder’s essay on sculpture, also finished
in 1778.11
The problem that preoccupied Trevelyan was that of Goethe’s
deeply personal relationship to the harsher, fatalistic, merciless aspects
of Greek myth. As a classic of the German literary canon, Iphigenie
was understood by its readers as the scene of struggle between pow-
erful and antithetical moral forces. In the later twentieth century
it became the scene of a contest about the legacies of the German
Enlightenment and about the overcoming of radical evil. The Greek
ideal that it was said to represent became entwined and identified

with these quintessentially modern struggles and was thus even fur-
ther removed from the contextual approach of the first generation of
classical Philhellenes. These struggles yielded two Iphigenias, each of
which embodied a noble opposition to tyranny and oppression as well
as redemption from guilt and despair. On the one side stood the her-
oine and saint of Humanität, endowed with the power to heal, tame,
and overcome. Her authority and her qualities had a pious aura and
possessed the intimation of religious power. On the other side stood
the “unarmed Amazon,” much more human and worldly, fallible and
frail, but nonetheless an exemplar of “autonomy” and perhaps also of
“duty,” the two pillars of the Kantian Enlightenment, an enemy of
slavish subordination to tyranny and superstition. Both are creations
of the centuries that followed the first performance. Both claimed to
have discerned the ethical core of Goethe’s most famous encounter
with Greece and therefore also of German literature’s most celebrated
engagement with the Greek tradition of myth.
The Iphigenia of Manichean Struggle

The Iphigenia of Humanität dominated the understanding of gen-
erations of German school children and literary critics. They believed
that “she had to be seen as a saint, who on the strength of her human-
ity and purity healed Orestes,” that only she had moved the barbarian
king Thoas to renounce his evil intentions, and that she represented
the optimistic humane message.12 Two particularly forceful critiques
of this tradition were published by literary scholars in the postwar era.
The first was that of Günther Müller, whose essay on Goethe’s Iphigenie
and the Parzenlied, or song of the fates, was published in 1953.13 The
second was that of Wolfdieter Rasch, whose book, Goethe’s Iphigenie
as a Drama of Autonomy, was published in 1979.14 Müller and Rasch
represent the two poles of interpretation in response to the question
of what prompted Goethe to write the drama in the first place. The
answer to this question naturally yielded the framework within which
Iphigenia’s morality and humanity, and her message as a whole could
be understood. For Müller, just as for Trevelyan, Iphigenie was above
all a personal struggle of Goethe’s; a contest between the worlds of
light and darkness, between the benevolent and humane cosmos and
the dark, merciless powers of the underworld. The drama was thus an
act of overcoming. Müller emphasized that this darker side had to be
taken seriously as a component of the drama. This recommended his
work to Rasch, who, however, developed a different account of the
fundamental purpose of the drama.15 For him, the play was deeply
embedded in an Enlightenment theology that rejected orthodox and
authoritarian models both in religious and political life.
In detaching the play from Goethe’s personal context and plac-
ing it within a narrative of eighteenth-century theological polem-
ics, Rasch broke with a tradition, most powerfully represented by
Friedrich Gundolf’s 1916 intellectual biography of Goethe, to which
we will return.16For Gundolf, Prometheus, Proserpina, and Iphigenia
were “three stages of Goethe’s idea of fate.” The Goethe of Werther
and Prometheus had stood in irreconcilable struggle with the fate
embodied in the external world; their entire being was a desperate
negation born of deep spiritual desires anchored in Goethe’s own
constitution. The ethical power of Iphigenia signified the overcom-
ing of this opposition.17
The Iphigenia of personal overcoming thus served as a window
onto Goethe’s deeply held personal beliefs and as the key to his trajec-
tory. In this way the modern rendering of Greek drama was the prism
of a personal theology and ethic that unfolded in live dramatic action.
The appeal and pathos of drama as a medium was therefore much
greater than sculpture or poetry when the Philhellene himself was as
much a subject of admiration and inquiry as the philhellenic founda-
tion. What had to be overcome was the harsh and melancholic mes-
sage of the Parzenlied. The Parzen, as messengers of death, were the
negative counterpart of the soft and amiable genii that Lessing had
admired as ancient representations of death. Both had a powerful hold
on the philhellenic imagination. In his Alceste of 1773, Wieland had
conveyed the chilling effect that the very thought of their approach
produced. “They have heard it! They are coming, they are coming!,”
shouted the dying Alceste.18 In his letters on the play, Wieland had
suggested that this terrible sentence alone sufficed to communicate
the magnitude and nobility of the sacrifice.19 Goethe too had been
fascinated by the melancholy and desolate mood of the Greek under-
world and by the merciless and abrupt break that the youthful death
of a blooming figure signified. The monologue Proserpina, taking up
one of the most famous Greek legends, represented the eponymous
character in Pluto’s realm and was published in Wieland’s Teutscher
Merkur in 1778.20
The monologue was then inserted into Goethe’s satire, The Triumph
of Sensibility.21 According to Trevelyan, this was done in a mood of
frustration with the Greek ideal and the result was to “destroy its
whole effect,” that is, the effect of Proserpina’s monologue.22 “They
have torn me away, the swift horses of Orcus; the unmovable god
held me with firm arms . . . Torn down into these endless depths!
Queen here? Queen? Before whom only shadows bow!”23 Such was
Proserpina’s lament in the mouth of Queen Mandanane, a charac-
ter of Goethe’s satire. The courtiers asked why she was declaiming
alone, and the king replied that “if you could speak Greek, you would
know that a play means to act alone.”24 Prince Oronoro, the main
character, possessed a doll in the likeness of Mandanane, which was
discovered to contain the main texts of “sentimentality,” among them
Rousseaus’s Nouvelle Heloise of 1761 and Goethe’s own Werther. The
texts tumbled out of the doll when curious courtiers secretly violated
Oronoro’s sanctuary, an imitation of the greenery of nature purged
of all its inconveniences. The satire thus portrayed the summit of
melancholy as a conscious choice, as a cultivated mood and way of
life, which removed itself from interaction with social life and nature.
Oronoro himself said at the end of the play that he longed for the end
of the “stormy stirrings of my heart,” and “this Tantalid striving for
eternally flowing enjoyment.”25
Far from “destroying” its whole effect, the Parzenlied in Triumph
of Sensibility actually helps Trevelyan’s overall argument. Nowhere is
it clearer, that for Goethe, the melancholy and darkness of the under-
world are forces within the individual life and personality that we
can choose to indulge or to overcome. Trevelyan’s Goethe creates
the Iphigenia myth as an act of personal overcoming and as a way
of resolving a painful aporia in the legacy of Greek tragedy. Pylades,
Trevelyan tells us, was Greek: comely, life-loving, yet prone to trick-
ery and the use of force. But he was “pushed into the background by
Iphigenia, whose new morality of universal trust and love resolves the
dangerous situation which his code of violence would have aggravated
into a catastrophe.”26
This sense of a Manichean struggle between opposing worldviews
as the message of the play was retained with a more philosophical
inflection by the Swiss literary critic Emil Staiger, whose essay on
Iphigenie was published in 1957.27 The action of Iphigenie, he wrote,
takes place in the twilight, “insofar as in the depths the darkness of
fate is brewing, yet on the summit shines the clarity of a belief in prov-
idence.” The poet, Staiger asserted, moves in an intermediary realm,
which here borders on Euripides and there on almost Protestant zones
and he finds his peace neither here nor there, but in a place where
fate and providence are resolved (aufgehoben) in a manner peculiar to
Goethe.28 The appeal to providence, which Staiger’s Goethe pitted
against fate, and which he sublimated in a secret, esoteric, and idio-
syncratic reconciliation between the two, recalls Rousseau’s famous
paean to providence in his letter to Voltaire of August 1756.29 This

was written in the wake of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which had
given a tangible pathos to such questions. The implication of Staiger’s
position is thus that Goethe too was coming to terms with Lisbon. In
the Weimar era, the philosopher Alfred Baeumler would assert that
the celebration of the powers of fate, associated with the Greek god-
dess Moira, as opposed to the individual will of the Olympian gods,
was a more genuine approximation to Greek wisdom.30 Baeumler
thereby consciously tried to reverse the Humanität that Iphigenie’s
turn to providence had portended.
The I phigenia of C onfession

Goethe, wrote Emil Staiger, felt guilty about Friderike Brion and
Lilly Schönemann, women he had loved and abandoned in his youth.
This guilt was no means confined to the past, he explained. Rather,
it followed like a shadow the man to whom love alone intimated the
true meaning of the world.31 Staiger’s guilt-ridden Goethe’s route to
a confessional purification is different to the more detached under-
taking of Goethe the Enlightenment moralist, who according to
Wolfdieter Rasch, set about systematically advancing a new moral-
ity and theology in this play. Staiger’s greater emphasis on the per-
sonal dimension and Rasch’s exploration of contemporary theological
debates produced two incompatible variants of Humanität. Both con-
tain strong elements of plausibility and both help us to understand
how this philhellenic generation fundamentally altered the param-
eters of Philhellenism in that it became the cipher and sanctuary of a
contemporary morality whether personal or more universal in scope.
The recovery of Greek ethical life as had been manifested in its art was
superseded by the sense that excellence lay in the future, in a desidera-
tum that had to be realized by the moderns both personally and col-
lectively. Greece had only laid the foundation, even if admirably, but
the virtue of the moderns lay in the long-term realization of higher
ends. Even if this perspective would crystallize more fully in the work
of Schiller, particularly under the influence of a Kantian philosophy
of history, Goethe’s recent interpreters show us how the crucial turn
was at least partly intimated in the fictional Taurica.
The first protagonist of this turn was not Iphigenia but Orestes.
It was the prospect of respite from the furies, pursuing him for the
murder of his mother, which took him to Taurica with Pylades.
The theological revolt against a harsh orthodoxy that Rasch reads
into Iphigenie auf Tauris begins, in his account, with Voltaire’s play
Oreste, of 1750.32 It was performed in Wilhelm Gotter’s German ver-

sion in Weimar in 1772.33 The Duke of Weimar, Carl August, was
fond of Voltaire’s plays and they were welcome on the Weimar stage.
Much of the first act of Voltaire’s Oreste was taken up with the poi-
gnant exchanges between Electra and Clytemnestra, who were, of
course, Iphigenia’s sister and mother respectively. Just before these
exchanges, however, Electra ominously summoned Orestes to come
and avenge the murder of Agamemnon: “Orestes hear my voice, that
of your country, that of the blood which was shed and calls you and
cries: come from the depths of the deserts where you were raised.”34
Electra’s violent and uncompromising righteous indignation con-
trasted with Clytemnestra’s pleas for her moderation and with her
own efforts to protect her son from the threats issued by Aegisthus,
as well as with her search for the expiation of her guilt by visiting the
temple.
Orestes was warned about Electra by Pammene, the old man he and
Pylades met upon their return to Argos. Electra will bring you more
trouble than help with her ardent character and her indocile courage,
they were told.35 As was expected in the French tradition of haute tra-
gédie, Voltaire gave Electra a female confidante, Iphise. It was her role
to tell Electra she was being unduly harsh on Clytemnestra, for whom
“the countenance of murderess is itself a punishment.”36 The ferocity
of Electra was an important part of the background to Orestes’s guilt,
which was played out in the tension between the opposed characters
of his two sisters; one pushing him toward the deed and the other
aiding and sweetening his reconciliation with himself and the gods.
For Rasch, however, the most important message in Voltaire concern-
ing Orestes’s guilt was his indictment of the gods toward the end of
the play: “Gods, eternal tyrants, pitiless power; gods who punish me,
who have made me guilty!”37 Alongside this indictment, his great-
est merit for Rasch is his defiance of the oracle that had warned him
early in the play not to reveal his identity to Electra. Here were the
foundations of the Enlightenment advocacy of humane deities and its
condemnation of superstition. It is this, Rasch believed, that Goethe
took from Voltaire’s handling of the Greek myth.
Rasch’s Orestes was above all a “self-helper,” able to confidently
reinterpret the oracle, as he did both in Voltaire and at the end of
Goethe’s play, when he removed the potential source of conflict with
Thoas by declaring that the oracle ordered him to take his sister and
not the image of the goddess.38 The central theme of Iphigenie auf
Tauris, Rasch explains, is the “desacralization of the forgiveness of
sins, the enlightened emancipation from ecclesiastical tutelage.”39 He
argues that a careful reading of Goethe’s plays shows that Orestes

himself, without the help of Iphigenia, has purified himself from
the sin and has recovered. In contrast to Staiger, he states that there
is no specific background of guilt from Goethe’s life but that the
concern with the non-Christian approach to guilt was an essential
motivation for writing the play. With this act of housekeeping, Rasch
removes inconvenient complications for his Enlightenment story.
Goethe removes Orestes, he says, from the “mythical realm,” from
the theonomous circle of guilt and penance. His purification is his
own moral achievement. This is why there are no furies in the play.40
When preparing the play for the stage in Weimar in 1802, Schiller
complained in a letter to Goethe that there could be no Orestes with-
out the furies.41 The illness, says Rasch, is overinterpreted by many
so that Iphigenia herself can be the redeemer. What is important for
Rasch is that Orestes’s torment and regret are themselves the penance
and that his dream is a bathing in Lethe, and therefore a forgetting.
His reconciliation with his mother in the dream was the clearest indi-
cation of its success.42
Iphigenia too was a self-helper, a parallel to Kant’s self-thinker, Rasch
asserts. This was the case of Götz, and of Goethe’s poem Prometheus.
They were examples of “courses of action in which human autonomy
is realized.”43 If we accept Rasch’s view, then this self-helper could
not have been motivated by anything except his own sense of liberat-
ing empowerment against the tyranny of the gods and perhaps also,
and certainly Rasch’s Goethe, by an enlightened striving to rend the
chains of superstition and blind subordination. Rasch’s scheme is a
political theology leading to a Kantian Humanität of autonomy. It is
political because, as Rasch frequently points out, the parallel is often
drawn between theological orthodoxy and political absolutism. This
point is most clear when Rasch discusses the attitudes toward sacrifice.
Johann Lorenz von Mosheim, the Göttingen theologian and church
historian, had written a detailed passage about Abraham’s abortive
sacrifice of Isaac in his Ethical Doctrine of Holy Scripture, a multivol-
ume work published in the 1760s.44 Mosheim, as Rasch points out,
wrote that it was not sufficient for an explanation of this event that
God wanted to test Abraham’s faith. Rather, it was to prove that we
are all the property of the Lord and he may do with us as he pleases.
It was important for the conception of Iphigenie, Rasch pointed out,
that even in contemporary times a God who could demand sacri-
fices was propagated.45 In other words, Goethe’s intervention was
also aimed at Mosheim’s political theology, and its humanity is to be
found in the repudiation of such orthodox harshness.
Staiger’s Goethe was also interested in making a theological point

about humanity and forgiveness. But while for Rasch, his main tar-
get was the repudiation of theological tyranny and political absolut-
ism, Staiger described a more prosaic but equally noble endeavor to
redeem the image of human nature: “for whoever regards man as
a fallen being, whoever undermines trust in his nature, creates and
increases that evil in men’s hearts, about which he claims to be out-
raged.” Today, he continued, “we are hardly in a position to appreci-
ate, let alone share that conviction. We have heard Schopenhauer,
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and his disciples . . . Nietzsche enjoys the
honor of a prophet . . . yet the point is permitted that he himself
helped to shape events with his teachings. This is asserted in Goethe’s
sense.” For Staiger, Goethe’s insight that accounts of human nature
are self-fulfilling prophecies is also manifested in his dislike of plays
like Schiller’s Fiesko and his Räuber. 46
Between Goethe and the present stood Schopenhauer’s and
Nietzsche’s explorations of the darker foundations of the ratio-
nal world, where Greek drama was understood in the first instance
through music, itself a portal to and cipher of the irrational. The
eruption of the monstrosities of the twentieth century had been pre-
saged in the abandonment of Goethe’s prosaic and personal human-
ity. Orestes’s healing, Staiger wrote, was not effected by him simply
unburdening himself by speaking. That would have been too mod-
ern. It was also not a sacral catharsis, that would have fallen outside
the scope of such a thoroughly human drama. Instead, Goethe put
forward a solution that was very much peculiar to him and came from
the depths of his conviction: he granted to Orests the redeeming sleep
of forgetting. Faust and Egmont, he points out, also fell asleep at
moments of supreme crisis.47 Yet we can object to Rasch’s argument
that the humane forgetting of a self-helper out to refute an unpalat-
able political theology and that of a brother still existing within the
parameters of myth and subject to its powers are very different. In the
modern historical imagination that has reconstructed the meaning of
Goethe’s Iphigenia, the greatest of those powers, just like in Faust II,
was the eternal feminine.
Autonomy and the Eternal Feminine

Rasch, in fact, fought a two-front battle. On the one hand, he was
keen to assert the theological radicalism of Goethe, his albeit more
restrained affinity with Voltaire and Diderot. But he was equally
concerned to refute the other theology that had grown around the
interpretation of the play and which threatened to eclipse the proto-

Kantian achievement of the play in favor of autonomy: the religious
power and purity of Iphigenia. If, as Nicholas Boyle and Staiger both
argue, Iphigenie is a play about purification, then a second agency is
necessary or at least plausible. “A spirit, a thing, a condition is pure,”
Staiger wrote, “when it is not clouded by anything alien, which exists
free from foreign mixture in its essence.” It is therefore hard to imag-
ine Iphigenia as a loving wife, as mother, burdened by the demands
of the day.48 At the heart of Iphigenia’s purity was her honesty, her
inability to lie. Rasch emphatically asserts that Iphigenia tells the
truth not out of purity, but because she is practical, a self-helper, and
it represents the best chance of getting away.49 Staiger’s sacralization
of Iphigenia takes place subtly and advances from a description of pre-
cisely that honesty, the prop that Rasch was later to knock away:
And yet, just such a decision [i.e., to tell the truth], presupposes a long,
never shaken tranquility, getting used to holy stillness, through which
alone the harmony of the interior [des Innigen] reveals its will. Only in
the priesthood are both permitted and secured: the untouchable and
unmixed essence of the pure and the grace of being initiated and at
one with that which is deepest. From within the temple, mediated by
the priestess, the spirit of purity spreads outwards in concentric rings,
penetrates the alien, incorporates it, pronounces, calms and convinces
with its fine-tuned music, until all selfishness disappears and a higher
dispensation triumphs.50
That higher dispensation was the fount of Iphigenia’s power, and

the effects of her truthfulness were taken to be the proof of it. “The
transformation of Thoas,” was, according to Staiger, “Iphigenia’s
most glorious victory.”51 The earlier French and German Iphigenias,
as we saw, had not endowed the shipwrecked priestess of Diana with
any significant political influence or ethical authority. Some had even
involved her in the jealousies and intrigues with which the moderns
enhanced the appeal of tragedy. Others had allowed her to lapse into
unseemly desires for revenge. Goethe’s Iphigenia was different. That
she was at a remove from all such intrigues and blemishes was beyond
doubt. But the degree and nature of her power and her ethical stature
were contested. We have seen that Rasch was at pains to emphasize
that she acted out of pragmatism in telling the truth. He also pointed
out that the suspension of sacrifices on Taurica were part of Thoas’s
attempts to woo her and not evidence of her taming influence on
Taurican custom.52 The Kantian Iphigenia that Rasch and Adorno
advanced in different ways as paradigmatic of the Enlightenment
imperative of autonomy, was not a priestess endowed with the power

to tame Thoas. As Martin Walser, Gillparzer, Adorno, and others
pointed out, Goethe’s Thoas was no barbarian, but instead akin to a
citizen of eighteenth-century Weimar.53
This point was central to Erich Heller, who emphasized Goethe’s
inability to write tragedy. The play, he asserted, was dramatically
untrue, because the setting of the play was not real enough to oppose
significant resistance to the realization of its vision. In this world
there was no radical evil, a crucial departure from the Greek origi-
nal.54 This may be taken to diminish the significance of her influ-
ence. The question of Iphigenia’s power is therefore one of the most
significant problems of Goethe’s play and one characterized by a fun-
damental ambivalence. It was in grappling with this question that
interpreters arrived at two divergent but equally potent variants of
Humanität, both of which correspond to powerful and authorita-
tive impulses in modern German intellectual history. Iphigenie auf
Tauris came to stand for two radically divergent sets of values and
philosophical allegiances.
The real founder of the Iphigenia, blessed with ethical author-
ity and priestly power as a German national heroine, was Friedrich
Gundolf, whose Goethe of 1916 had attained its thirteenth edition by
1930.55 Gundolf’s immensely successful work was the final stage in
the overcoming of the contextual appraisal of Greece and Greek art,
which Goethe’s Iphigenie had itself begun. To understand this sig-
nificant move we must ask what aspects of Goethe’s own relationship
to the dramatic material made it plausible. Already the use of Greek
myth in a modern drama by an author like Goethe, so closely con-
cerned with psychological and spiritual forces acting upon his creative
persona, made it possible to open a much more subjective dimension
to the problem of the ethical content of Greek material. A Laocoon or
a Nemesis heralded a universal validity, rooted in a given context, but
whose ethical message could be reconstructed, admired, and assimi-
lated while respecting the wide gulf that separated their age from the
modern. Drama by contrast, invited not only reconstruction but rein-
terpretation of the fundamentals, a new creative act. In a conversation
recorded by his secretary Eckermann in 1827, Goethe reflected that
“the piece has its difficulties. It is rich in inner but poor in external
life . . . the printed word is, of course, only a pale reflection of the life
that was stirring in me during the composition.” It was the task of
the actor, he said, to lead us back to this first flame, which enlivened
the subject for the author. Indeed, the actor should also study with a
sculptor and a painter. It was necessary for him, when representing a
Greek hero, so that the unreflective gracefulness of his sitting, stand-

ing, and movement are imprinted upon his mind.56
Goethe never pretended to be completely faithful to Euripides or
to Greece. Had he known much more about Greece, he later remi-
nisced about the writing of the play, he would never have completed
it.57 But he was clear in this reminiscent reflection, on the subordi-
nation and auxiliary role of the other media with respect to drama
when it came to evoking his spiritual life in those early Weimar years.
Drama allowed the Greek myths to become occasions for reflection
on the spiritual longings and dilemmas of the author and this was the
point of departure for Gundolf’s analysis as well: the Greek myths
provided symbols that spoke to the author’s own struggles. This sub-
jective dimension was the seed of the new national myth that Gundolf
consciously promoted.
Gundolf’s own creative act in his essay on Iphigenia was opened
with a programmatic statement repudiating contextual interpreta-
tions in favor of a veneration for enduring spiritual symbols. This
very repudiation, was, according to Gundolf, anchored in the Greek
world as Goethe had understood it: “Particularly in the Greek world
the ideal of a pure humanity had become a real experience, at least
the historically determined, the material, was consumed [aufgeso-
gen] by the artistically or mythically enhanced traditions. The circle
of human ideas had been brought back to that which was essen-
tial within them by distance, by style, by greatness, purified from
that which was purely temporal.” In this, the Renaissance had fallen
behind antiquity, for, unlike the nakedness of the latter, it added
costume and courtly manners to its existence.58 The Goethe of the
Italienische Reise had also experienced the legacy of Greece, as we
shall see, as a return to the essential, as a stripping away of the arbi-
trary and superfluous. Yet, for Goethe, this quality remained tied
to Greek humanity and its art, whereas for Gundolf it was part of
a larger insight into the relationship between outstanding creative
figures and world history, an insight with strong esoteric overtones.
The great poets, creative geniuses, and rulers of past ages had all
been the bearers of eternal values that they had embodied in their
lives and protected. This insight was at the root of all the biographi-
cal enterprises of the George-Kreis, the circle of poets and historians
gathered around the figure of Stefan George, whom they vener-
ated as the “master” and who provided his own publisher, Georg
Bondi, for works on Goethe, Ceasar (both Gundolf), Winckelmann
(Vallentin) Nietzsche (Ernst Bertram), and the Emperor Friedriech
II Hohenstaufen (Kantorowicz).59
A contextual approach, as Gundolf made clear in his Iphegenie essay,

could only obfuscate and distract from the attention that should be
given to the individual creative genius’ evocation of the perennial and
essential, the noble and imperishable:
In the moment in which the “historical sense” spreads itself, when

Greeks, Romans and the Renaissance are dramatized and made into
epic, for the sake of the costume, of that which is Greek, Roman and
Renaissance, not for the sake of a higher humanity, those worlds lose
their symbolic value and thus comes about the ridiculous iambic con-
structions of the epigone age and the garish hermaphrodite colors of
the circus stage. Only as long as und only where the belief was domi-
nant, that in certain times that which is essential in man has found a
purer and greater expression, only where one believed in a universal
humanity, to be represented as freed from temporal limitations, and,
secondly, in a classical world in which these temporal limitations were
already overcome, only there could one draw upon one’s symbols of
past regions with poetic openness, and therefore with truthfulness.60
Within the George-Kreis, as Manfred Frank has explained, this

kind of appeal was embedded in contempt for modern, materialist,
and democratic culture. The guardianship of universal humanity was
not simply a matter of an antihistoricist or anticontextual imagina-
tion but it was also due to the need to protect the sites of that sym-
bolic memory.61 All but “those who have fled to the sacred district
on golden triremes,” Stefan George wrote in a poem published in his
Stern des Bundes in 1914, were “night and nothing to me.”62 That
the mode of transport to the sacred district was Greek reflected the
intimation of the George-Kreis that ancient Greece was indeed the
locus not only of such essential humanity but also of an understand-
ing and cultivation of its symbols. The holy grove in which Goethe
set the play, in contrast to the palace-centered action of the Iphigenias
before him, contributed to that sense of the custodianship of sacred
sites, the aggregate of which were the last refuge of a higher, aristo-
cratic humanity. Gundolf’s Iphigenia, therefore, even if he did not
say so explicitly, beckoned the initiated reader to the sacred district,
herself the embodiment of that perennial, superior humanity. “With
the awakening of the actual historical science,” Gundolf concluded
his manifesto, “of the professional ‘historical sense,’ as first cultivated
by the 19th century, history as a poetic world of symbols is deval-
ued. Where there is a Mommsen or a Ranke, no Schiller is possible.
Either one receives, like the medieval man or Shakespeare, everything
past only as a cipher, as equivalent to the present or one experiences

a particular world as supra-temporal, like the contemporaries of
Winckelmann and Goethe experienced the Hellenic world, and to a
lesser extent the Italian Renaissance. Otherwise, history is poetically
dead.”63
Historicism was by implication the parvenu or interloper that pro-
vided the basis even if not the intention of a democratic devaluation
of symbolic insights. The personal struggles of Goethe’s life were,
for Gundolf, those of the highest exemplars of humanity. Iphigenia’s
longings for a return to Greece were reflective, he explained, of his
“secret wish to return to greater forms of life.”64 In Gundolf’s inter-
pretation, this aristocratic sensitivity and expansiveness were thus at
the root of Goethe’s appropriation of the Greek world. The same
principle had allowed Gundolf to turn Goethe’s Werther into the
affirmation of that expansive and life-affirming aristocratic person-
ality, while at the same time evoking the sense of a hidden treasure
drawn from the emotional intimacy that the novel granted the ini-
tiated reader. The real story of Werther, he explained, was not the
tragedy of unhappy love but rather that Goethe-Werther had found
in Lotte, precisely one of those forms of life that the creative genius
wants to retain, and to whom he says: “why don’t you stay?”65 The
plausibility of Gundolf’s argument is strengthened by a passage in the
Italienische Reise even though he did not cite it. A second Lotte was
encountered by Goethe in Rome, or at least in his imagination as he
was writing the last parts of the Italienische Reise in his old age in the
late 1820s. The young Roman woman who captured his attention in
his second visit to the city in 1788 appeared also to herald a way of
life anchored in the sociability and landscape peculiar to the Roman
campagna.66 But the personality of the woman herself reproduced
something of that commonality of soul which Lotte herself discov-
ered, at the very end, she shared with Werther. That these platonic
relationships like that between Werther and Lotte and that between
Goethe and Julia in Rome contained a compelling message, perhaps
with an ethical core, which could only be accessed by understanding
their perennial ahistorical quality, was at the heart of the new national
myth that Gundolf consciously created.
The “education towards Humanität,” the fundamental drive of
Goethe in these years, Gundolf wrote, takes place here within a sym-
bol of utmost importance to him and only to be found in the Greek
world: purification from a terrible fate. That was the ethical core. The
curse of the House of Tantalus was lifted, not through a cultic act as
in antiquity, but rather by the effect of a pure, truthful woman. “All

human transgressions are atoned by pure humanity,” Goethe had
written in a dedication of the play to an actor, the reports of whose
performance had pleased him in 1828.67 For Rasch, Goethe could
only have meant that his play was theologically radical: the human
sufficiency of penance was the point he wanted to make in the dedi-
cation.68 According to Gundolf, Goethe meant Iphigenia’s “ethical
power,” the key term of his essay. In Gundolf’s consciously created
myth, that ethical power was retrieved from a symbol that ancient
Greece had embodied in its most pure form but which spoke to the
initiated of later ages just as eloquently.
For Hans-Robert Jauss, the passage from the “humane boldness of
the truthful speech” to the “redemptive power of the pure feminine”
engendered a new myth. It took the place of the old tantalid myth
that had been overcome. In Jauss’s view the most important impulse
for Goethe was not Voltaire’s radical conflict with and defiance of
the gods on the part of Orestes, as Rasch argued, but rather Racine’s
world of rampant passions and cruel gods. It was the confrontation
with Racine, which according to Jauss, gave birth to the new myth.
The Iphigenia of German classicism was equally distant from the
thought of the Enlightenment, he explains, and Racine’s tragedy. It
was the triumph of the pure feminine charms of the beautiful Greek
woman. The esoteric nature of Goethe’s message made it difficult to
decide whether the great deed of truth-telling owed its success to the
exemplary trust in the illuminating force of truth or to the unprec-
edented power of a mythical redemption, which “was at the same
time the inherent principle of female nature against the reality of the
historical world of men, ruled by violence and cunning.”69 Jauss’s
preoccupation with the contrast to Racine’s portrayal of Iphigenia
and her context begins to answer the question of what lay behind
Iphigenia’s “ethical power,” so admired by him, Rehm, Staiger, and
Gundolf. The latter spoke of her “ethically renouncing” strength. As
we saw, Racine had given Iphigenia motives of jealousy and strong
worldly attachments. The threat to her life unfolded against the back-
drop of passionate intrigues. Racine, Jauss observed, left the rule of
wild passions intact, as well as the curse of the House of Tantalus.
Goethe, by contrast, represented the liberation of man not only from
original sin but also from a “natural immaturity.”70 Jauss is therefore
attempting implicitly to reconcile the two great forces in the contest
of interpretation: the Kantian autonomy and the myth of the eternal
feminine. But it is clear that renunciation of the passions is the fount
of the wonders attributed to her.
The language of Staiger, Gundolf, Rehm, and the other advocates

of the renewed myth of the eternal feminine thus pointed in the
direction of ascetic virtue, emphasizing, as we have seen, terms like
“purity” and “renouncing.” Recent interpretations have confirmed
the centrality of this idea. What fascinated Goethe about the sub-
ject matter of this myth, Schönborn writes, was the central motif of
renunciation, which already in Euripides holds back the chain of vio-
lence. This was the route, she continues, by which Goethe arrived at
the Enlightenment ideal of pure humanity.71 Iphigenia was not recep-
tive to the power of Eros, says the Frankfurt edition commentary,
which for her went hand in hand with oppression.72 If we accept the
centrality of ascetic renunciation then we must agree with Jauss that
Goethe’s Iphigenie was in this respect a powerful response to Racine
and the French tradition that followed in his footsteps, such as the
work of La Grange, rather than, as Rasch would have it, a continua-
tion of Voltaire and his disciples Gotter and La Touche.
Yet the centrality of the ascetic motif has also complicated the
history of the struggle between the Iphigenia of autonomy and the
Iphigenia of the eternal feminine. Returning to the personal foun-
dations and meaning of the idea of renunciation, Goethe’s foremost
modern biographer, Nicholas Boyle, writes: “The conclusion of the
play expresses a confidence, echoed elsewhere in Goethe’s work
only in one or two poems, including Divinity, that in the specific,
aristocratic social world, the part of the nation in which he finds
himself, there lies the fully adequate objective response to his inner
needs, a confidence that, through a personal purity that sacrifices
eros to agape, lust to benevolent moral action on behalf of others,
Weimar can become for him a haven from frustration, guilt and
fear, and the possibility of tragedy can be put behind him.” And
yet, Boyle continues, Goethe “has not found a poetic and dramatic
form that can express his commitment to an ascetic life as a ducal
official because, fundamentally, that commitment is not there,
neither to an official existence nor to asceticism.” 73 Iphigenia’s
asceticism was therefore not an enduring goal of Goethe’s creative
existence, there was no uncompromising imperative in favor of that
kind of purity.
That Goethe’s renunciation and therefore also Iphigenia’s was
rooted in an aristocratic mindset had been argued in a different
way by Adorno, next to Rasch the most important proponent of the
autonomy interpretation. Goethe’s Iphigenia, Adorno wrote, needed
distance, something her Humanität preserved in every sentence she
spoke. It had been the lack of distance that had spelled the end for
Tasso, and he might have added, for Werther too.74 Both of these
characters seal their downfall with a passionate hug of their platonic
beloved, a violation that both completed and negated the world their
imagination had cultivated. The principle of distance, a postulate
Adorno tacitly borrowed from Nietzsche’s own aristocratic “pathos
of distance,” restricts, he writes, Humanität to a social privilege, for
the sake of which the artist distances himself.75 The feeling of injus-
tice, Adorno observes, comes from the fact that Thoas, the barbarian,
gives more than the Greeks, who, with the agreement of the work,
believe themselves to be superior. The course of the play was an apol-
ogy by Humanität of its immanent inhumanity. In order to defend it,
Goethe resorts to an extreme: “Iphigenia, obedient to the categorical
imperative of the as yet unwritten Critique of practical reason, dis-
avows, out of freedom, out of autonomy, her own interest, which
required her to lie. In so doing, she recreates the mythical context of
guilt which she is supposed to overcome.”76
For the contest between the Iphigenias of autonomy and the eternal
feminine, which we have been following, Adorno’s analysis contains
an important irony. The most powerful weapon of the proponents
of the eternal feminine had been, as we have seen, Iphigenia’s asceti-
cism. This quality was now conscripted by those who saw the play
through a Kantian lens, that is, that her autonomy was the central
message. But whereas Rasch explains autonomy in terms of the inde-
pendence of the self-helper following her own interests with practical
acumen, Adorno instead indicts the aristocratic exclusivity and there-
fore inhumanity that it defended. Adorno’a interpretation contains a
further irony for our story. The underlying aristocratic sensibility that
Gundolf, the founder of the modern Iphegenie myth, discerned in the
play, was rendered a component of Enlightenment, the very condition
of autonomy.
Adorno, Rasch, and Heller, though authoritative, were relatively
lone voices. Both Gundolf and Staiger speak of Iphigenia projecting
her power outward. There is no question that her truthfulness, born
of purity and humanity, lift the curse and heal Orestes. That sense
of ethical power was also evoked by Hermann August Korff in the
second volume of his Geist der Goethezeit, published in 1930.77 The
recent commentary of the Frankfurt edition of Goethe’s works con-
tinues the tradition in a similar vein. In Goethe’s Iphigenie, the furies
yield not to a masculine but to a new feminine law: that of sisterhood,
which we should see as Goethe’s equivalent to the fraternity postu-
lates of the revolutionary Enlightenment.78 This in turn builds on
Walther Rehm’s own interpretation in 1936: “That it is not actually

the male hero but the woman, through whom Goethe assimilates the
core of the old myth,” was just as characteristic of him as of Racine.79
All of these authors marvel at the power that was granted to purity
and look with satisfaction on the conscious refashioning of the Greek
myth. The religious power of Iphigenia’s priesthood, at the heart of
which was the healing of Orestes, was, from their point of view, a
legitimately Greek innovation on the part of Goethe. Yet, as Rasch
points out, the story does not end with the cure of Orestes. The gods
had ordained that the image of Diana must be stolen and this has yet
to be accomplished. This was the occasion of a further conflict with
the gods.80
It is this conflict that raised the question whether the purely
human, desacralized penance of Orestes meant the final acquittal
or whether that ordained by the gods, that is, the one to be granted
by the theft of the image, must still be attained. At this moment,
Rasch points out, Arkas, Thoas’s messenger, renewed the latter’s
marriage proposal to Iphigenia. She was offered the prospect of a
definitive end of all human sacrifices in Taurica as part of the deal.
Rasch’s Iphigenia valued her personal autonomy too much for a
noble deed of Humanität. Arkas was affronting her self-determi-
nation. Goethe, he observes, portrayed her as a great soul, but not
as the fount of all virtue.81 The paradox that Rasch is hinting at is
that the virtues of autonomy, here in its most basic form, and that
of Humanität are in conflict and that the former trumps the lat-
ter. If that is so, the self-helpers Orestes and Iphigenia are not the
protagonists of that mythical self-renewal, that noble participation
in a perennial conversation that Gundolf and Rehm attributed to
Goethe. Rasch, as we saw, had already knocked away the prop of
her honesty, the occasion of the admirable truth-telling. In giving
her more self-serving reasons for rejecting Thoas’s marriage pro-
posal he also knocked away the powerful prop of renunciation, the
ascetic basis of Iphigenia’s power.
If honesty and renunciation were respectively the compelling
expression and the credible foundation of Iphigenia’s power, it
was a third component, grafted onto this eternal feminine, which
gave it the character of the national patrimony of the German
Bildungsbürgertum. This is what we may call a national-Protestant
quality, which came about in a gradual process despite the acceptance
that the play dispensed with divinely ordained penance and forgive-
ness. In 1862, the theologian Ernst Wilhelm Herstenberg, writing in
the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, reviewed a talk by Julius Disselhof,

in which Iphigenia was interpreted in a Christian fashion. Herstenberg
objected vehemently. The redemption by Humanität, he said, was a
hubristic raising of Fallen Man out of the mud of sin.82 This assess-
ment of Goethe was reversed by the liberal Protestant theologian
Adolf von Harnack, albeit not with respect to Iphigenie, but with
respect to Faust. Harnack was fond of citing parallels between Goethe
and Augustine.83 “Faust,” Harnack observed in a lecture of 1887, “is
redeemed by heavenly love.” Despite Goethe’s lack of knowledge of
Augustine, the closing scenes of Faust II were Augustinian: “That in
this world of error and deception, love, divine love, is but strength
and truth, in that it liberates and gladdens and binds,—that is the
positive idea of the Confessions and of most of the writing later written
by Augustine.”84
The occasion for thinking of Goethe’s play in this vein and for
taking its religious message at face value was the prayer uttered by
Iphigenia, when she was on the point of despairing of the gods: “save
your image within my soul.”85 For Rasch this was the expression of the
humane piety that Goethe shared with deist trends in Enlightenment
Europe, critical of Christian orthodoxy. For Gundolf, this prayer was
the occasion of a comparison between Goethe and Martin Luther.
The conflict within her that Iphigenia brought to the fore here was
very “unantique,” he claimed. Instead, it resembled the crisis of faith
that famously preceded Luther’s foundation of the new Church. The
conflict, Gundolf wrote, “is Protestant.” Just like Luther, Iphigenia’s
“ethical strength,” Gundolf’s favorite term, came into its own when
facing the greatest test, that is, at the moment of her confession to
Thoas, when it was uncertain whether the curse of her family would
be lifted. The moment when her faith utters the words “save your
image in my soul” was the moment when victory was certain. The
ability to pray was already the sign of grace.
“To be able to conceive a figure and a fate like Iphigenia on the
basis of the Euripidean tale,” Gundolf wrote in the peroration of his
essay, “to be able to read and to interpret that material in that way,
that presupposes an internal grandeur und a human nobility with-
out equal, and therefore Iphigenie remains, even without consider-
ing art and genius, the glorious monument to Goethe’s character, as
it is also the gospel of German Humanität itself.” Gundolf’s fusion
of the Weimar classical age’s most famous play with the historical
hinge of the Reformation followed in the footsteps of Hegel, who
saw in Iphigenie the affirmation of subjective freedom in the ethical
personality, a world-historical development attributed to German

Protestantism.86 Goethe’s own distance from the contextual philel-
lenism of Winckelmann and the young Herder, and the fundamental
ambivalence of his intentions in writing the play laid the foundations
of two radically divergent narratives about the character and signifi-
cance of Iphigenia, two opposing foundations for Humanität.
C H A P T E R 7
F rom STUR M UN D DR ANG to Italy
S turm und D rang

After a period of abandon and debauchery in London, where he
wasted the funds of the German patrons who had sent him on a dip-
lomatic mission, Johann Georg Hamann experienced a conversion
and became a devout Lutheran Protestant.1 His learned polemic,
Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten, was published in 1759.2 Who could
say, Hamann protested in that piece, that Socrates was not also to
be reckoned among the figures sent by God, that “heaven anointed
him its herald and interpreter, appointed him to that calling . . . which
the prophets among the Jews possessed.”3 Like Luther, Socrates had
imitated his father, in that he took and hacked away, that which was
superfluous on the wood, and improved thereby the form of the
work.4 In the beginning, therefore, was Martin Luther. His skepti-
cism about the status of reason contributed to a powerful intellectual
and artistic impulse in late eighteenth-century Germany known as
the Sturm und Drang.5
Hamann took Winckelmann’s evocations of Socrates’s sensuality
in his stride, making a comparison between his concern with bodily
and artistic form, and Luther’s craftsmanship of doctrine. But more
important than this comparison were three qualities or insights that
Hamann associated with Socrates and which contained the seed
both of the Sturm und Drang ’s relationship with Greece and Greek
poetry, and of the ideas of Goethe’s Italienische Reise. Socrates was
not guided by reason but by the Daimon, the spirit that he mentioned
in his dialogues and to whom he attributed his inspiration. The first
of Hamann’s insights was that “just as nature has opened our eyes, so
history has opened our ears. To analyze a body and an event down to
its last particulars means to wish to spy out God’s invisible essence,
his eternal force. Whoever does not believe Moses and the prophets
will therefore, against his wishes and knowledge, remain a poet, like
Buffon on the history of creation and Montesquieu on the history

of the Roman Empire.”6 For Hamann, Socrates’s divine mission was
confirmed precisely by his obedience to the Daimon, a kind of inspi-
ration sanctioned by providence and disdainful of the reason that
classified and passed judgment, whether it concerned Buffon’s plants
or Montesquieu’s laws.
The second insight was about the nature of that inspiration. “What
compensates in Homer,” Hamann asked, for the ignorance of the rules
of art, which an Aristotle after him elaborated, and what compensates
in a Shakespeare for the ignorance or violation of the laws of criti-
cism? Genie is the unequivocal answer. Socrates could well afford to
be ignorant, he had his Genius, upon whose knowledge he could rely,
whom he loved and feared as his god, whose tranquility meant more
to him than all the reason of the Egyptians and Greeks.7 Genie, for
Hamann, was a creative faculty, of divine provenance and endowed,
by its embodiment in the prophets and the prophetic Socrates, with
ethical authority. As an expression of a providence for which prophets
were the protagonists of history, Hamann disdained a historiography
that tore the veil of nature, an attitude to the past that did not respect
the truths which arose in a given locality and tried instead to encom-
pass and delineate the whole in retrospectively imposed categories.
Hamann’s third insight therefore appeared to enjoin a mimetic rela-
tionship to nature: “Perhaps the whole of history is more mythology,”
he observed, and just like nature, a sealed testimony, a puzzle, that
cannot be solved without resorting to tools other than our reason.8
A wish to faithfully represent the transformations of nature, taking
at face value the truths contained in given moments and localities,
was the ethical and methodological foundation that Hamann con-
tributed to Herder’s philosophy of history. But this same reverent and
mimetic way of proceeding was premised on the “sealed testimony,”
the puzzle Hamann equated with nature. Reason, which in his view
blocked access to that testimony, could certainly be circumvented by
historicist endeavors to capture the whole scene and epoch in which
nature manifested itself. Yet it could also be circumvented by the
Genie’s personal evocation, not of the entire scene and its place in his-
tory, but of particular moments, testimonies of fullness and vitality,
of excellence in living, in overcoming, in atoning. For Goethe, who
opted for this second approach, this entailed a break with Hamann’s
Protestant providential foundation while retaining the insights about
nature and Genie, and an eventual return to a theodicy akin to a
deistic providence. These insights about nature and Genie were fun-
damental to Goethe’s relationship with Greek antiquity.
FROM STURM UND DR ANG TO ITALY 153
In early April 1770, the 20-year-old Goethe arrived in Strasburg.

The traveling theatre troupes staged pieces by the French tragedians
Corneille and Racine and he attended chemistry lectures. He quickly
became alienated from the local Pietist-Protestant community,
which he found narrow-minded and constraining.9 Herder arrived
in Strasburg early in September and stayed until May 1771. During
this period he shared the composition of each part of his essay on lan-
guage with Goethe. The first words, Herder explained, were exclama-
tory imitations of natural sounds, which designated not things, but
actions. Thus verbs came first and constituted man’s link with the
nature that surrounded him.10 The encounter with Herder, to whom
the young Goethe looked up as a tutor, was a powerful intellectual
impetus despite or perhaps because of Herder’s harshness as an inter-
locutor and assessor of the young man’s ideas. Inspired by Herder’s
ideas about language embodying the genius of nations, Goethe went
on expeditions to collect folk songs in Alsace in 1771. Herder also
introduced Goethe to the work of Hamann and Möser. It 1776,
Herder took up the post of general superintendent of the Lutheran
clergy in Weimar and served as Protestant pastor for several decades.
Yet he complicated the link between the creative Genie and Lutheran
culture, which Hamann had postulated in 1759. Herder’s essay on
language denied its supernatural origin, infuriating Hamann.11 As
Nicholas Boyle writes, Herder’s theory of the creative individual,
linked by language to his national culture, was a powerful counter-
model to the Lutheran notion of individual selection and redemption
within the church.12
The young Goethe, according to Bernd Witte, saw the poet, and
indeed himself, as the warring hero, who mastered himself and the
world. It was this which he took from his early study of Homer. It
replaced the exemplars of sacred history, like Moses. This was ren-
dered more explicit in the poem Künstlers Morgenlied¸ where the
religion of art took the place of Judeo-Christian tradition.13 Goethe
imagined more earnestly than posterity, Boyle wrote, the replacing of
the old God with the human heart of sensibility, with human activity
and creativity in the way celebrated by the idea of Genie.14 This was
arguably the meaning of the famous poem Prometheus, which begins
by warning Zeus to cover his view.15 Behind Zeus stood the God of
the Pietists. In the summer of 1773 ,he wrote to his friend Christian
Kestner that he intended to turn the poem into a drama about defi-
ance of the gods and of men.16 The Genie was not only defined in
relation to its opposition to religious authority. That defiance itself
was anchored in a powerfully ambivalent assimilation of nature. We
have seen that a mimetic relationship to nature was an ethical stem

and prescriptive admonition of the Sturm und Drang. Yet the Genie
was confronted with its destructive potential. Werther, a paradigmatic
Genie, had reflected on this when he spoke about the fact that it was
impossible to go through the woods without treading on helpless
little creatures.17 In the satire Triumph der Empfindsamkeit, Prince
Oronoro had attempted to get round the problem by setting up a scene
true to nature that was indoors and stripped of its discomforts.18
Goethe’s poetry of this period was animated by a similar belief
in the poetic individual’s creative power and resilience. If there was
a philosophical patron for this, Boyle writes, it was Leibniz, who
believed that every identity had the singular task of representing the
universe from its individual perspective.19 Paradigmatic of this defi-
ant self-mastery and exuberance that possessed exalted insights into
the fullness of human experience was Pindar, who, next to Homer,
absorbed Goethe’s attention in 1772. “Since I last heard from you,”
Goethe wrote to Herder in July of that year, “the Greeks have been my
only preoccupation.”20 The letter contained a description of the mas-
tery enjoyed by the creative personality expressed in the terms of the
chariot races of Pindar’s eighth Nemean Ode. The term Epikratein,
was, as Mauro Ponzi explains, a metaphor for the poet, who was in
a position to master the inner force of nature and the language of
the literary tradition.21 The imagery of the chariot driver’s mastery
of violent forces is evocative once again of the ambivalence and blind
exuberance of nature. The Genie was a tamer as well as the portal of
knowledge about the passions and the forms of human existence.
In an earlier 1771 draft of his essay on the British bard, Herder
had written: “Shakespeare, the son of nature, confidant of the deity,
interpreter of all languages and passions and characters, leader and
contriver of the thread of all happenings which can befall the human
heart—what do I see when I read him! Theatre, backdrop, comedian,
imitation are gone: I see world, persons, passions, truth! . . . torn out
pages from the great book of providence!” Shakespeare, Herder con-
cluded in this early draft, was the silhouette of a symbol a posteriori,
toward a theodicy of unending wisdom.22 If Pindar was the tamer,
Shakespeare’s universality in his knowledge of passions and the myr-
iad fates of mankind was akin to providence. This was the apotheosis
of the Genie’s epistemological significance. The access to knowledge
granted to individual genius served truth with faithfulness to the
ambivalence and fullness of nature; it lay bare and gave meaning to
the otherwise baffling intrigues and vicissitudes of human life with
such wisdom that it amounted to a theodicy.
Yet, for Herder, Shakespeare formed northern men. In the com-

parison between Shakespeare and the Greeks, it was the former who
was explicitly linked to providence. The Greek dramatists clearly
retained only the mimetic faithfulness to nature, which implicitly in
this essay was but the first step toward the higher services provided
by the northern Genie. It was also the north that was the subject of
the final lament in the final piece of 1773, that the “great inven-
tor of history and the world soul was becoming ever more dated,
that words and manners of the ages withered and perished like an
autumn of leaves and nothing but ruins were left.”23 The Sturm und
Drang yielded an ethic derived from and prescribing the admiration
of mimetic responses to nature. It implicitly postulated an epistemol-
ogy centered on the individual poetic genius, and it suggested that
the expansiveness of that wisdom stood in an intimate relationship
with providence, that it amounted to a theodicy. But though Homer
and Pindar were paradigmatic exemplars of at least parts of this clus-
ter of values, both Herder and Hamann, Goethe’s mentors, pointed
northward when it came to its fullest realization: to Shakespeare and
Luther. Thus, insofar as the legacy of the Sturm und Drang provided
the parameters of an engagement with Greece, both in the early 1770s
and later, it was through a northern prism. It was a northern mimesis,
epistemology, and theodicy, an important qualification to any notion
of the purity of German Philhellenism. The Genie was a tamer, herald
of providence but ultimately also a manifestation of freedom.
Herder’s Conception of Greek Freedom

before the I DEEN
Herder’s most extensive discussion of Greek freedom before the
Ideen was part of an eighteenth-century conversation in which the
Sturm und Drang and Weimar were juxtaposed to the forms of
inquiry advanced in Göttingen by the historian Christoph Meiners.
Montesquieu briefly sketched in his Persian Letters, which appeared
anonymously in Amsterdam in 1721, the opposition of the two kinds
of political freedom that modern Europe had inherited from the
ancients and the barbarians which followed in their wake:
Love of liberty and abhorrence of kings kept Greece independent for

centuries, and spread republican government far and wide. The cities
of Greece found allies in Asia Minor; they sent people there to form
colonies that were as free as themselves, and which provided protec-
tion against the incursions of the kings of Persia. That is not all: Greece
populated Italy, Italy populated Spain, and possibly Gaul . . . Those

Greek colonists brought with them a spirit of freedom nurtured in
that pleasant land. Consequently, in those distant times monarchies
were rare in Italy, Spain and Gaul. As we shall soon see, the peoples
of the north, and of Germany, were no less free, and if we find traces
of monarchy there it is because they had chosen as king a head of the
army or of a republic.24
Montesquieu’s observation, in the voice of the Persian traveler Rhedi,

suggested, by allusions to the old freedom of the north and of
Germany, the tertium comparationis at a time when the appraisal of
ancient Greek freedom engendered questions about the possibilities
of a modern equivalent.25 In 1778, the Royal Academy of Sciences in
Berlin, which had been founded by Leibniz in 1700, offered a prize
essay competition on a two-part question: First, “To what extent and
in what way has government affected the sciences among the people
where these flourished.”26 Two of the responses to it, by Meiners,
entitled History of the Origin, Progress and Decline of the Sciences in
Greece and Rome, published in 1782, and by Herder, which adopted
the academy’s question as his title, constitute the most detailed con-
siderations of Greek democracy in late eighteenth-century Germany
intended for a broader reading public.27 They are significant because
they embody several illuminating dichotomies. Herder was a passion-
ate Philhellene; Meiners was not. Herder sought a grounding and
identification of the “national genius,” and was more interested in the
articulation of potentialities in terms of institutions and peoples than
in the violent swings of historical fate effected by individual person-
alities that animated Meiners. The latter was fascinated, like Voltaire
had been, with the power of coincidence in history and appended to
his treatise of 1782 a disquisition on the problem of causality in his-
tory and the fundamental obscurity of causal processes.28 But both
answers to the academy’s question were of course concerned with
the fate of the arts and sciences and this placed the assessment of
Athenian democracy under a very different criterion.29 It was easy
to argue after all, as many did, that Athenian democracy had ulti-
mately failed to withstand the onset of Philipp of Macedon and had
not therefore produced a politically robust state.30
As Jonathan Sheehan has shown, the mid to late eighteenth cen-
tury witnessed a revival in translations of the Book of Job.31 The
revival of Job and the new translations of the Old Testament at this
time were often motivated by the wish to bridge the gap that sepa-
rated the ancient biblical world from modern times by the means of
the sublime, an appeal to the powerful emotions contained in the

Hebrew texts.32 This ancient Hebrew patriarchal world, which at this
time in Germany appeared to combine the aura of pastoral simplic-
ity and the appeal to the emotional resources of the sublime, opened
Herder’s discussion of the relationship between government and the
sciences, between government and wisdom. In Herder’s historical
imagination that world was a powerful rival to Athenian greatness,
and the advanced political freedom it rested on.33
Herder briefly painted a picture in 1779 of a wisdom derived from
tradition, from the sayings and customs of fathers, from song and
fable, genealogical registers, and heroic deeds. Such “happy constitu-
tions,” where the first laws were nature itself, could flourish even in
the vicinity of despotism as they had done in Ireland, in Spain, and
even in Turkey. Nature could attain great beauty but it could not
attain that of art, Winckelmann had explained in 1764. The cities
were cast as the antithesis of Herder’s patriarchal idylls and in this
context he reversed Winckelmann’s phrase to read: “Art may achieve
anything, but it cannot achieve nature.”34 The oldest forms of Greek
wisdom too, were the epics, the deeds, and sayings of fathers. Also,
in later times, Herder explained, lawgivers made use of such means
for formative purposes and became the fathers of their native cit-
ies. Neither compulsion nor gold yet played a role.35 Like Rousseau,
Herder drew a powerful distinction between idealized pastoral cus-
toms of distant antiquity and the refinement of the towns, but unlike
Rousseau and unlike Meiners, he subsumed the role of the lawgiver
within the broader phenomenon of “fatherly government.”36 Where
fatherly government ended and despotism began, once tribes began
to form larger units and gave rise to ambitious chiefs, there the sci-
ences stagnated, “embalmed in old habits.”37
The main criterion that disqualified despotism as a promoter of
the sciences for Herder was aesthetic. It lost all sense of measure and
proportion; it was all about ostentation and colossal greatness. The
principles of aesthetics were those of political constitutions: The only
government, he wrote at the end of the section on despotism, in
which nature, measure, and proper proportions existed was that of
freedom.38 The role played by this aesthetic reality as the underlying
determinant of Herder’s Greece was played in Meiners’s Greece by the
decline narrative. Even in the aftermath of the eightieth Olympiad,
when all sciences were expanded and publicly taught, they became
partly responsible for the corruption of Greek manners.39 Greece was
the first country in the world, Herder explained, to have gradually
shaken off its small tyrants and to have made visible under a new
government, also new arts and sciences.40 Athenian speeches were

the most immediate manifestation of freedom: the orator spoke to
his people, a circle he knew, and not to strangers and despots, what is
more, to a refined people rather than Scythians. The same was true of
the theatre: it served democracy and the people were to be flattered in
their freedom, and so tragedy was a “strangler of tyrants,” an orator
of freedom.41
Whereas for Herder the arts and sciences flourished in Greece
because of the juxtaposition of the different cities and the competi-
tion and emulation of the citizens of each, for Meiners, their rise
resulted more from the forces of trade than the ubiquity of competi-
tive relations embedded in the constitution and political geography.
The thirst for knowledge, he said, spread suddenly from the colonies
to the motherland of Greece. In keeping with the tradition of attrib-
uting formative power to the lawgiver, freedom in Greece for Meiners
did not grow out of the public spirit of competitive relations, as it did
for Herder, but rather from the measures taken early on by Theseus.
It was he who had broken the power of the aristocracy and founded
the freedom of the people.42
The Problem of Greek Freedom

in Herder’s I DEEN
“The whole history of humanity,” Herder wrote in the third vol-
ume of his Ideas on a Philosophy of History of Mankind of 1787, “is a
pure natural history of human energies [Kräfte], actions and drives
according to location and time.”43 Underlying this assertion was
what modern scholarship has referred to as the “principle of indi-
viduality” governing Herder’s “historicism.” The history of a given
age or people was more than merely a stage on the way to the realiza-
tion of freedom or of an extraneous end, but in itself a whole, pos-
sessed of its own completeness and dignity. In his study of German
historicism, Frederick Beiser regards that principle as the core of the
phenomenon.44 For Hans-Dietrich Irmscher, the origins of that idea
are to be found in Herder’s studies in natural science and psychol-
ogy in the 1760s. It was not the classificatory method of Linné that
Herder had adopted but rather that of Buffon, which allowed for the
incomparability of individuals.45 The task of the philosophy of his-
tory, Irmscher explains, was to search for the inner nature of things,
and to discover the forces (Kräfte) that they bring forth and their
necessity, not to speculate about the goal for the sake of which they
are present.46
It was this immanence of the explanation, this refusal to accept an

extraneous criterion with which to judge and order historical epochs
and phenomena that so deeply irritated Immanuel Kant. To him it
was an attempt to explain that which we do not understand, by the
means of that which we understand even less.47 Its ethical impulse
was the mimetic deference to nature and natural forces that, as we
have seen, was a powerful creative impulse for the Sturm und Drang
era. Herder in turn reacted to Kant’s objections by accentuating his
differences with his former mentor. The third volume of the Ideen,
therefore, with its discussion of Greece, was in part a response to
Kant’s challenge, which appeared in his reviews of the first part of
the Ideen in 1785.48 Kant objected not only to the immanence of
the explanation of the course of history but also to the creative role
ascribed to that mimetic relationship to nature carried over from the
Sturm und Drang. Man could never account for his purpose by ref-
erence to his nature but rather only by reference to his free acts. For
Kant, there was a fundamental opposition between natural instincts
and inclinations on the one hand, and acts of free self-realization on
the other. Man belonged to two distinct spheres of existence: the
physical and the moral.49 If history for Herder was the scene of the
blossoming and realization of individualities as natural forces whose
inviolability excluded being pressed into the service of austere moral
goals, then this was also the foundation of a theodicy.
The task of the third volume of the Ideen was to put forward a
plausible chain of human societies, to ascribe their formation to their
individual characteristics and to derive the summit of their achieve-
ments from the same traits in interaction with their environment.50
That initial formation posed a question about sociability and the
means by which it came about, a fundamental problem of eighteenth-
century political economy and philosophy.51 As a sympathetic reader
of Brown, Wood, and Rousseau, Herder sought to put forward his
own understanding of how a simple, pastoral existence could engen-
der sociability in a festive and pious spirit that contained the elements
of civic harmony and engagement, as well as vitality and health. We
have seen that the preoccupation with the forms of Greek art, poetry,
and sculpture had intimated ethical precepts like truthfulness. In the
Ideen, it was music that engendered the formative impulses of Greek
sociability. The first step toward this was an interest in odes and
poetic song strengthened by a new close relationship with Goethe,
which resumed in the summer of 1783. In the songs of Homer, in the
biblical psalms, in the epic of the northern peoples, and the hymns
of the Reformation, the odes of Klopstock and songs of Lithuanian
farmers, as Irmscher explains, poetic song was understood as the

uncontrived stirring of human nature.52 Only the Greek language,
Herder explained at the beginning of book XIII of the Ideen, was
born of song, since song and poetry and an early custom of free liv-
ing made it the muse-language of the world. The character of the
Greek language was derived from music and dance, song and history
and through the free interaction of many tribes and colonies that
gave rise to a lively nature. The German language, he observed, was
once a close sister of the Greek.53 Since Greek culture originated in
mythology, poetry, and music, it was no wonder that the taste for it
was a principal trait of their character. To our manners, it may sound
odd that music was a privileged part of their education, he wrote.
Everything was accompanied by music and music served their ends
better than science.54
A consequence of the ethical salience of music as the originator of
social bonds was that it was also the guarantor of freedom. No despot,
as Herder repeatedly pointed out in book XIII, ever united them and
the Greek language had “not been coerced by silent laws.” But a fur-
ther consequence was a critique of the assumed centrality of Socrates
in the formation of Greek ethics. Long before Socrates, he observed,
there had been philosophers who had turned their attention from the
heavens to the ethical life of man. The praise of Socrates must restrict
itself to the man himself and his narrow circle. A life of service to man
in action and ethics was a defining trait of Greek culture from the
time of the fabled Orpheus. And Pythagoras too had had a greater
influence on education with his school than Socrates by means of all
his friends. This admittedly noble man should not be raised above
the station to which Providence had assigned him. Herder reiterated
that he had only educated a few and that in the mouth of his closest
students his fine method could degenerate quickly into mockery.55
This appears to be a direct contradiction of his mentor Hamann’s
position in 1759, who, as we have seen, ascribed to Socrates a provi-
dential role on a par with the prophets of the Bible.56 But it is also
significant because it posits a more universal and popular account,
not, admittedly of the initial possession, but of the transmission and
reach of knowledge, under the auspices of music. The implication was
that Orpheus and his kind sang to the people, Socrates cultivated the
minds of his chosen few.
A festive sociability engendered by music had been postulated by
the Jesuit José de Acosta’s Natural and Moral History of the Indies,
published in 1590 and widely read in Europe.57 The idea had been
developed, as we have seen, by the Jesuit Lafitau in 1724 and by
John Brown in 1763. For Herder, this strand of Catholic thought,

assimilated by his expansive scholarship, accounted for the most
salient manifestations of Greek vitality, the games and the competi-
tion between the free states. It was in reading Pindar that Herder
arrived at his image of public games animated by the ardent emula-
tion of heroic forefathers and of victories crowned with the status of
a god. The civic fabric was affirmed by the athletes’ identification
with the ancestry and founding of their respective cities. “Where do
we find games of such significance and with such consequences?,”
Herder asked. “This public spirit,” he continued, “of doing every-
thing for the whole, or at least appearing to, was the soul of the Greek
states, which without doubt Winckelmann meant when he praised
the freedom of the Greek republics as the golden age of art. Radiance
and greatness in them were not distributed as in the modern ages,
but rather flowed together into what concerned the state. With ideas
of fame of this type Pericles flattered the people and did more for art
than ten Athenian kings would have done.”
The Greek states would not have built their great public buildings
had they not been “collectively striving forces competing with each
other,” and without this, much less would have been achieved in the
sciences too. 58 The athletic contests, born of song and a festive piety
toward ancestors thus constituted the kernel of Greek development
beyond the simpler sociability of the earlier ages. The creative salience
of the contest was therefore the final and most magnificent conse-
quence of ethical primacy of music, which having superseded Socrates
now accounted for rise of the arts and sciences.
Deciding on the election of commanders or their condemnation,
to speak on war and peace, life and death, and every public affair of
the state, was certainly no matter for a restive mob, Herder observed
in his discussion of the role of rhetoric (Beredsamkeit) in ancient
Greece. Such practices opened their ears and the Athenian people
attained the art of political conversation that no Asian nation knew.59
Yet precisely these two features of Greek freedom, the “collectively
striving forces competing with each other,” and the art of rhetoric,
presaged and precipitated the downfall of Greece. They did so by vio-
lating and overthrowing in the field of political life the ethical precept
of Herder’s Nemesis concerning measure. Each time that a state stood
on the pinnacle of its power, even led by the most talented man, it
tottered on the brink of collapse, Herder explained. Thus stood the
whole of the Greeks against the Persians and the strivings of Athens,
Sparta, and Thebes against each other ended with the loss of their
freedom. History also showed how dangerous Pericles and Alcibiades,
the great orators, had been for their state. Everything radiant about
Greece, Herder concluded, was due to the activity of its lively energies
and everything lasting and healthy was accounted for by the equilib-
rium of its striving forces.60
Goethe in Italy I: The Ruins of Antiquity

and the Gardens of Homer, –
On September 3, 1786, in the small hours, Goethe sneaked away
from Karlsbad, because “otherwise they would not have let me get
away.”61 He traveled south toward Bavaria. He had not told anyone in
Weimar about his impending departure. It was a flight of the soul to
the longed-for south, a journey that put an end to the platonic rela-
tionship with Charlotte von Stein, even though his letters to her form
an important record of that journey. Increasingly burdened by the
duke, Carl August, with taxing administrative duties, and increas-
ingly subject to powerful stirrings in his psyche, there came a point
when Goethe could not even see Latin text without being overcome
with almost unbearable discomfort and longing.62 He crossed south-
ern Germany and the Brenner Pass and arrived in Trient early on the
morning of September 11.
“Ideas with which he had long wrestled,” observed Ludwig Curtius
in a lecture delivered in Rome in 1932, “such as the Urpflanze (arche-
typal plant) or the internal construction of a work of art, became clear
to him in Italy.”63 Curtius told his audience that Goethe brought to
his subject “a concept of the natural whole, which neither the dis-
tinguished gentleman nor the scholar of antiquity possessed.” The
breath of the earth in its climate, its constitution in its rocks, its natu-
ral laws in its plants, and its highest achievement, man—this was the
holistic impression that, according to Curtius, Goethe assimilated in
Italy.64 In northern lands, Trevelyan wrote, “there seemed to be a veil
over the process of manifestation, so that neither nature nor human
life and therefore also not art, could reveal themselves in great, simple
forms of ideal significance.”65
The two generations of Philhellenes with which we are concerned,
that of Winckelmann and the young Herder on the one hand, and that
of Goethe, Schiller, and the older Herder on the other, first encoun-
tered a tangible, physical expression of Greece in the collections of
antique sculpture, whether at Mannheim, as in the case of Goethe, or
in Dresden, as in the case of Winckelmann. But the German experi-
ence of Greece in the late eighteenth century was ultimately mediated
by Italy. None of the German Philhellenes of these generations ever
ventured into Ottoman-ruled Greece. But the ways in which Italy

conveyed the legacies of Greece were fundamentally different. The
physical presence of antiquity in Dresden and in the Roman villas to
which he had access had given Winckelmann the confidence to pro-
duce a holistic portrayal of ancient Greece, of an art embedded in a
social and political context with the right practices and forms of judg-
ment, denying pride of place to anything but the highest exemplars.
The climate was of greater significance to Winckelmann than the
landscape; the milestones of ancient history were more compelling
explanations for the character of art than the manners and economy
of the people around him.
Goethe went to Italy in a very different spirit to Winckelmann. The
latter arrived in Rome in 1755 under the patronage of the Catholic
hierarchy, determined to live mentally and spiritually in the libraries
and villas and to recover with every fiber of his soul, all the compo-
nent elements of an elaborate ideal. Reading Winckelmann’s letters in
Italy, Goethe remarked that he imparted a terribly German earnest-
ness in search of everything that was fundamental and sure about
antiquity and art.66 Winckelmann was acutely conscious of his own
situation and of his achievement in rising in society, but also of his
subordinate status. He was both uplifted and plagued in Rome by
his own emotional relationship to aspects of the Greek social fabric
to which he attributed all excellence, namely, as we have seen, ancient
forms of male friendship. His commitment to antiquity as an ambi-
tious protégé of the cardinals and as a suffering practitioner of what
he saw as its heroic virtues made him a creative prisoner of his subject
and of the selected sites of its objects. Goethe arrived in Rome at
the end of October 1786 as an ennobled minister of the duchy of
Weimar, Saxony, and Eisenach. His longing for the south, as Curtius
described it in 1932, spanned everything from geology to the obser-
vation of local customs. He had acquired an aristocratic self-assurance
and brought to Italy an expansive curiosity for all its manifestations
of ease and vitality in the relationship to nature, for all aspects of an
anticipated, pulsating, contemporary utopia.
The most salient Italian portal to the Greek world for Winckelmann
remained sculpture. For Goethe that portal, at least until his second
visit to Rome, was the landscape. Both were passionate, lifelong read-
ers of Homer and in the crucial phases of their engagement with the
latter, they read him in relation to that respective portal which opened
the way for each of them to the Greek world. As we have seen, for
Winckelmann, Homer’s figures were unthinkable without the prev-
alence of the Greek bodily form that sculptors later encountered in
the gymnasia and at the Olympic Games. For Goethe, Homer hinted
at truths evoked by the landscape, especially of Magna Grecia and
Sicily, the once Greek-dominated part of southern Italy. These truths
were inseparable from the features of contemporary Italian life that he
described with such dedication and precision, and which outlined in
their most quotidian and mundane details, the contours of that utopia
which he discerned more intimately with every step on Italian soil.
When reflecting in 1932 on what made a journey in this mind-
set possible, Curtius spoke of the “classlessness of the German spirit
between Leibniz and Romanticism.” The French spirit, he said, once
it had overcome Calvinism and the disturbances of the Fronde in
the seventeenth century, was that of the court. In Germany in the
eighteenth century, by contrast, there was no politically mature and
cultivated citizenry—it was strewn across the country and doubly
powerless due to the confessional division. There was, moreover, no
unified leading court. This German classlessness was a weakness but
also a strength, since within it lay “the root of its fundamental vision
of a pure humanity, whose development in a free spirit, in a moral-
aesthetic self-cultivation, in a social state, is to this day an unfilled
program.”67 Speaking under the shadow of the rise of National
Socialism in Weimar Germany, Curtius’s lecture contained indict-
ments of right-wing extremism. Goethe’s Italy was thus the sanctu-
ary of a universal German humanity. In distinguishing the origins
of that humanity specifically from the spirit of the French court, he
anticipated what Walther Rehm would do in 1936 in his discussion of
“Iphigenian humanity.”68 And just as the interpreters of Iphigenie auf
Tauris discerned a “pure humanity” so Curtius now read that into
Goethe’s Italy. The idealized adjective “pure” and the noun “purity”
were the ciphers of the twentieth-century imagination for the kind of
relationship to Greek themes that had overcome historicist barriers.
It implied that it was possible to recover the edifying and beautifying
core of Greek humanity independent of its context. What this meant
and what “moral-aesthetic self-cultivation” might be taken to mean
are the subjects of this chapter.
The passage from Winckelmann’s Achilles to Goethe’s Ulysses
meant the eclipse of that heroic exertion in the scene of great histori-
cal action, burdened and enlivened by the pathos of male friendship.
It gave way to the settled utopia of an idyllic garden, the possession
of which proved transient or elusive for a hero in search of private
fulfillment removed from historical responsibility. It was a transition
that privileged the Odyssey over the Iliad. “It would have meant lit-
tle to him to stand on the Pnyx and reflect that here Themistocles
and Pericles and Demosthenes had swayed the Athenian demos with
the magic of words” Trevelyan wrote of Goethe.69 By September
16, 1786 Goethe had reached Verona. There he stopped to ponder
ancient graves:
The wind which blows from the graves of the ancients comes with
pleasant scents like over a hill of roses. The graves are agreeable and
touching and always convey life. There is a man, who next to his wife
looks out of a niche as if out of a window. There stand father and
mother, the son in the middle, looking at each other with inexpress-
ible naturalness. Here a couple holds hands. Here the father appears to
be entertained by his family. To me the immediate proximity of these
stones was very moving. They are of a more recent art, but simple,
natural and universally meaningful. Here there is no anguished man
on his knees who awaits a joyful resurrection. The artist has, more or
less with elegance, represented the simple presence of people, thereby
prolonged their existence, rendered it permanent. They do not fold
their hands, do not look to heaven, rather, they are down here, what
they were and what they are.70
The remarks to be found in Lessing and Herder’s essays on the

graves of the ancients are echoed in the sentiments Goethe expressed
on this occasion. Graves were the most tangible manifestation of that
Italian mediation of Greek antiquity, since though these were not
Greek graves, it was a Greek ethic and a Greek mythology that had
occasioned their imagery. In their mimetic reproduction of natural
life in its simplicity and worldliness they also fulfilled the ethical
purpose of preserving the impression of that life for posterity. The
rupture between antiquity and Christianity was starkest in the repre-
sentations of death. A further facet of that antique life which Verona
preserved was found in the ball game he observed later that day: “The
most beautiful poses, worthy of being cast in marble, come to the
fore there.” The well-formed, lively, and vigorous young people were
dressed in short, slim white clothing and so the two sides were dis-
tinguished only be special badges.71 The allusion to Winckelmann’s
comments in 1755 on the relationship between the observation of
physical exercise and the vocation of the sculptor was unmistak-
able. The difference was that contemporary Italy could evoke it more
strongly than accounts of Socrates. Just like the graves, the ball game
in Verona preserved the practices and mindset of the natural existence
of Greek antiquity.
In Venice, Goethe continued to evoke the festive and natu-
ral character of Italian life, with a lively description of court cases
that were more like performances than the dry juristic drudgery his
father had forced on him during his brief career as an active law-
yer in Wetzlar 14 years before. The vast, enticing panoply of Italian
life contrasted sharply with the unnatural and darker complexion of
modern Christian art. In Bologna, he remarked that though faith
had raised the arts once again, superstition had become their ruler
and had brought them to ruin.72 It could be said that Italian life
reproduced for Goethe that mimetic quality with regard to nature
which the Sturm und Drang had valued both in Greek culture and
in that of the north. Yet the breadth of his vision and curiosity as
a traveler introduced a second, competing motif that was to act as
the second portal within his mind to the fruits of Greek antiquity
that could be discerned on Italian soil. There had been something
nebulous and fantastical about watching the ball game in Verona
and the court cases in Venice. And yet, as he wrote, “when one does
not proceed here with fantasy, but instead takes the surroundings
as real, as they are, so they become the decisive site, which makes
for the greatest deeds and thus I have always up to this point used
the geological and landscape points of view, in order to suppress the
imagination and sensibility und preserve for myself a clear overview
of the locality.”73
Goethe’s imagination inclined him to drink in and assimilate the
manifestations of vitality and hints of utopia that he encountered in
Italian life and which enchanted him in such small details as the ritual
of welcoming in the night with the exclamation felicissima notte! But
his ambition drove him toward an objective estimation of essential,
original, fundamental forms of life, instantiated in antiquity and to be
deciphered and recovered in the soil, the landscape, and the physiog-
nomy he so carefully observed at every station of his trip. These two
conflicting but complimentary approaches to the search for nature
and antiquity, a scientific attention to the landscape and a creative
imagination, were to yield a productive tension for the whole Italian
enterprise. Both of these approaches entailed throwing off the bur-
den of history, sometimes in a tone that anticipated the arguments
in Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations, that we are weighed down and
stifled by an excess of historical knowledge.74 In Palermo, in April
1787, the landscape began to assume a greater spiritual and aesthetic
significance for Goethe. “The most beautiful spring weather and a
gushing fertility conveyed the feeling of a vivifying peace over the
whole valley, which the uncouth guide spoiled for me with his learn-
ing, recounting in detail how Hannibal once fought a battle here and
what great deeds of war took place on this spot. I curtly rejected the
dreadful recall of such departed phantoms.”75
Goethe’s Sicilian guide was perplexed that his charge would go off
and examine rocks rather than listen to tales of Hannibal’s martial
exploits. Just as Italy itself mediated the legacies of Greece, so rocks
and gardens evoked antiquity’s unreflective identity with nature.
Goethe’s companion by this stage was Christoph Heinrich Kniep, a
young painter. The public garden in Palermo, Goethe observed on
April 7, though of recent foundation, “places us in antiquity.” The
impression of this “marvelous garden” by the sea sat too deeply, he
reflected: “The black waves on the northern horizon, their struggle
at the bends of the bays, even the distinctive scent of the misty sea,
all of that recalled the blessed isle of Phaeacia to my senses as well as
my memory.” He rushed immediately “to buy a Homer,” to share
and read aloud a translation of that edifying song to Kniep, who
deserved to rest from his exertions with a good glass of wine. The
Homeric scene at the garden was immediately contrasted with the
“noisy joy about the happy resurrection of the Lord,” which began at
dawn on the day after Goethe visited the garden. The procession, he
wrote, could confuse the ears of those not used to such a noisy divine
worship.76
The belief that Homer could best be understood by an engage-
ment with the landscape and the wider geography in which the epics
were situated, and that an attentiveness to the contemporary life and
manners of the ordinary people of these places could yield a good
impression of the manners of Homer’s times, were the principal theses
advanced by the British traveler and antiquarian Robert Wood. His
book, An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer, had
been first circulated among friends in London in 1769 with an edi-
tion appearing in 1775.77 A German translation appeared in 1773.78
“A review of Homer’s scenes of actions,” Wood wrote in the preface,
“leads naturally to the consideration of the times, when he lived; and
the nearer we approach his country and age, the more we find him
accurate in his pictures of nature, and that every species of his exten-
sive Imitation furnishes the greatest treasure of original truth to be
found in any Poet, ancient or modern.” Thus Wood articulated an
almost Faustian inclination to arrive at the purest manifestation of an
original genius with an unsurpassed tact for nature and an unreflec-
tive truthfulness. The subject of the inquiry, Wood explained, was a
consideration of Homer’s “mimetic powers” and that “we shall admit
his ancient title of Philosopher only as he is a Painter.”79 At the same
time, Wood expressed a conviction similar to that of John Brown

and the young Herder that the sociability of the heroic age in all its
aspects stood on a musical foundation:
Josephus rightly observes that there are no allusions to any written

laws in Homer and that the word nomos does not occur as a law in any
part of that Poet. The first written laws of which we can be assured are
those of Draco. Before these times all was effected by memory; and the
histories of ancient times were commemorated in verses, which people
took care faithfully to transmit to those, which came after them. They
were also preserved in temples, where, upon festivals, the priests and
priestesses used to chant them to the people. There were also bards,
whose sole province it was to commemorate the great actions of their
gods and heroes. Their law was entrusted to verse and adapted to mea-
sure and music.80
Nevertheless, the public guardianship of memory and law was

of secondary interest to Wood, whose aim was to delineate the
sources and nature of the inspiration of an individual genius. For
him, therefore, the most important antithesis to written laws were
not the chanted commandments of the priests but the province of
epic poetry, “where the most finished efforts of artificial language are
but cold and languid circumlocution, compared with that passionate
expression of Nature, which, incapable of misrepresentation, appeals
directly to our feelings, and finds the shortest road to the heart. It
was to be found in every production of Genius, and in all poetry;
that is to say, all composition was dramatic. It was therefore to the
advantage of the Father of Poetry that he lived before the language
of Compact and Art had so much prevailed over that of Nature and
Truth.”81 Wood was at great pains throughout his text to distinguish
between Homer the poet and the world around him, the manners
of which were much too raw and uncultivated for him. His ethical
and religious personality was far nobler. The mixed customs of the
Bedouin tribes that Wood compared with the heroic age, their unim-
peachable and earnest hospitality on the one hand, and their lust for
plunder and rapine on the other, were only faithfully reproduced,
not celebrated, by the great painter-genius. This ethical distinction
accorded to Homer left considerable room for a sketch that sought to
isolate the unrealized utopian possibilities of the heroic age.
“Why do voices call me out of my sleep?,” asked Ulysses in
Goethe’s Nausikaa, a play that remained only a fragment inspired
by the Homeric scenery of Sicily and of the garden in Palermo.82
Just as Goethe’s Orestes had awoken from a dream to the voice of
his sister, so now Goethe’s Ulysses awoke to the playful voices of

Nausicaa and her companions. Both awakenings were accompanied
by intimations of recovery that dawned in the wake of intense anxiety,
and of a soothing feminine presence. “I see it well!,” a joyful Ulysses
exclaimed, “a beautiful daughter of heroic descent is coming, accom-
panied by an elderly woman, avoiding the sands of the bank and
towards the grove.” Nausicaa herself expressed an intimation of an
idyll and of happiness in a dream she was about to confide to her older
companion.83 Reminiscing many years later about his inspiration for
Nausikaa, Goethe wrote that there could be no better commentary
to the Odyssey than the Sicilian surroundings and that he was quickly
captivated by the idea of turning the Nausicaa passages into a tragedy.
The motif of the story was to be that Nausicaa, touched by Ulysses’s
narrative, by the intensity of the way in which he shared it, and by
acts of bravery that occur off-stage, compromised herself by prema-
ture declarations of interest. The half-innocent, half-guilty Ulysses
must eventually declare that he is leaving, Goethe recounted, and the
girl sees no alternative but to seek death. “There was nothing in the
composition,” he added, “that I could not have set forth according to
nature, out of my own experience.”84
The relationship between Nausicaa and Ulysess was the summit of
Goethe’s emotional approximation to Greek antiquity. It fulfilled the
same function in this respect, as Winckelmann’s deep attachment to
the friendship between Achilles and Patroclus. Both ideals were char-
acterized by a profound vulnerability, both evoked expansive scenes
and landscapes and a complex of virtue and sin, an intense compan-
ionship and a painful separation. Yet Nausikaa was never completed.
We have seen that Erich Heller believed Goethe incapable of tragedy
because his age and temperament precluded it. Bernd Witte adds in
this instance the observation that Goethe in Italy had internalized the
“harmonizing image of Homer” that he had previously deliberately
ascribed to his very fallible hero Werther. Goethe’s Homer became,
according to Witte, a bourgeois Homer. The destructive element, the
presence of death, was banished in favor of an emphasis on the natural
forces of procreation. Homer’s world of simple manners was, Witte
contends, the antidote to the manners of the court. 85
In what concerns Homer, Goethe wrote to Herder from Naples
on May 17, 1787, he had experienced a new revelation. The descrip-
tions and symbols, he explained, are understood by us poetically and
yet they are unspeakably natural, but with a purity and intimacy,
which leave one shaken. They evoked existence, he elaborated, while
we only evoke the effect. Hence the absence, in the Greeks, of the
affected manners and elaborate gestures typical of many moderns.86

It was a philhellenic commonplace to attack the baroque world as
the foil against which classical simplicity was defined, something
Winckelmann had inculcated in all his admirers.87 The moral impli-
cation was hard to miss: there was more honesty, frugality and, by
implication, more justice in that pastoral-heroic idyll that succeeded,
even if only momentarily, the tumultuous happenings of the Iliad. Yet
these remarks betrayed not only an idealization of a noncourtly socia-
bility, but they also contained a hint of an ambition that we might
term the Faustian appropriation of Greece: Homer’s world and its
physical evocation in the far south of Italy pointed toward fundamen-
tal features, kernels of human excellence, “what the world contains in
its innermost recesses,” in Faust’s words.88 It was the combination of
physical and topographical features that beckoned the Faustian trav-
eler into the sanctuaries of those secrets. In his comments to Herder he
immediately added that it was the landscape, the well-tended gardens,
trees, hanging branches, fertile fields, misty mountains, blossoming
valleys, cliffs, and banks and the surrounding sea that enlivened the
Odyssey for him.89 In Rome it would be Greek sculpture.
Goethe in Italy II: With Moritz and Herder

toward a Faustian Theodicy –
In March 1787, Goethe visited the British envoy to Naples and art
collector Sir William Hamilton in Caserta. Goethe remarked that
after many years as a lover of art and after such a long time studying
nature, Hamilton had found the summit of all joy in nature and art in
a beautiful girl, a 20-year-old Englishwoman. “She is very beautiful
and well-formed,” Goethe continued, and reported that “he has had
a Greek garment made for her, which suits her well, she then unloos-
ens her hair, takes a couple of shawls and adopts a series of positions,
gestures, deportments etc., that in the end, one really believes one is
dreaming. One sees what so many thousand artists would have liked
to have achieved, here all completed and in movement and in sur-
prising variety.” Hamilton, Goethe cheerfully recounted, found “in
her all the antique, all beautiful profiles of the Sicilian coins, indeed,
the Apollo Belvedere itself.” The fun was unique, he said, “and we
have already enjoined two evenings. Tomorrow morning she will be
painted by Tischbein.”90
Goethe’s playful allusions to Hamilton’s infatuation with a young
woman pointed to a serious preoccupation that would become domi-
nant as he turned northward in the late spring of 1787 and made
his way back to Rome. The process must have been encouraged by
the fact that Johann Heinrich Tischbein painted the young woman
as Iphigenia.91 What a thousand artists would like to have achieved
was not just to be found in Hamilton’s companion but was also cap-
tured, as Winckelmann had asserted in 1755, in the works of Greek
sculpture, which united the scattered beauties of nature in a single
object. For Winckelmann, it was Greek beauty and the context that
produced it which was captured for the contemplation of posterity.
For Goethe, such works harbored fundamental, universal forms of
character; in other words, they could tell us much about human form
and character today. The point of departure was a principle, con-
tained in Herder’s Plastik, the essay on sculpture completed in 1778,
which contended that Greek sculpture was a powerful approximation
to truth in its portrayal of humanity and human expressions. Goethe
yearned to revive that truth and to approach it scientifically in the
present, to tease out all its secrets. From the pedagogical hopes of
Winckelmann, who wanted to educate artists in good taste, and from
the formative hopes of Herder, who wanted to aid a better contem-
plation of God’s manifestation in history, Goethe made Greece into
the potential source of vast knowledge. Ancient Greece had become
a key to unlock contemporary secrets of human form. This was the
Faustian turn in his relationship to Greece.
His addresses to Herder in the pages of the Italienische Reise
asserted that the possibility of such knowledge was premised on the
elimination of all that was arbitrary and superfluous in the contem-
plation of great art, of the landscape, and of antiquity. The kernel
of truth that remained, purged of all that oppressed and stifled the
natural vitality that connected contemporary Italy to ancient Greece
in his imagination, acquired something of an affinity to providence.
The existence of that kernel was thus not only a stimulus to research
and speculation but also a consolation and a resolution, an intimation
of and a companion to Herder’s theodicy and the ideas contained in
Karl Phillip Moritz’s work on Greek fable.92 Taking these two aspects
together, Goethe’s Philhellenism became a Faustian theodicy. It was
Faustian not least because the treasure trove of knowledge envisaged
in Rome and in the immediate post-Italian Weimar years remained
an ambition. For Herder, the theodicy in which Greek antiquity was
embedded and came to epitomize advanced two powerful ethical
motifs: freedom and the harmony of organic forces.
The problem of evil, of justifying or balancing the existence of
the destructive power manifested in nature and humanity, was ren-
dered all the more poignant by the devastating Lisbon earthquake
of 1755. It was under the impression of that event and, provoked by

the facile versions of Leibnizian optimism that he saw around him,
that Voltaire wrote the short novel Candide in 1759. The succession
of calamities and natural disasters experienced by Professor Pangloss
were insufficient to dissuade him that “all is for the best in the best
of all possible worlds.” 93 In August 1756, Rousseau had written to
Voltaire in order to defend his belief in providence. It had not been
nature or providence that had caused the devastation at Lisbon, he
argued, but human society, which abandoned a more modest and
dispersed pastoral existence and insisted on piling up dwellings in
monstrous conglomerations. “I see everywhere that the evils to which
nature subjects us,” Rousseau asserted, “are much less cruel than
those which we add to them.” 94 He concluded the letter with a defi-
ant affirmation of his belief: “All the subtleties of metaphysics will
not make me doubt for one moment the immortality of the soul and a
beneficent Providence. I sense it; I want it; I hope for it; I shall defend
it to my last breath.” 95
In formulating natural laws in the fifteenth book of the Ideen,
Herder made use of the argument by analogy that had most infuri-
ated Kant in 1785. Each individual carries within him, he mused, in
the form of his body and in the qualities of his soul that equilibrium
(Ebenmass) according to which he is made and to which he should
make himself. Through errors and confusions, through education,
through adversity and exercise each mortal seeks the equilibrium of his
energies, in which alone the full enjoyment of his existence consists.96
Herder exalted the “laws of a universal order founded upon itself,”
in which the “the laws of retribution” operated no differently to the
laws of movement discernible in physics.97 The Greek Nemesis and its
two principles, that of measure and that of retribution, had become
the cipher of the philosophy of history. It embodied and restored the
balance of forces both within the individual soul and in the sum of
human life. Faith in this process amounted to a theodicy grounded
in the ethical resonance of Greek fable and art. In the Ideen, Herder
applied the philosophical principle of Nemesis to the appraisal of the
state, the individual, and the course of history. All the works of God,
Herder concluded, rest on the “balance of conflicting forces achieved
by an inner power, which steers it towards order. With this thread I
wonder through the labyrinth of history and see everywhere harmo-
nious divine order, since what can in any way occur, occurs and what
can act, will act.” 98
In 1787, Herder sent both the third part of the Ideen and the
piece God: Some Dialogues to Goethe in Italy, who shared them with
Karl Philipp Moritz. Goethe was delighted with them and wrote to
thank Herder, commenting on the happy contrast they provided to
the superstitious and overly doctrinal piety he often encountered
there. Moritz was in awe of Goethe, who became a venerated mentor,
and cited his poems frequently in the writings produced during, and
inspired by, his own stay in Italy. Early in September 1787, Goethe
reported that Herder’s Gott “had done Moritz a lot of good” and that
he “glowed in bright flames like well-dried wood,” having imbibed
Goethe’s own enthusiasm for it.99
Mortiz’s Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen was writ-
ten in 1788 and cited at length in Goethe’s Italienische Reise.100 His
Götterlehre oder Mythologischen Dichtungen der Alten was published
in 1790.101 These two works and Herder’s dialogues had principles in
common, which tied them to the enterprise of Herder’s philosophy
of history in the Ideen. They made more explicit some of the ideas
underlying the latter work. Both contained a theodicy that culmi-
nated in aesthetic analogies derived from Greek examples, whereby
the examples themselves possessed the didactic power, implicitly or
sometimes explicitly unique to Greek art and fable, to impart these
truths. Moreover, both emphasized, contrary to Kant, the self-
sufficiency of nature and of each manifestation of nature as morally
satisfying phenomena that were to be contemplated and enjoyed. The
object of that contemplation was ultimately a youthful vitality, the eter-
nal renewal of which, in a natural dialectic of creation and destruction,
constituted the consolation of existence, the philhellenic theodicy.
“The fine form of Apollo represents eternal youthful humanity,”
Moritz wrote in the Götterlehre, “which, like the leaves of an ever-
green tree, only retains its perennial bloom and lively color by means
of the gradual fall and destruction of wilting. Among the creations
of the ancients, this is one of the most sublime and lovely, because
she resolves the concept of destruction, without recoiling in hor-
ror, into the concept of youth and beauty and in this fashion gives
a harmonious tone to a fundamental opposition.” The ancients had
reached an ideal of beauty, Moritz averred, which contained within
itself everything else, the countenance of which filled the soul with
wonder because of its unending variety.102 The evocation of Apollo
would have particularly resonated with Goethe, who as Curtius, tells
us, always had Apollo with him.103 Even the Fates, the uncompromis-
ing minions of death, which in Wieland’s Alceste had inspired such
terror, were in Moritz’s rendering “after all, feminine and beauti-
fully formed, weaving and singing the song of the sirens.” It was the
“lightest work of feminine hands, whereby the secret course of things
is directed. The beautiful image of the tenderly spun thread of life, so

easily cut, cannot to be replaced by another.”104
The images from Baron Stosch’s collection showed, Moritz
enthused, gods and mortals engaged in their schemes while the high
goddess of fate playfully held the thread in her hand, with which
she directed the revolutions of things and the proudest purposes of
kings.105 In his Essay on the Mortuary Symbolism of the Ancients pub-
lished in 1859, the Basel historian Johann Jacob Bachofen would des-
ignate the images so loved by Moritz, with the salience of fate and
the self-sufficient natural dialectic of creation and destruction, the
quintessentially feminine and matriarchal morality. It was a morality
premised on the creation and destruction of corporeal life, and its
retribution was directed at restoring the balance of earthly, mater-
nal forces.106 Its antithesis was the escape from the self-sufficiency of
nature toward higher spiritual ends, a development heralded by patri-
archal civilization. In the emphasis on the need for the soul to actively
free itself from the tutelage of corporeal nature, therefore, Bachofen
may be taken to represent the Kantian reading of these images.
What Kant and Bachofen rejected as the stifling tutelage of corpo-
real nature was to Herder and Moritz the sublime embodiment of edi-
fying truths. Precisely the corporeal representation of such truths was
an achievement that distinguished the development of Greece. They
sought to unite, Moritz explained, the tenderness of the formed with
the strength of the unformed. The visual art of Greece raised itself
to the summit, ennobled by its object, man. It produced human-like
forms that superseded human form itself, “in which everything inci-
dental was excluded and all essential traits of power and sovereignty
are united.”107 It was this thought that Goethe had imparted to and
shared with Moritz when he returned to Rome for a second and much
longer stay from the summer of 1787 to the spring of 1788.
Herder’s dialogues were a response to what was known as the “pan-
theism dispute,” in which Spinoza and some of his readers were accused
of negating the concept of God by subsuming him with the totality
of nature. Herder reversed Jacobi, Mendelssohn, and Wizenmann’s
picture of Spinozism. It was to be seen, not as a threat to morality, but
as its foundation, not as the route to a mechanical and materialist idea
of nature but to an idea of nature as an organism.108 The dialogues
dealt with two problems of relevance to the oppositions we have been
tracing in the differences between Kant and Herder. The first was the
problem of necessity. In the third dialogue Phiolaus asked his inter-
locutor Theophron about the image of the beautiful goddess he has
before him. It was the Greek Nemesis, Theophron explained. “The
sincere and noble countenance of the goddess,” he elaborated, “her

wise measure and the branch of happiness she holds in her hand, are
sufficient symbols to remind us of a firm natural truth.” Theophron
then enumerates the ideas of Herder’s fifteenth book in the Ideen on
the maintenance of harmonious balance. Nemesis played an ontologi-
cal role in this dialogue, heralding a metaphysics of the self-regulating
power of nature, reconciling Philolaus to the Leibnizian necessity so
detested by Voltaire.109
In the fourth dialogue Philolaus proclaimed that “man is placed
before no less a goal of freedom than the freedom of God himself, to
master our passions, even our fate by means of a kind of inner neces-
sity, that is, by means of sufficient concepts which alone can grant us
the knowledge and love of God.”110 Such concepts were the harmoni-
ous self-sufficiency and self-renewal of nature, the purest manifesta-
tions of God. The highest conception of freedom lay therefore in
contemplative veneration. Theophron had earlier referred to the eter-
nity intimated in every natural force itself, even without considering
its connection within endless space and endless time. “Consider,” he
had said, “the inner fullness of the energy which shows itself in every
living being.” Spinoza was no Pantheist, all things were expressions
of divine energy.111 Herder’s rendering of Spinoza, therefore, and
the contemplative theodicy centered on Greek evocations of natural
truths, excluded the creative and striving self-exertion at the core of
Kant’s idea of freedom. This, then, was the second problem. It was
rendered more acute by the arrival of the female interlocutor Theano,
who in the fifth dialogue emphasized the enjoyment of life through
our senses as the best approximation to the truths outlined in the pre-
vious dialogues.112 It is no wonder that Kant referred to the dialogues
as a “dishonest” piece of work.113
In his essay on the imitation of beauty, Moritz contended that
only the Genie himself could attain the highest enjoyment of beauty,
since the highest response to the beautiful was the desire to reconsti-
tute it. The beautiful was an independent whole that contained the
ends of its existence within itself, and which was not of itself useful.
Even when the beautiful gave occasion to destruction, it could not be
wished away. Instead the guilt of that destruction could be attributed
to the necessity of things or to higher powers, just as Priam, King of
Troy had done, when he consoled Helen by telling her that the gods
and not she were guilty.114 And so the beautiful, Moritz concluded,
in which even destruction abrogates itself, gives us an intimation of
that great harmony, in which creation and destruction, advance hand
in hand.115 The Genie’s privileged access to the knowledge of nature
in his creativity was a legacy of the Sturm und Drang. His creative
power had now become the medium through which the truths of
Herder’s theodicy could be apprehended. Its purest manifestations,
the images that brought that mediation to life, were drawn from
Greek art and fable.
Goethe’s relationship to human form as evoked by ancient sculp-
ture was more immediate in the physical sense, and more integrated
in the wider array of his scientific interests, in such a way as to give a
Faustian inflection to the theodicy he shared with Herder and Moritz.
During his second stay in Rome he surrounded himself with pieces of
sculpture, most notably the head of the Juno Ludovisi, which later had
a prominent place at his house on the Frauenplan in Weimar, where
he lived from 1792. Goethe could not know, Neutsch remarked, that
the Juno Ludovisi was not an image of a deity but rather the represen-
tation of a Roman princess. “It is remarkable,” he added, “with what
visionary gifts Goethe was able to discern, even in the faded Roman
image, the essence and form of the Greek original.”116 “When one
opens one’s eyes in the morning,” Goethe recalled in his later report
for April 1788 in Rome, “one feels touched by the highest; all our
thinking and feeling is accompanied by such forms, and it thereby
becomes impossible to fall back into barbarism.”117 This remark, as
Curtius pointed out, was in the tradition of the sentimental journeys
to Italy of the earlier eighteenth century, that of the contemplating
and experiencing subject. The traveler who reflected on and enjoyed
art out of “fundamental historical, philosophical or poetic convic-
tions” was at the heart of the narration.118 Rousseau’s postulate of
1755 that we are corrupted by our sense of sight was thereby tuned
into its opposite.
The redemptive and ennobling insight of 1788 was arrived at in
stages. “My greatest joy,” Goethe enthused in July 1787, “is that my
eye is being trained in true forms.” It reawakened, he said, his feeling
for deportment (Haltung) and for the whole. It was all about prac-
tice.119 That practice was not only part of his endeavor to understand
form, something related to his often frustrating efforts at improv-
ing his drawing. It was also akin to an initiation, by means of the
exalted sense of sight, into something divine. “I was with Angelika
[Kaufmann] in the Rondanini Palace,” Goethe reported at the end
of July. Kaufmann, a distinguished painter and collector, painted
portraits of Winckelmann and Goethe in Italy. Goethe respected her
opinion and her companionship in Rome was of great significance.
The Medusa in the Rondanini Palace now gave him the greatest ela-
tion, he said. “Just the idea that something like that is in the world,
that it was possible to make that, makes one doubly human.” What
words could express about such a work would be insignificant. Art
was not there to be spoken about, but to be seen.120
Early in September, Goethe remarked that Herder’s Gott had
“encouraged me to push deeper into natural matters.” His work on
botany had brought him closer to the insights of the dialogues that
each organism, each individual unit was complete in itself and repre-
sented the manifestation of God and that this was to be preferred to
the notion of a personal God who interfered in specific instances and
determined the course of events. He recounted that his search for the
principle that unlocked works of art, for which artists and critics had
been searching, was becoming clearer. The ancient artists, he said,
had just as great a knowledge of nature, and just as clear an idea as
Homer of what could be represented and how. These high works of
art were at the same time “the highest works of nature which men
had brought about according to true and natural laws. Everything
arbitrary, contrived is removed, there is necessity, there is God.”121
For Walther Rehm, these sentiments and Moritz’s work consti-
tuted the announcement of a “Greek-German humanist aesthetic
and ethic.”122 For the East German scholar Hans-Heinrich Reuter,
Goethe’s Italian journey was a purely aesthetic interest compared to
the genuinely ethical inspiration that Herder’s later stay in the same
country had brought about.123 Rehm’s Goethe was a seer, enlivened
from the beginning by a religious vocation of discovery and the Italian
journey was the pivotal episode of his development. The sacralization
of Greek art that Rehm’s Goethe effected like a philhellenic saint, was
the almost conscious creation of a German ethic and liturgy. Ludwig
Curtius’s Goethe was a much more sober inquirer than Rehm’s.
Iphigenia’s formula “searching for the land of the Greeks with the
soul” was Iphigenia’s and not his, Curtius asserted. Rather, Goethe
gained from antiquity in general the “free personal way of life” that
liberated him from the bourgeois convention of his social class and
from the lifestyle of his age.124 Curtius’s individual self-fashioning
and Rehm’s national-pedagogical message were thus two possibili-
ties of interpretation that pointed to different inflections within a
German humanism.
In April 1788, Goethe visited the French Academy in Rome with
his friend Heinrich Meyer, the painter and later renowned art histo-
rian who from then on would become his most trusted confidant in
matters of painting and sculpture.125 The reproductions of the best
statues of antiquity evoked the idea that the noblest preoccupation
was human form, which appeared there in all its manifold glory. And
yet, for all one’s preparation one felt at the same time “devastated”
in front of it. Form, he concluded, “encompassed everything; the
purposefulness of limbs, proportion, character and beauty.”126 Ernst-
Richard Schwinge has shown how this sense of an ancient purity of
form in art was valued by Goethe, particularly in the 1790s, in terms
of the genres of literature. The ancient Greeks had developed each
separate form, dramatic, epic, and lyrical, to its fullest manifestation,
whereas the moderns provided mixed pieces that adopted different
forms in the successive acts of a given piece.127
Schwinge’s Goethe struggled throughout his career with the
alternative between “idealizing” and “historicizing” approaches to
Greece. Yet it is perhaps more useful to see his relationship to Greece
as mediated by different artistic and philosophical imperatives at dif-
ferent periods. It was not a swing of the pendulum toward the idealis-
tic that brought about the idea that the secrets of Greek nature could
be at least partly retrieved by the contemplative pilgrim in the right
frame of mind. It was rather the inspiration of Herder’s idea of the
divinity instantiated in nature and its forces and the holistic under-
standing of the form of nature in botany, geology, and anatomy that
encouraged him to see Greek art and Greek naturalness as a mani-
festation of these truths. If the ethical and philosophical imperatives
that impelled his studies, exercises, and contemplation came from
Herder and his own attachment to a synthesis of natural sciences,
the faith in the purity of Greek form was supplied by a reading of
Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity, which he undertook in
1786–1787. Winckelmann’s careful discernment of the periods in the
history of art and the identification of the high points, as well as his
assertion that the depiction of deities was intended by the Greeks to
serve as universally valid portrayals of particular human characteris-
tics, were decisive in grounding that faith. But while scholarly interest
has focused on that grounding, it is the evolution of the ethical and
philosophical longings of the 1780s that lent Goethe’s experience and
reflections their distinctive purpose.
The ancient evocation of human form, with its universal, fine, and
precise grasp of everything that such form could convey appeared
to portent the threshold of a Faustian knowledge. It was the key to
understanding the relationship between art, nature, and necessity.
It would ennoble man, preclude barbarism, and provide true enjoy-
ment in producing and contemplating. All the Greek ethical values
and other types of excellence that the younger Herder and Lessing,
as well as Winckelmann had themselves evoked, the Greek sense for
measure and equilibrium, the truthfulness of sculpture, the youthful
vitality of Greek proximity to nature, now had the sanction of a

divine necessity. The difficulty and reluctance of expressing these
insights in words mirrored Faust’s own difficulties with language and
Herder’s evocation of the idea of force (Kraft) as the key concept
explaining the presence of God in individual entities, echoed one of
Faust’s own translations of the Gospel of John: “in the beginning
was the force.”128 At the same time, the insufficiency of words led
Goethe to the same conclusion that had characterized Herder and
Moritz’s theodicies: “The impression of the sublime, the beautiful,
however beneficent it may be, also unsettles us, we wish to express
our feelings, our vision in words: but for that we must first recognize,
appraise, understand, we begin to distinguish, to order and this too
we find, when not impossible, certainly most difficult, and so finally
we return to a contemplative, contended admiration.” The viewer is
led back, surrounded by antique sculpture, to a lively natural life,
to man in his finest condition, whereby the viewer himself becomes
enlivened and more human.129
C H A P T E R 8
The Loss of Paradise and the History

of Freedom: German Philhellenism
in the 1790s
S chiller’s J ena L ectures

Early in May 1789, as the estates-general was convening in Paris on
the eve of the fateful confrontations that would usher in the French
Revolution, the 29-year-old Friedrich Schiller was preparing to deliver
his first lecture at the University of Jena. The post as an unsalaried
lecturer in the philosophy faculty had been obtained through the
efforts of Goethe, who had written to the university in late 1788,
that Schiller would be a good acquisition, all the more since he would
be obtained at little cost for them.1 Schiller would deliver a course
of lectures on universal history. This could only occur in the phi-
losophy faculty, since history otherwise served in an auxiliary role
either as ecclesiastical history in the faculty of theology or as the his-
tory of law in the juridical faculty.2 Before Schiller began to speak,
the lecture hall had filled up and the demand was so great, that, as
he wrote to his friend Christian Körner, they had to march down
the street to a bigger venue. The tradition of universal history had
taken various forms in the eighteenth century.3 In Germany, the most
significant variant, associated with August Ludwig von Schlözer in
Göttingen, postulated what Ulrich Muhlack has called a “utilitarian
approach”: history was the scene of material improvements, including
the improvement in manners that Schlözer called the “ennoblement”
(Veredelung) of man.4 The measure of such improvements was the
criterion of happiness. The histories of Christoph Meiners, also at
Göttingen, and whom we have encountered several times, pointed in
a similar direction.
The G öttingen historians had the task of educating the future

civil servants of Hannover and beyond. They therefore conceived
of their work as eminently useful. Both the course of history, and
the orientation of the officials who learned from it, turned on prac-
tical social and material ameliorations that facilitated governance
and trade. 5 Schiller began his lecture with a scathing and rous-
ing attack on the Brotgelehrten , precisely those scholars who lived
from the perceived usefulness of their inquiries. “Every light,” he
said, “which is lit on account of a happy Genie, in whatever branch
of science, makes their barrenness plain.” They lived in fear of
innovation and inquiry. Their rewards were not the “treasure of
their ideas” but rather they lived only for the recognition they
got from others, for their positions of honor, their salaries. If this
should fail them, Schiller asked, who was unhappier than they?
Vain was the search for truth for them, when truth could not be
changed into gold and praise in the press. 6 When this approach
was applied to the consideration of the course of history, Schiller
implied, nothing was left but an aggregate of disconnected and
confusing facts. But the philosophical spirit that pursued truth
for its own sake and not for the money or vanity of praise would
soon see a new drive awaken in him, which strove for concordance
(Ü bereinstimmung), “which irresistibly roused him to assimilate
everything around him to his nature founded in reason, and to
raise every phenomenon he comes upon to the highest effect that
he can recognize, to that of an idea.” The philosophical spirit
thereby took a harmony that existed within itself and imposed it
“upon the order of things.” He brought, a purposive reason into
the course of world events “and a teleological principle into world
history.” 7
These observations were partly the result of the strong impres-
sion made by Kant’s philosophy of history on Schiller, who adopted
in these passages many essentials of the Königsberg philosopher’s
view.8 But they were also the result and perhaps the resolution of the
struggles that, as we saw, were contained in Schiller’s earlier dramas
and which had posited conflicting aspirations and ideals of freedom.
What united the turbulent bids for liberation in Schiller’s dramas
with his faithful interpretation of Kant was the sense that freedom
was an aspiration to higher forms of ethical life, increasingly indepen-
dent from material and temporal constraints, be they of a seductive
or oppressive nature. It was that sense of freedom that underlay the
teleological appraisal of history in that the realization of freedom as a
higher morality by the means of reason became the goal of history. It
THE LOSS OF PARADISE AND THE HISTORY OF FREEDOM 183
was to have profound consequences for the development of philhel-

lenic thought in Germany. These consequences were compounded by
the shock of the French Revolution.
The role of Greece changed fundamentally. It underwent a transi-
tion from the immanent ethics of Herder’s Nemesis, in which the
ethical value was discernible in the object of contemplation to a tran-
scendental ethic where the individual had to strive to match a norm
that lay outside the sensible world. What had made Greece so attrac-
tive was that its art had brought the physical encapsulation of ethical
values and human excellences to unprecedented heights. Goethe in
Italy still marveled at the difference that seeing Laocoon at night by
torchlight could make to the viewer. All its features were thrown into
sharper relief and it could thereby be assimilated in all its sublime
beauty.9 The sublimity and inner dignity of a genuine moral com-
mand, wrote Kant in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals in
1783, “is all the more manifest the fewer are the subjective causes in
favor of it and the more there are against it, without thereby weaken-
ing in the least the necessitation by the law or taking anything away
from its validity.”10 Schiller did not simply assimilate Kantian ethics
in his appraisal of history and of Greece, but these ideas represented
the fundamental challenge and starting point for his reflections. The
transition in ethics was paralleled by one in the philosophy of history
from the self-sufficient individual entities of Herder to the teleology
that discerned a purposive reason tending toward a goal.
The transcendental virtues replaced the immanent virtues, that is,
those immediately discernible in the images and actions that had been
celebrated in every instance as the paradigmatic excellence of Greek
antiquity. A reason that looked to extraneous criteria of goodness
and to a distant future realization replaced the virtues of heroism and
heroic friendship, renunciation for a higher good replaced the affir-
mation of fame in its civic context that had so animated Winckelmann
and Herder. What we might call the “historicist pathos,” that of the
role of male friendship, of the position of women, of the role of music
and poetry in the founding of a society based on competition and
subject to its dangers, gave way to the pathos of reason, of modern
man’s backward glance at the struggles and aporias of freedom and
its future prospects.
Freedom itself came to signify the history of the contradiction
between man’s capacity for ethical goodness and his frequent failure
to live up to it; it was the history of struggle. Man was free in that
struggle, that is, when he took up the fight against his baser instincts
and aspired toward a higher morality. This idea was expressed by Kant
in a famous passage of the Groundwork when he discussed the inde-

pendence of a good will from its outward successes: “Even if by a
special disfavor of fortune or by the niggardly provision of nature,
this will should wholly lack the capacity to carry out its purpose—if
with the greatest efforts it should yet achieve nothing and only the
good will were left (not of course as a mere wish but as the summon-
ing of all means insofar as they are in our control)—then, like a jewel,
it would still shine by itself, as something that has its full worth in
itself.”11 In order to render that conception of freedom a postulate
of the content of history, it was necessary to return to a conjectural
beginning: to Genesis and the Fall. “So long as inexperienced man
obeyed this call of nature,” Kant observed in his Conjectures on the
Beginning of Human History in 1786, “his lot was a happy one. But
reason soon made its presence felt and sought to extend his knowledge
of foodstuffs beyond the bounds of instinct; it did so by comparing
his usual diet with anything which a sense other than that to which
his instinct was tied—for example, the sense of sight—represented as
similar in character.”12
Thus the eating of the forbidden fruit in Genesis was what Kant
called an “experiment of reason.” Its outcome was that man became
conscious of his reason as a faculty that can be extended beyond the
limits to which all animals are confined. As such, it was of “great
importance and it changed his life decisively.” It was the “first experi-
ment in free choice” and “after he had tasted this state of freedom
it was impossible for him to return to a state of servitude under the
rule of instinct.”13 It is significant that this experiment was first
prompted by the sense of sight. We have seen how the sense of sight
was the vehicle of corruption in Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins
of Inequality and the portal to the ennoblement of man by contem-
plative knowledge of humanity in Greek works in Goethe’s Italian
Journey. It was now the seat of Kant’s paradox that corruption itself
was the precondition of freedom, since it provided moral choice and
opened the struggle by which man realized the potential for reason
within him.
Like Kant, Schiller painted a picture of paradise as a stifling and
inhibiting scene of simple pleasures in his lecture “Thoughts on the
first human society according to the thread of the Mosaic tradition”:
“In a lascivious inactivity he [man] would have lived out his eternal
childhood—and the circle in which he would have moved, would be
the smallest possible, from desire to enjoyment, from enjoyment to
calm and from calm once again to desire.”14 It was precisely this state,
expressed in almost identical words, which had disturbed Goethe’s
Faust about his own condition once Mephistopheles was able to grant
so many of his wishes.15 But abandoning paradise by means of Kant’s
experiment, man “threw himself,” Schiller said, “into the wild game
of life, made his way into the dangerous path towards moral free-
dom.” Man’s disobedience against God in the Garden of Eden was
nothing less than his emancipation from instinct. It brought moral
evil into the creation but only in order to make possible moral good.
It was “the happiest and greatest event in the history of man; from
this moment is derived his freedom, here was laid the first, remote
foundation stone of his morality.”16
The consequences of the loss of paradise for the philosophy of
history and for the theodicy, in which ancient Greece had an enno-
bling or a redemptive message, were plain. The natural vitality in
which manifestations of Greek public life, like the Olympic Games
and contests of all kinds had been clothed, the mimetic relation-
ship to nature that the Sturm und Drang and subsequent thought
had celebrated and regarded as the threshold of ethical values, clus-
tered around the idea of balance and truthfulness, might now seen
as inimical to the awakening of man’s reason and the attainment of
moral freedom. Nature was now equated with the instinct a free,
reasoning being had left behind. Schiller’s lecture on the origins of
human society developed a dialectic between idleness and purposive
activity. The envy of the shepherd for the seemingly pleasant sed-
entary life of the farmer, the hunger that turned men into robbers,
and the adventures that turned robbers into heroes, were all features
of man’s freedom, of the “wild game” that would have led to new
institutions, monarchies, and states had it not been for the catas-
trophe of the flood, which filled Europe and Asia with wild beasts.
The early Greeks excelled in combating these beasts and Oedipus
became King of Thebes after defeating the Sphinx.17 The Greeks of
the heroic age thereby acquired, for Schiller, a place of honor at the
inception of that struggle between man’s idleness and his activity
that nascent reason had occasioned.
Schiller’s lecture, The Mission of Moses, was printed in early
September 1790 in Thalia.18 The title was a provocative variation
on the Anglican clergyman William Warburton’s Divine Legation
of Moses, published 1738–1741.19 By leaving out “divine” from his
title, Schiller was indicating his intention of challenging the story of
divine revelation and removing it from the narrative of early history.20
Presenting an account sympathetic to deism, Schiller resorted to the
idea, propagated by such seventeenth-century figures as John Toland
that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul was to be found
in Egypt, the real source of religious wisdom in the ancient world.

As John Roberston has shown, Warburton responded to Toland and
others by denying that hieroglyphs contained secret wisdom and
that the presence of the doctrine of the immortality of the soul in
Egypt undermined Christianity.21 But the two parts of Warburton’s
argument led to divergent interpretations, reflecting the contrasting
interests of his readers and were of some significance for the place
of Greece in narratives of the transmission of wisdom in the ancient
world. In his Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer,
Robert Wood expressed considerable skepticism about the deist the-
sis, saying that “great pains have been taken to trace the mysterious
knowledge, which the Poet [Homer] is supposed to conceal under
this dark allegorical veil, up to his Egyptian education.” Yet despite
the efforts of Thomas Blackwell, who made the case for Homer’s
Egyptian education, Wood asserted that “compliments paid to the
knowledge and wisdom of ancient Egyptians, are not so well founded
as is generally imagined.”22
Wood drew on Warburton to show that hieroglyphs were “the
production of an infant state of society not yet acquainted with
alphabetical writing.” The divine truths of Homer’s theology were
drawn instead from a “comprehensive observation of Nature, under
the direction of a fine imagination and sound understanding.”
Wood refuted Blackwell and others concerning Homer’s Egyptian
initiation, and called on the authority of nature as opposed to the
secretive guardianship of esoteric knowledge. And yet he ascribed to
Homer an essential aspect of the Egyptian wisdom thesis as would
later be revived by Karl Reinhold and Schiller himself, namely, that
such wisdom was the prerogative of a chosen few, in this case one
who protected divine truths from the ignorant and perhaps threat-
ening multitude: “For though we must acknowledge, that the
general conduct of Homer’s gods would even disgrace humanity;
yet, when we consider the pure and sublime notions of the Divine
Nature, which so frequently occur in his writings, it is but justice to
such exalted sentiments of the Supreme Being, to pronounce them
incompatible with the belief of those ridiculous absurdities, which
distinguish the opinions of the multitude from those of the Poet.”23
Homer, he wrote, “believed in the unity, supremacy, omnipotence,
and omniscience of the Divine Nature, Creator, and Disposer of
all things; his power, wisdom, justice, mercy and truth are incul-
cated in various parts of the Iliad and Odyssey. The immortality
of the soul, a future state, rewards and punishments and most of
the principles of sound divinity are to be found in his writings.” It

looked, he concluded, much less like the religion of mystery than of
common sense.24
Wood’s “religion of common sense” accorded with the German
Philhellenic theodicy of the 1780s in which Greece and Greek art
played a central role, not least because he used Greek art and genius
and its contrast with the “absurd and unmeaning public monuments”
of the Egyptians, as way of refuting the esoteric thesis that privi-
leged the mysteries, and derived Greek wisdom from the proximity
to nature. But though both Wood and Warburton had been trans-
lated into German, it was still possible for Karl Reinhold to publish
his work, The Hebrew Mysteries or the Oldest Religious Freemasonry
in 1788.25 He claimed to derive from Warburton and from Masonic
treatises, the idea that the doctrine of the unity of God and a repudia-
tion of paganism were the “highest object” of the ancient mysteries
and that this was the basis of the Mosaic religion.26 Warburton’s point
conceding the presence of these ideas in Egypt was now put back into
the service of the deist position by lackadaisical scholarship. Schiller’s
sympathies lay squarely with the deist side of the dispute and, as Klaus
Weimar points out, he did not read Christoph Meiners’s learned refu-
tation of it nor was he concerned to provide much scholarly ballast for
his lecture, other than his reading of Reinhold.27
Egypt was the most cultivated state known to history, Schiller
asserted, and the idea of a universal unity of things must have blos-
somed in the head of a priest. The doctrines of a single God and of
the immortality of the soul had to be kept secret not only for the
safety of the initiated, who underwent all sorts of ceremonies, but
also because the constitution of the state rested on idolatry. This led
to the creation of a secret league, and all this served as the inspiration
of the Greek mysteries at Eleusis and Samothrace.28 Yet the priestly
caste entrusted with this wisdom soon degenerated into a self-serving
elite, cultivating their symbols and ceremonies for the sake of obscu-
rantism and dominance. If, in Schiller’s view, this degenerate form
was the institution that Egypt bequeathed to Greece in Eleusis, then
he approximated Cornelius de Pauw’s dismissal of the Greek myster-
ies in those terms, which had appeared in his Philosophical Researches
on the Greeks in 1788.29 Paradoxically, Schiller adopted the mysteries
thesis about religious wisdom originating in Egypt in order to make
an antihierocratic, and by implication in the modern world, an anti-
clerical point. Moses, he said, betrayed the mysteries for the sake of
posterity.30 He had taken them out of the clutches of a priestly caste in
decline, which had kept them to itself, and made them the foundation
of the state. This was his great merit.
In August 1789, Schiller delivered a lecture entitled, “The leg-
islation of Lycurgus and Solon.”31 This was a concerted attempt to
apply to early Greek history the template of Kant’s conjectural nar-
rative and to delineate the struggles of a nascent freedom in its vari-
ous facets. Lycurgus had created a state admirable in many respects
for its political cohesion and discipline. The famous resistance of the
Spartans against the Persians at Thermopylae was the “most beauti-
ful memorial of political virtue.” And yet that impressive constitution
was in the highest measure objectionable, and the fate of man would
have been sad had all states been organized on this model. The state
could never be an end in itself, since the purpose of mankind was
the extension and application of all its capacities.32 The Spartan citi-
zen renounced friendship, maternal and conjugal love, for the sake of
citizenship. “A tender mother,” Schiller observed, “is by far a more
beautiful phenomenon in the moral world than a heroic hybrid being,
who denies natural sentiment.” Lycurgus had not only built a state
on the ruins of morality but had also designed its institutions to keep
Spartans permanently bound to the same stage of their political and
spiritual development.33 In decrying the extreme primacy of citizen-
ship, Schiller anticipated the arguments about the distinction between
ancient and modern freedom advanced by Benjamin Constant in his
lecture of 1816 “The Liberty of the ancients compared with that of
the moderns.”34
When one descends from our heights ever lower, William Tell
explained to his young son Walter in Schiller’s play Wilhelm Tell
finished in 1804, “one sees freely under all the heavens, the corn
grows in long, beautiful valleys and the land looks like a garden.”
Answering the boy’s question about why they did not at once descend
to these lands, Tell said that though the land may be beautiful, its
occupants did not enjoy the fruit of their toil. “Not free on their own
patrimony?,” asked the astonished Walter. The land, Tell said curtly,
belonged to the bishop and the king.35 The Swiss alpine republican-
ism embodied one kind of political freedom that Schiller discerned
in the contrast between Sparta and Athens. Solon, by contrast both
to Sparta and to earlier Athenian legislators like Draco, had a heart
“sensible to joy and love” and “some weaknesses of his youth made
him more considerate towards humanity and gave to his laws the
marks of leniency and mildness.” In cancelling debts in his famous
Seisachtheia, he only took from the rich the means to be unjust. The
land, which before was worked by slave hands, was now free and the
citizen worked the fields as his own property, which he had previously
worked as a day laborer for his creditor.36
And yet Athenian republican freedom also evinced a “childish
mentality” in that citizens, who by means of extraordinary merit or
exceptional good fortune had risen to such great influence as was
incompatible with republican equality, were banished even before
they merited such banishment.37 This was the famous ostracism of
the Athenians. What Schiller regarded as the “childish politics” of
Athens was to be taken very seriously by Nietzsche as the guaran-
tor of the health and vitality of the Greek state. In the short essay
entitled, Homer on Competition, Nietzsche argued that all features of
Greek culture stemmed from the primacy of the contests. The truth
of this could be glimpsed by considering the original meaning of
ostracism. A fragment of Heraclitus, which Nietzsche quoted, said:
“Among us nobody should be the best; but if somebody is, let him
be somewhere else.” “Why should nobody be the best?,” Nietzsche
asked. The answer was that otherwise competition would dry up.38
For Schiller, then, Athenian political freedom, in its primitive charac-
ter was ambiguous, in that it embodied the young boy Walter’s idea of
property just as it applied the childish policy of ostracism and carried
out an act of injustice against individual citizens.
Two reflections at the conclusion of the lecture recalled the moral
freedom born of the dialectic between idleness or stagnation and
the purposive conscious activity of reason that he and Kant saw as
the kernel of truth in the story of the Fall. Ancient lawgivers had
the advantage over moderns, he observed, that they could form men
according to the content of their laws and united the citizen with the
person. Yet it was wrong to give to moral duties the compulsion of
law. Freedom was the precondition of the moral beauty of actions.39
The second reflection was that Lycurgus had commanded idleness
by the laws and Solon had punished it severely. Hence were born in
Athens all the virtues, trades, and arts and all the fields of wisdom.40
Lycurgus’s shortcoming was that he had closed his mind to posterity
and to the possibility of development. This was a fundamental differ-
ence with Herder’s philosophy of history. For Herder, to demand of
a lawgiver that he look consciously to posterity would be to detract
from the completeness of his own arrangement. It was that arrange-
ment, as conceived within the limited horizons of any given polity, in
and for itself, which Herder saw as the true bequest of each people.
Schiller instead looked to an ideal of freedom realized in installments,
releasing and encouraging the moral conscience of individuals with
ever greater consistency and sagacity.
Aesthetic Education and the G ENIE ’S

Role in History
Yet it was in Schiller’s engagement with Greek tragedy and Greek lit-
erature in the 1790s, within the framework of his aesthetic writings,
that the history of freedom was resolved into a philosophy of history.
It was a philosophy in which the political and moral predicament of
modern man prompted a fundamentally new conception of the mean-
ing of the Greek past. The assimilation of the ideas of Kant was joined
by the shock engendered by the course of the French Revolution. The
transition from an immanent to a transcendental ethic, mentioned at
the outset of this chapter, was deepened and acquired new and pow-
erful dimensions. At the same time, the dialectic between esoteric-
elite and universalist-popular ideas about the origins of art and of the
transmission of knowledge came to center once again on the figure
of the Genie and his relationship to the environment and traditions
in which he thrived.
Schiller’s engagement with Greek epic and tragedy resumed more
intensively in the summer of 1787, as he moved from Dresden to
Weimar. From May to November 1788, he spent time with the von
Lengerfeld sisters, one of whom he was to marry, in the vicinity of
Rudolstadt, near Weimar. They read the Odyssey together in the eve-
nings, and, as Caroline von Lengerfeld remembered it, “this great
portrayal of humanity in its universality and eternal natural verac-
ity moved us to our very depths.” They also translated portions out
of Brumoy’s Théâtre des grecs, the standard modern translation for
Greek tragedy.41 Schiller’s famous poem, The Gods of Greece stemmed
from this period.42 In early 1789, he translated Euripides’s Iphigenia
in Aulis, mainly from Brumoy’s French text, which appeared in
Thalia.43 The reasons for his choice, as he wrote to his friend Körner,
were practical: to perfect his own dramatic production by reading
something that was stylistically sound.44 It was in the course of this
translation, Ernst-Richard Schwinge argues, that he began to replace
the worth of antiquity with something new and moved toward a phil-
osophical differentiation of antiquity and modernity.45
Reviewing Goethe’s verse composition of Iphigenie auf Tauris that
same year, Schiller expressed his discomfort with Euripides’s Pylades.
It was a “memorable example of the attitudes of the Greek stage.
How little does the poet allow his Pylades a pure idealistic magna-
nimity, how little he allows him to raise himself above mankind!”46
By contrast, Schiller’s enthusiasm for Goethe’s Orestes was bound-
less, particularly the scene where at the end of his trance, the furies
depart from him. “If the modern stage only has this single fragment
to show, it could still triumph over the ancient.” The Genie of this
poet, Schiller enthused, who need fear no comparison with an ancient
tragedian, had united the finest fruit of moral refinement and the
most beautiful fruit of the poetic art, supported by the progress of
ethical culture and “the milder spirit of our times.” It was, moreover,
“a happy idea” that he had used the only possible space, madness
(Wahnsinn), to introduce our morals into the Greek world without
doing the least damage to it.47 The favorable comparison of Goethe
with Euripides was the beginning of a chain of ideas that were artic-
ulated in 1790, when Schiller delivered a lecture on the theory of
tragedy at Jena. This served as the basis of two essays finished in
1792 entitled On the Grounds of Enjoyment in Tragic Pieces and on the
Tragic Art. The revision of the material had followed an intense study
of Kant’s aesthetics early in 1791.48
The first dichotomy that began to ground the philosophical dis-
tinction between Greek antiquity and modernity was that between
the acceptance of fate and a teleological consciousness, outlined in
On Tragic Art. A “blind submissiveness to fate” was always humili-
ating and painful for a freely determined being, Schiller protested,
and it was that latter being that was missing in even the finest pro-
ductions of the Greek stage. The appeal to necessity in these pieces,
he observed, always left behind an unresolved knot. That knot was
loosened only when morally formed man climbed to the highest stage
to which he can rise through fine art (rührende Kunst). Even the dis-
content caused by fate lost itself in a “clear consciousness of the teleo-
logical connection of things, of a sublime order, of a good will. Greek
art never reached those heights, since neither the popular religion nor
even their philosophy was able to light their way that far ahead.”49
The philosophy that underlay his courses on universal history, with its
teleological affirmation of a present that was the product of struggles
for freedom like the Reformation and Thirty-Years War, was applied
to moral qualities of art. The moderns had the advantage over the
Greeks that they could imagine a chain of causes and events governed
by an uplifting end.
In On the Grounds of Enjoyment in Tragic Pieces, Schiller explained
a further reason for the repudiation of the centrality of fate. The
moral law, he explained, can only demonstrate the full extent of its
power when it is shown to be in conflict with all other natural forces
and the latter lose their hold over a human heart. This moral determi-
nation was at its most radiant, he elaborated, when it won the upper
hand against opposition. By natural forces was meant “everything
that is not moral, everything that does not stand under the high-
est law-giving of reason: sentiments, drives, affects, passions, just as
physical necessity and fate. The greater the adversary the more glori-
ous the victory.” The highest consciousness of our moral nature, he
concluded, can only be obtained in a violent situation, in struggle and
the highest moral pleasure must therefore be accompanied by pain.50
The struggles of the generations that fought the wars of freedom
that Schiller the historian wrote about, the Thirty-Years War and the
Dutch Revolt, were superseded by qualitative advantages of the strug-
gle experienced in tragic art. Schiller implied that tragic art could
deliver a teleological vantage point and unfold the triumph of moral
freedom against natural instinct in a single performance. Moreover,
it could depict that struggle in the most exquisite fashion, choosing
each element of the plot for the most moving and edifying effect. Art
could stage the sublimity of the contests that engendered moral free-
dom with better exactitude and emotional poignancy than history.
The French Revolution and its presumed intellectual origins ren-
dered the division between nature and freedom more acute. Man
could not be ennobled by the demands of reason and the laws of
morality alone, since this did violence to his nature as a sensual,
physical being. But neither could he be left to the stifling tutelage of
nature, since that would be to forfeit his purpose as a rational being.
In the course of essays on aesthetics and poetics that appeared in
the mid-1790s, Schiller offered a solution to the dilemma. Drawing
on Kant’s Critique of Judgment, published in 1790, he argued that
it was the play of our faculties in experiencing aesthetic beauty that
allowed us to reconcile both sides of our being in a way that made us
conscious of acting for the future, toward the perfectibility of man. It
was in how we felt and thought about beauty that we could rediscover
at a higher level the harmony between nature and humanity that had
characterized the ancient world and especially Greece.
This project of reconciliation and higher unity was surrounded on
all sides by dangerous and enticing pitfalls. In his essay, On Naïve and
Sentimental Poetry, the extremes of these pitfalls were represented
by Goethe’s Werther and by Rousseau, two powerful and seductive
figures in the European literary mind in the years before the revo-
lution. The main problem these figures represented was either the
sentimental aspiration to return to the lost paradise that he and Kant
had shown had been abandoned for good, or the terrible effects of
sentimental discontent at the disunity between freedom and nature.
Two aspects of Schiller’s solution to this problem transformed the
character of Greece and reversed several value judgments of the
philhellenic sensibility of previous decades in Germany, with wide-

ranging consequences for German intellectual history. First, it was
the individual subject whose character would give a moral content
and purpose to beauty and not the beauty itself that would inspire
the subject to adopt the moral stances discernible in a statue. This
was the thrust of his argument in Über Anmut und Würde, writ-
ten in 1793. A lively spirit, Schiller wrote in that essay, “obtains for
himself an influence on all bodily movements and is able eventually
to modify by means of the power of sympathetic play even the fixed
forms of nature which are unreachable for the will. In such a person
everything becomes a trait of character, as we find with several heads,
which a long life, extraordinary fortunes and an active spirit have
completely transformed.”51
This argument reveals a facet of freedom in Schiller’s thought
that repudiated the ethical-formative power which in several ways
Winckelmann and Herder had attributed to Greek sculpture. An
“active spirit” had such freedom as entailed the power to shape its
own outward demeanor. It was significant also that this process took
place over a lifetime: freedom also entailed the ordering of our actions
within a teleological framework. A lifetime of freedom and activity
superseded the momentary inspiration that an Apollo Belvedere or
a Juno Ludovisi, or a Laocoon could offer and the virtues, such as
constancy or vitality, which they could convey. The ethical force of
art was transferred from object to subject and importantly, to a sub-
ject capable of projecting a future. Second, in dealing with the ever-
present menace evoked by longings for a return to paradise, Schiller
developed what could be called a new account of a natural condition.
He did this in order to arrive at a beginning, which in contrast to
what he took to be Rousseau’s view, could serve as the point of depar-
ture in man’s journey to a higher synthesis of morality and sensuality.
The template on which that new natural condition was articulated
was ancient Greece. Rousseau’s ideals and utopias, his end-state, were
portrayed as holding man back in a state inferior to the Greek condi-
tion, the threshold of the forward progress of freedom.
In words recalling the age of gold in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,
Schiller articulated in the famous sixth letter of his Letters on the
Aesthetic Education of Man published in his own journal Die Horen
in 1795, his idea of the ancient totality in which the faculties of man
were united and his life was lived in harmony: “In those days, at the
beautiful awakening of mental forces the senses and the mind had as
yet no strictly separated jurisdiction; no dissension had yet provoked
them to divide in hostility and determine their boundaries.” Among
moderns one had to search from person to person in order to arrive at

the idea of the totality of the species. “We see not only individual sub-
jects,” he lamented, “but whole classes of persons develop only a part
of their capacities.” Which individual modern, he asked, could step
forth and compete, man against man, with an individual Athenian for
the prize of mankind?52 In setting up this image of Greece as a rec-
onciled whole, Schiller was adopting an idea of the previous philhel-
lenic generation, developed most fully by Herder, that Greek life and
Athenian life in particular integrated the individual’s spiritual and
physical existence in single public, active, religious framework. It was,
in other words, the Greece of Herder’s Pindar that Schiller recalled
in this letter.53
But instead of locating the meaning of that totality within it, as
Herder had done, and seeing it as a self-sufficient link in the chain of
providence, whose completeness could be contemplated with satisfac-
tion, Schiller went on to say in the same letter that it had been culture
itself that had inflicted upon mankind the wound of the departure
from that idyll. “Torn away from each other,” he wrote, were state
and church, laws and morals, enjoyment was separated from work and
means from ends, effort from reward.54 Yet the Greeks, as a people
endowed with understanding intuited that if they want to develop
as thinking beings they had to “give up the totality of their being
and pursue the truth along separate paths.”55 Though the demise of
totality was a necessary instrument of culture, the letter concluded, it
could not be its end. The totality in our nature that art has destroyed,
Schiller explained, must be reconstituted by a higher art.56 The con-
flicts caused by the loss of that totality were exemplified most acutely
by their culmination in the violence of the French Revolution. If
philosophy implores us loudly to return to the arms of nature, the
eighth letter asked, why is it that we are still barbarians? The answer,
Schiller proclaimed with reference to Kant’s essay of 1784, Answer
to the Question What Is Enlightenment, was “sapere aude!”—dare to
know.57 But this, he lamented, went unheeded. Most people relied on
the state and on priests for their instruction rather than themselves.
They had built their happiness on those illusions, which only scattered
what to them was the hostile light of knowledge. The age urgently
required the development of the capacity to understand through feel-
ing (Empfindungsvermögen).58
The ninth letter was a powerful intimation of the synthesis of
ancient totality and modern freedom, of Greek form and modern
content. It was illustrated by reference to the Greek myth at the heart
of Attic tragedy, on which Goethe had drawn for his play Iphigenie
auf Tauris. A benevolent deity, Schiller proposed, should take a baby

from its mother’s breast, nourish him with the milk of a better age,
and allow him to grow to maturity under a remote Greek sky. When
he has become a man, he should return, an alien being, to his own
century, “but not to please it with this coming but rather, terrible
as Agamemnon’s son, to purify it. The matter he will take from the
present but the form from a nobler age, indeed, from beyond all time,
from the unchanging unity of his being.”59 The full force of Goethe’s
Orestes, whose initial crime and confession strove for various kinds of
purification, thus became Schiller’s cipher for the synthesis of Greek
antiquity and modernity that should be the goal of a didactic and
noble art. Orestes’s terrible return was also a warning that the absence
of that higher totality was an injustice. It is plausible that for Schiller,
Orestes’s initial crime of killing Agamemnon was the revenge of a
wounded totality, the dangerous aspiration to return to the lost para-
dise that had a violent outlet in the French Revolution, and his sub-
sequent confession and purification represented the rectification of
political errors by the higher art that Schiller yearned for.
Implicitly casting doubt on Winckelmann’s link between the spirit
of political freedom and the flourishing of great art by citing the
example of Rome, Schiller argued that just as art had survived the
decline of a noble nature, so it would march ahead, forming and reviv-
ing it once again.60 This is more explicit in the tenth letter, where he
argued that as long as Athens and Sparta retained their independence
taste had still not ripened. It was true that poetry had undertaken a
sublime flight but this was attributable to the stirrings of Genie, of
which we knew that it bordered closely on wildness, a light that shone
out of the darkness.61 This remark showed the limitation of Schiller’s
acceptance of Herder’s Pindaric evocation of the Greek whole. The
individual Genie and not the vitality and freedom of his surroundings
and of the people accounted for the excellence of poetry. The dialec-
tic between esoteric-individual and democratic-universalist accounts
of the transmission of knowledge and of artistic creativity, which we
have had numerous occasions to encounter, was tilted by Schiller in
favor of the former. He was at pains to emphasize not only the indi-
vidual creative faculty of the artist, but, as we have seen, the potential
of the subject to articulate the elements of his own freedom.
As long as man only feels (empfindet), he wrote in the fourteenth
letter, his personhood and absolute existence remained hidden from
him, and as long as man only thought, then his existence in time, his
condition remained a secret. Only the play drive could unite both.62
In elaborating on this drive Schiller returned to Winckelmann and
Herder’s celebration of the Greek games, their vitality and the stark
contrast with the bloodthirsty gladiatorial spectacles of the Romans.
One will never go wrong, he mused, if one sought the ideals of
beauty that men had by asking how they satisfied their play drive.
The “bloodless contests of strength, speed, nimbleness and the noble
competition of talents” were, for Schiller, the Greek manifestations
of the play drive. Again, drawing on Winckelmann, he said that this
explained the quality of their art. The noble pursuits of this play drive
accounted for the pleasing features of the statues of the Greek dei-
ties.63 The portrayal of this early noble play drive rounded off the
image of the life in close proximity to nature of which Greek antiquity
was the highest example. Schiller borrowed the historical reasoning
of Winckelmann and Herder that attributed to Greek institutions,
like the games, the excellence of Greek art. Yet he saw that reality only
as a spur to the moderns to surpass its achievements, to add to the
laurels of the games the unmistakably modern accolade of individual
moral freedom.
In late July 1794, Schiller attended a lecture on natural science
at the University of Jena. One of the hearers was Goethe. They
walked out together, animatedly discussing the content of the lec-
ture. It was the first friendly encounter between the two poets. The
young Schiller had first glimpsed a rather aloof and stern Goethe at
Mannheim in 1781, shortly after his dramatic escape from Stuttgart.
Arriving in Weimar in 1787 while Goethe was still in Italy, Schiller
had been fed a dose of poisonous remarks about Goethe by the dis-
gruntled Charlotte von Stein: that he was ruining the mining works
in Ilmenau under his responsibility and that the duke had fallen out
with him. Their next encounter in 1788 was hardly warmer than the
first.64 Yet on August 23, about a month after the lecture, Schiller
wrote a letter to Goethe in which he outlined his idea of the latter’s
literary development. If you had been born a Greek, he said, every-
thing would have come to you effortlessly, but since you were born
a German, you have had to make your way back to Greek life with
a conscious effort of your Genie.65 Goethe was deeply moved by the
letter and replied that it had helped him overcome a serious bout of
doubt and anxiety.66 The letter developed the idea that Schiller had
begun to articulate in the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man
that the Genie was the mediator between historical epochs and liter-
ary styles.
It was at this point that the individual-esoteric origin of cultural
achievement and the transmission of wisdom, which had been hinted
at in the Letters, received its definitive sanction. It was a question that
transcended philhellenic debates but which contributed to determin-

ing their parameters. Whereas the Letters had spoken of mankind’s
return to a higher synthesis of nature and moral freedom, the ideas
that grew out of the letter to Goethe concentrated more on the indi-
vidual Genie and attributed to him a decisive role in the philosophy of
history. The essay On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, published, like
the Letters, in Die Horen, in 1795, described the poet’s creativity as
growing out of two fundamental attitudes, each of which was broadly
but not exclusively equated with historical epochs. The na ïve in poetry
and in life was described by Schiller in terms of a proximity to child-
hood and its spontaneous, harmonious, potentially all-embracing
relationship with nature.67 The sentimental was born of the distress
at the separation of man from this natural childhood—a distress that
can take productive forms and strive for a return to the naïve, like
Goethe, who was born German but embodied an approximation to
Greece. But it could also lead to self-destruction, like that of Werther
or stifling injunctions and longings like those of Rousseau.
Modern readers of Schiller have puzzled about whether these two
categories are a binary opposition and about whether they constitute
a philosophy of history. In an important intervention on Schiller’s
essay, Peter Szondi suggested that the sentimental form of feeling is
not the second, but rather the third category, which unites the first
two: the naive and the na ïve in conjunction with the reflective reason.
This triadic scheme, Szondi suggests, was made possible by changes
made by Kant in 1787 to the Critique of Pure Reason. This made it
possible to speak about three epochs of history, in the tradition of the
Franciscan medieval philosopher and mystic Joachim of Fiore.68 The
question about whether Schiller was referring to concrete historical
epochs was solved, Szondi argued, by Schiller’s remark that the na ïve
was “a return to childhood where we no longer expect it.” It was
not, therefore, confined to specific eras. The na ïve required the sen-
timental in order to come about at all.69 Helmut Koopmann speaks
of Schiller moving toward a cyclical conception of history between
his Jena lectures and the essay on na ïve and sentimental poetry.70 Yet
the puzzle is perhaps more easily solved by remembering the forma-
tive powers in history attributed to the complex creative force of the
Genie.
The people of the Netherlands, Schiller had written in his intro-
duction to his history of the Dutch wars of independence against
Spain, completed in 1788, was the most peaceful people of this part
of the earth and less capable of heroic deeds than their neighbors. Yet
circumstances forced upon them a momentary greatness. Some have
the aim of proving the superiority of Genie to contingency, he wrote,

“but I present a portrait here where adversity creates Genie and contin-
gency makes for heroes.”71 The independence of the Netherlands was
the most sublime bid for freedom in European history for Schiller. It
was a freedom attained by Genie understood as a collective and politi-
cal entity. The use of that term in that work of history demonstrates
the rich spectrum of meaning it contained in Germany at this time,
from the religious reformers and teachers admired by Hamann, to the
artistic virtuosity of the poet, and now, political leaders, like Goethe’s
Egmont, a hero of the same Dutch struggles and driven by an equally
powerful creative force.
What they all had in common was that the personality of Genie
could assert itself against matter, against contingency, and against the
expected course of events. That personality was given different forms
in Schiller’s poetological history of mankind. It was not so much in
the spirit of Joachim of Fiore, therefore, that Schiller posited three
possibilities, each with its own spiritual character and corresponding
to an age. Rather, it was the individual Genie, Goethe, Werther, and
Rousseau, who would guide or misguide mankind on different paths
after the loss of paradise and the initial rupture with nature. Rather
than a succession of epochs or a cyclical account, the history of free-
dom in this essay was now the struggle within the mindset of the
Genie and the fate of mankind still hung in the balance.
In each instance, the possibilities embodied by these vastly differ-
ent Genies, now the motor of history, were measured against or illus-
trated by the life of Greece and by the appropriations of Greek themes
in Goethe’s work. In this way, as he had done in the Letters, Schiller
assimilated and evaluated both of the great tendencies of German
Philhellenism in the late eighteenth-century: the idea of seeing Greek
life as a single whole and composite phenomenon, as a way of life, and
the idea of rendering Greek legacies subjective by incorporating their
individual themes in an essentially modern moral and literary project.
Greek antiquity acquired new meanings in the scenes of history and
potential futures in which different Genies flourished and perished.
Goethe told his secretary Eckermann in 1830 that Schiller had
written the essay on poetry as a way of “protecting himself against
me.” He preached, Goethe recalled, the gospel of freedom, “I did
not want to see the rights of nature curtailed.”72 If Goethe was the
German Greek then the essay was also a reckoning with the implica-
tions of a German Greekdom as embodied by Goethe’s artistic genius
and the products of his imagination. Hans-Robert Jauss contrasted
the essay with Friedrich Schlegel’s work of this period, asserting that
Schiller represented the “modern,” and the Schlegel the “ancient”

stance of the old querelle des anciens et des moderns of the 1690s.
Whereas Schlegel remained beholden to an image of antiquity as a
perfect and completed whole, Schiller sought a reconciliation of the
perfection of antiquity and the perfectibility of mankind.73 For Ernst
Behler, this characterization is a fundamental mistake. The polarity
between “ancients,” which in France had primarily meant Rome in
any case, and “moderns,” was no longer at issue, but rather the ques-
tion of how Greek antiquity could be assimilated to bring about a
rebirth of modern culture.74
“When we recall the beautiful nature which surrounded the
Greeks,” Schiller wrote, “how familiarly this people, under their con-
tented heavens, could live with free nature, how much closer their way
of thinking, their form of feeling and their customs were to simple
nature, and what a true picture of the same their poetic works are, so
we must be estranged by the observation that we find among them so
few traces of the sentimental interest which we moderns have for nat-
ural scenes and natural character.” Referring implicitly to Rousseau,
he added that we want to exchange our free will for the peace of
natural necessity, while the Greeks, by contrast, wanted to enliven it
by reading humanity and human will into it.75 Rousseau’s sentimen-
talism would have the effect of making man a prisoner of necessity
without the enchantment and vitality provided by the Greek context
and way of life. Aborgast Schmidt argues that the naïve feeling for
nature, the happy acceptance of natural order Schiller evoked as part
of the na ïve, was really a property of Hellenistic stoicism and not clas-
sical antiquity and that it was the stoics whose deification of nature
was being affirmed in those passages.76 Yet we can admit this wider
significance of the term without losing the specificity of the classical
Greek contribution to the phenomenon.
In a note appended to the main text Schiller added that this abil-
ity to enliven nature was peculiar to the Greeks, who alone possessed
the vigorous movement and fullness to attribute to lifeless nature the
qualities of life. The contrast to this was the poetry of Ossian, the sup-
posedly Scottish bard popular in the Sturm und Drang among young
German poets.77 Lifeless nature in Ossian was not endowed with
human qualities but was instead colossal, imposing, and it asserted
its rights even over men.78 This juxtaposition mirrored the progress
of Werther’s reading in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. As
the eponymous character’s mood darkened and became more mel-
ancholic, he turned his back on Homer and read Ossian. The Greek
ideas of the gods (Götterlehre) was the product of a na ïve feeling,
Schiller explained; the birth of a joyful imagination, not a pedantic

reason, like the doctrinal religion of the moderns.79 In this passage
Schiller downgraded the theodicy that Goethe, Moritz, and Herder
had derived from Greek myth in the 1780s. Whereas the latter three
had insisted on the commensurability of Greek fable and its insights
about nature with the most noble and plausible notion of God and
providence, one worthy of modern humanity, Schiller now charac-
terized Greek fable and thus the elements of that theodicy as the
mindset of man’s childhood and placed them at the beginning of the
process of man’s development, not at its end. It was the task of the
moderns to arrive at a higher synthesis, not to equate their religious
insights with Greek ones. It is perhaps in this sense that Schiller was
defending himself from Goethe in writing the essay.
The path that modern poets travel, Schiller mused, was the same
as that of man in general. Nature made him at one with himself; art
separated and divided him, through the ideal he returned to unity.
But because the ideal was something infinite, which he never reached,
the cultivated man as such could never be complete, while the nat-
ural man as natural man could. Thus, the goal toward which man
strove in culture was to be endlessly preferred, he said, to that which
he reached by means of nature.80 It was this insight, Walther Rehm
observed, that made Schiller posit the ethical superiority of modern
man with regard to the Greeks. Modern man earned his higher unity
by striving endlessly for it. The Greek earned no merit in what he
achieved.81 The ideal that Rousseau held for man, Schiller asserted,
took too little account of his capacities and too much of his limita-
tions. It betrayed everywhere a need for bodily calm rather than for
moral harmony. He would rather lead mankind back to the spiritless
simplicity of the first state than to see that conflict ended in the lively
harmony of a fully completed education.82 Rousseau, therefore, could
neither aspire to Greek completeness nor to the noble and constant
approximation to the ideal open to modern man.
It was interesting to observe, Schiller wrote, that everything
which nourished the sentimentalist character was pushed together
in Werther: passionate unhappy love, sensitivity for nature, religious
feelings, philosophical contemplativeness, and, of course, the world of
Ossian.83 Yet precisely because the fantasies of a Werther were no wild
manifestation of nature, Schiller concluded at the end of the essay,
but rather one of freedom, which was in itself a noble quality that
can be endlessly perfected, it could also lead to an endless fall into a
bottomless depth and can only end in complete destruction.84 It is
significant that the essay ended, not with the pathos born of the loss
of the ancient world and the Greek proximity to nature, which was
evoked with such warmth in its pages, but with the distinctly modern
pathos of freedom, of what the free sentimental mind can resort to in
its despair. The Greek world, with its art, its vitality, and its religious
ideas was a static idyll, complete within itself. It was not Werther’s
reading of Homer but his passage onto Ossian that signified the new
burden of freedom. The Greek world had been closed and the Genie
that would shape the destinies of man for good or ill could neither
return to it nor be led astray by it.
The Return to Homer and the End of

Classical German Philhellenism
In 1942, the classical philologist Otto Regenbogen published two
lectures he had delivered on “Goethe’s Greekdom.”85 Forbidden
to teach at university by the Nazis since 1935, he was nevertheless
permitted to publish. Like Walther Rehm, he was a philologist who
sought to tell the story of the German-Greek encounter in terms that
made Germany, and particularly Goethe’s Germany, not just the fore-
most interpreter but also the continuation and development of the
excellence of Greece. Like Rehm, he was distant from the ideology
of Nazism. The German encounter with Greek culture, with Greek
humanity in particular, offered a better foundation of German patrio-
tism, evoked all the more poignantly in the middle of the Second
World War. In 1942, he chose Goethe’s unfinished epic Achilleis,
which the latter composed in March 1799, to outline the contours
of that German continuation of Greek humanity. Homer had already
shown us the deeply human qualities of Achilles, Regenbogen
observed, separating them from the antique traits. Goethe had helped
Achilles further along this path, ennobling him with a new masculin-
ity, toward that courage which defies the questionability of human
existence with a “nevertheless.”86 With this observation, reminiscent
in the “nevertheless” of Nietzsche’s appraisal of Greek heroic pessi-
mism, Regenbogen also drew Goethe toward the nineteenth century,
bridging the gap between Weimar classicism and his own time.
In the mid-1790s, parallel to the nascent friendship with Schiller,
Goethe returned to an intense interest in Homer. This was the third
such phase in his life, after the early 1770s, the time of writing
Werther, and after the inspiration given by the Sicilian landscape in
1787, which had culminated in the fragment Nausikaa.87 This return
to Homer was partly prompted and accompanied by Heinrich Voss’s
translation of the Iliad, which he read aloud to his friends in Weimar
in 1794–1795 and by the controversy surrounding Friedrich August

Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homeros, published in 1795.88 Schiller’s
Philhellenism had assimilated the challenge of Kant. The problem
of moral freedom, with the centrality of struggle and the opposi-
tion between morality and sensuality, had superseded the Gothean-
Herderian irenic theodicy of the 1780s as the main prism through
which Greek antiquity was appraised in art and the philosophy of
history. Now Friedrich August Wolf offered a further challenge to
philhellenic sensibilities when he argued that there was really no such
person as Homer. Instead, the Homeric epics were compilations of
an oral tradition that had come about over a long period of time. At
first, Goethe welcomed the release this offered from the otherwise
towering and oppressive genius of Homer. That release allowed him
to compose his own epic as another rhapsode, one of the bearers of
the oral tradition in ancient Greece, who recited poetry in public.89
It was instead Herder who took exception to Wolf and the con-
troversy developed an unpleasant personal dimension.90 Herder pub-
lished his essay, “Homer, ein Günstling der Zeit,” in Schiller’s Horen
in 1795. He argued subtly but with passionate interest for the unity of
the original epics. The merit of the rhapsodes was secondary and that
of Solon, who had preserved the tradition, was only political.91 Wolf
was greatly alarmed and believed his core insights could be threat-
ened among the reading public by Herder. 92 The Homer that was
the subject of controversy and composition in the mid and late 1790s
was often more that of the Iliad than the Odyssey. The Iliad was,
according to its territory, Herder wrote in 1795, more a world of the
East and the Odyssey a world of the West.93 For German philhel-
lenes, then, the Homer of the west was that of Sicily, of Nausikaa,
of the plight of Nausicaa and Penelope, of Odysseus’s yearning for
his home. The Homer of the East, of Asia Minor, resonated, above
all, with the exploits and sorrows of heroic friendship so beloved of
Winckelmann and enthroned the primacy of fate. The renewed atten-
tion that the Homeric epics commanded as a result of the work of
Voss and Wolf prompted a return to the idea, recalled by Regenbogen
and articulated by Robert Wood in 1769, that a humane and edifying
ethic could be distilled from Homer despite the rough manners of
the times in which the epics were composed and of the times which
they depicted.
For Friedrich Schlegel, who wrote his treatise On the Study of
Greek Poetry between 1795 and 1797, one embodiment of that genu-
inely Homeric and uniquely Greek ethic was the figure of Achilles.
For Goethe, Achilles became the new subject of the attempt he had
made with Odysseus to make good a Homeric deficit identified by

Robert Wood. “Is it not very remarkable,” Wood had observed, “that
Homer, so great a master of the tender and pathetic, who has exhib-
ited human Nature in almost every shape, and under every view, has
not given a single instance of the powers and effects of love, dis-
tinct from sensual enjoyment, in the Iliad?” 94 Perhaps, between the
death of Hector and the departure of the Greeks, Goethe wrote to
Schiller with some equivocation in December 1797, there was an epic
poem to be written, set, that is, between the Iliad and the Odyssey.95
In May 1798, he admitted that it was “entirely sentimental” and
that it would thereby qualify as a modern work.96 The Achilles that
Goethe depicted in the few pages of the work that he completed,
was that which answered Wood’s puzzlement rather than that which
had ignited Winckelmann’s imagination. His intention was to have
Achilles fall in love with Prolyxena on the eve of his death, a prisoner
of the Homeric evocation of fate, yet defined ultimately by the attach-
ment to a woman.
The epic poem began with Achilles commanding his Thessalonian
soldiers to build a mound, a “glorious hill” to contain the remains of
himself and his beloved friend Patroclus, a memorial at the edge of
the sea for foreign peoples and future times.97 It was an ethical col-
oring, David Constantine wrote in his essay on the Achilleis, which
Homer’s idea of fame never had. It would have sat uneasily with the
intended conclusion of the poem, had he finished it.98 The scene then
moved to Olympus, where Achilles’s mother Thetis sought sympathy
for the impending death of her son. Achilles, she complained, no lon-
ger called upon her, “he stands on the bank, forgetful of me, thinking
longingly only of the friend.” 99 Thetis was partly rebuffed and partly
comforted in Olympus. She was told not to give up hope, to think
of Admetus and Alceste reunited and of Persephone and Orpheus.
Three elements in this poem shifted the context in which Achilles’s
personality and feelings were articulated, away from the dominance
of heroic friendship and toward the salience of relationships with
women. The mother’s call to regain the devotion of her son, the evo-
cation of couples reunited out of the underworld, and the unwrit-
ten but sketched attachment to Polyxena, all have this purpose. For
Goethe, as for Wieland, whose Alceste he must have had in mind, the
ethical import of Greek tragedy and epic hinted at a pure humanity,
a humanity that was most deeply instantiated in encounters between
brother and sister, as in Iphigenie, or husband and wife, as in Alceste.
Its insights had to be distilled by the modern poet. Redemption, the
beautiful defiance of fate and fatalism, required a synthesis of male
and female, which an Achilles fixated on male friendship could not

deliver.
Friedrich Schlegel’s Achilles embodied the quintessentially philhel-
lenic virtue of measure (Ebenmass). Simplicity, grace, and lively natu-
ralness were all characteristics that Homer shared with Celtic and
Indian bards, he explained, but the finest sense of measure that
united overwhelming force with inner peace and heroic manners that
united force and grace were unique to Homer’s Greece.100 Achilles,
he explained, “knew the tears of tender pain on the loyal bosom of
a loving mother” and honored with intense melancholy the locks on
the grave of the beloved friend. Only a Greek could unite and blend
this burning excitability, this fearsome rapidity of force comparable
to a young lion, with so much spirit, manners (Sitten), and sensi-
tivity.101 Homer’s figures, Herder wrote, renounced everything mon-
strous; they were purely godly and human.102 The same sentiment was
expressed in a prescriptive fashion by the short essay entitled On Epic
and Dramatic Poetry, composed by Goethe and Schiller in late 1797.
The objects of epic and tragedy should be purely human, meaningful,
and pathetic. It was best when its persons found themselves at a state
of culture where one can act neither morally, politically, nor mechani-
cally but purely personally. The legends of the heroic age were, they
said, particularly favorable to this.103 The significance of the Iliad and
of Achilles in particular was therefore that the intensity of emotion
and the force imparted to action harbored either a discernible pure
humanity or a uniquely Greek equilibrium.
The desire to lead that pure humanity to a higher articulation,
shared by Goethe and Schiller in the 1790s, entailed a repudiation or
at least qualification of Winckelmann’s Olympus. The latter’s Jupiter,
his Apollo Belvedere, enjoyed an imperturbability, a sovereignty that
made their aloofness from disfiguring passions the ethic to be emu-
lated. Goethe expressed the core of the truly Greek idea of Athena,
Regenbogen observed, when he made her appear to Achilles in the
form of his friend Antilochus, and show him solidarity in the face of
his impending doom. In this way, Regenbogen added, Goethe over-
came Winckelmann’s doctrine of self-sufficiency as the highest quality
of the Greek gods. He moved beyond his own depictions in Iphigenie,
where the distant gods feast incessantly around gilded tables.104
The more humane persona given to some Olympian figures in the
Achilleis expressed Goethe’s ambition, kindled in Italy and ripening
in the 1790s, to invoke the visual power of Greek excellence in a
process of ethical renewal. Since the work of Winckelmann and the
young Herder, philhellenic ideas had articulated, as we have seen,
shifting preferences (sometimes within the work of the same author)

for visual, or poetic, musical or tactile mediation between beauty and
manners or between art and morality. But the developments of the
late 1780s and 1790s, that is, Goethe’s Italian journey, Kantian and
Rousseauian philosophies of history, and the impact of the French
Revolution, engendered a dual sense of the loss of paradise that
altered the terms in which that beauty could be recovered as well as
prompted the search for more ambitious and universal responses to
the problem. That ambition and universality began to straddle the
boundary between philhellenic ideas and a nascent Romanticism.
Goethe’s loss of paradise was in a sense more tangible, embodied as it
was in Italy and the physical unity of its art treasures and landscape.
He lamented the French removal of art treasures from that coun-
try.105 It compromised the holistic integrity of art, people, and land-
scape that he had found so artistically inspiring and ethically salutary.
The challenge was to retain its formative and educative potential. For
Friedrich Schlegel and Schiller, the opposition of freedom and sen-
suality made the passing of a putative paradise into the challenge of
a higher synthesis of the two. This difference entailed a contrasting
faith in either the visual or poetic foundations of moral truths.
When the material is limited and the tool is very simple, Schlegel
wrote in his study of Greek literature, one can well imagine that a
talented race reached a height in it, which could not be surpassed.
Perhaps the Greeks had reached this in sculpture. But sculpture and
music could only represent ideas and morals indirectly. Poetry, by con-
trast, “speaks through the imagination directly to mind and heart, in
an often languid and ambiguous, but all-encompassing language.” It
was the only pure art that did not need the “foreign help” of nature.
The finest statue was but an incomplete fragment, torn away from
a larger whole.106 Only the tragedian could represent a complete
action and present a whole in the realm of appearance.107 The idea at
the heart of Herder’s Plastik of 1778, that sculpture offered a faith-
ful representation of humanity, was trenchantly repudiated. Herder
himself, in his response to Wolf in 1795, argued for the priority of
Homer’s epic poetry as the foundation of “Greek taste in art, poetry
and wisdom.”108
“Man is the highest, the actual object of visual art!,” Goethe
exclaimed in his Introduction to the Propyläen in 1798. In order to
understand him, he continued, a universal knowledge of organic
nature was indispensable. The human form cannot be grasped merely
by observing its surface, one must uncover its interior, separate its
parts, recognize their connections, know the difference, learn about
effect and countereffect, assimilate the hidden, the still, the foun-
dation of appearance, “if one truly wants to see and imitate, that
which moves as a beautiful, single whole in lively waves before our
eyes.”109 It was a Faustian aspiration, seeking the interior founda-
tions, the organic substance of the edifying visual whole. Schlegel’s
active whole, depicted by the tragedian, was superseded in Goethe’s
mind by the human form, whose humanizing power he had expe-
rienced firsthand in Italy: “Any artist who has spent time in Italy
should ask himself whether the presence of the best works of ancient
and modern art have not stirred in him the endeavor to study and
recreate the human form in its proportions, forms, characters, to exert
himself in the execution with complete diligence and care, to approxi-
mate those works which entirely rest on themselves, to bring about
a work, which, in that it satisfies sensual vision, raises the spirit to its
highest reaches?”110
Schlegel, a reader of Schiller and Kant, yet acutely sensitive to
Winckelmann’s and Herder’s senses of Greek historicity, demanded a
more complex ethical good from Greek art and history than Goethe’s
release from oppressive powers like fate, guilt, and severity. Moreover,
contrary to the emphasis on Selbsttätigkeit or consciously willed activ-
ity, which Schlegel shared with Schiller, Goethe’s visual approxima-
tion to morality was one of aesthetic surrender.111 The best art, he
wrote in the Introduction, clasped our feelings and our imagination.
It took away our discretionary power and we could no longer do what
we wanted with that which is completeness. We are obliged to give
ourselves up to it, so that it may give us back to ourselves raised up
and improved.112 The poetological historian Schlegel reflected on the
embryonic moral freedom already portended in Greek tragedy, with
which the protagonists defied the empirical triumph of fate: “the calm
dignity of a beautiful disposition resolves the terrible struggle and
leads the bold preponderance which had violently broken through the
dam of order, once again into the mild pathway of the eternally tran-
quil law.”113 The poetological approximation to morality prescribed
a constancy that negated fate rather than an aesthetic surrender and
passivity.
German philhellenic thought had endured three losses of paradise
in the 1780s and 1790s, which affected it directly or indirectly: that
of the initial unity of sensuality and freedom in antiquity discerned so
poignantly by Schiller, that of the old order of Italy in the Napoleonic
invasion and his own departure felt by Goethe, and, finally, that her-
alded in Kant’s philosophy of history, taken up by Schiller, and cul-
minating in an affirmation of the Fall as the origin of conscious moral
choice. The challenge to the unity of the Homeric epics was an addi-
tional threat of loss as well as incentive to produce, for Herder and
Goethe respectively. Goethe’s Propyläen project was a response that
sought to recover the humane, mitigating, and uplifting excellence
of Greece by understanding the foundations and relationships that
constituted its visual aesthetic. The Faustian premise was that Greece
was not trapped in the historicity in which Winckelmann and Herder,
in different ways, had enveloped it and that it was possible to peer into
the secrets that held it together and utilize them for the benefit of
mankind. Schlegel discerned in Greek literature the “pure and simple
elements in which one must analyze the mixed products of modern
poetics.” The character of each Greek poet was at the same time a
“pure and simple aesthetic fundamental knowledge.”114 Both Goethe
and Schlegel wanted to put the pieces of Greek aesthetic excellence
back together, an ambition that owed its scope and impulse to the
losses of paradise. Both sought to find in Greece, in human form and
literature respectively, the fundamental pieces of a new and universal
aesthetic for mankind.
The search for elemental forms contained within Greek art had
superseded the search for an understanding of the institutions that had
flourished around it and had made it possible. The recovery Greece by
looking within and dissecting the salient products of its art and litera-
ture for the sake of modern educational goals negated the holism that
the loss of paradise had been unable to sustain. It portended the later
dominance of a professional classical philology and in transcending
historicity by suggesting we could recover its basic units, it opened the
possibility of an intelligible dialogue between modern creativity and
ancient achievement. Here it stood on the threshold of Romanticism.
The intimation of such a dialogue had existed from the beginning
in the very processes that shaped earlier philhellenic thought, in the
Sturm und Drang and the personalities of the Genies. The formative
and historical power that Schiller attributed to the Genie in molding a
given period had added another layer to its plausibility. But it was only
in the late 1790s that the programmatic statements of Schlegel and
Goethe implicitly negated the Greek whole that their predecessors
and mentors had so painstakingly postulated, in order to make out
of the purer units a new synthesis, robust enough to make good the
losses and ruptures that history, politics, and philology had brought
about.
No tes
Introduction
1. See Katherine Harloe, Winckelmann and the Invention of Antiquity:
History and Aesthetics in the Age of Altertumswissenschaft (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013) and Suzanne Marchand, Down from
Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
2. See Eliza Marian Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany: A
Study of the Influence Exercised by Greek Art and Poetry over the Great
German Writers of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935) and Walther Rehm,
Griechentum und Goethezeit. Gechichte eines Glaubens (Leipzig:
Dietrich, 1936).
3. Interesting essay-length surveys of the German relationship to Greece
that link the eighteenth with the twentieth century are Brian Vick,
“Greek Origins and Organic Metaphors: Ideals of Cultural Autonomy
in Neohumanist Germany from Winckelmann to Curtius,” Journal of
the History of Ideas 63, no. 3 (2002), 483–500 and Manfred Landfester,
“Winckelmann und Nietzsche,” in Johann Joachim Winckelmann.
Seine Wirkung in Weimar und Jena, ed. Jü rgen Dummer (Stendal:
Winckelmann-Gesellschaft, 2007), 135–150.
 The Age of Winckelmann and the

Young Herder I: Encounters
1. See Rehm, Griechentum und Goethezeit.
2. See Erich Aron, Die Erweckung des Griechentums durch Winckelmann
und Herder (Heidelberg: Kampann, 1929).
3. See the essays in Jü rgen Dummer, ed., Johann Joachim Winckelmann.
Seine Wirkung in Weimar und Jena (Stendal: Winckelmann-
Gesellschaft, 2007). See also Manfred Fuhrmann, “Winckelmann:
Ein deutsches Symbol,” Neue Rundschau 83, no. 2 (1972), 265–283.
4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political
Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), 170.
210 NOTES
5. Michael Sonenscher, Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem

in the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2008), 195–200.
6. See Denis Diderot, Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans.
Geoffrey Bremner (London: Penguin, 1994). And Ernst Gombrich,
The Ideas of Progress and Their Impact on Art (New York: Cooper
Union School of Art and Architecture, 1971), 13–14. See also James
L. Larson, “Winckelmann on Imitation,” Eighteenth-Century Studies
9, no. 3 (Spring 1976), 399. “In many ways the implicit ethical con-
tent of the essay on imitation parallels the explicit arguments of
Rousseau’s Premier Discours.” Gombrich argues that Winckelmann’s
1755 essay was a rejection of the effeminacy of the baroque.
7. Wolfgang Schadewaldt, Winckelmann und Homer (Leipzig: Barth,
1941), 4.
8. Ibid., 21–22.
9. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Versuch einer Allegorie besonders für
die Kunst, ed. Albert Dressel (Leipzig: Mendelsohn, 1866).
10. Ibid., 3.
11. Ibid., 7.
12. Ibid., 12.
13. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Gedanken über die Nachahmung
der griechischen Werke in der Malerey und Bildhauerkunst (Dresden:
Walther, 1756).
14. Rehm, Griechentum und Goethezeit, 24.
15. Winckelmann, Gedanken, 8.
16. Ibid., 9–10.
17. Ibid., 13–14.
18. Ibid., 16–17.
19. Carl Justi, Winckelmann und seine zeitgenossen (Leipzig: Koehler und
Amelang, 1943), vol. 2, 385.
20. Ibid., 389.
22. Winckelmann’s “Sendschreiben über die Gedanken” and his
“Erläuterung über die Gedanken” were published in the 1756 edi-
tion together with the original essay. See note 13 above.
23. Henry Hatfield, Winckelmann and His German Critics, 1755–1781:
A Prelude to the Classical Age (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1943),
21. This is a good account of the reception of Winckelmann’s work in
contemporary Germany.
25. Ibid., 62–63.
26. Ibid., 101–102.
27. See Jean Chardin, Journal du voiage du Chevalier Chardin en Perse
(Amsterdam: Jean Wolters & Ysbrand Haring, 1686).
NOTES 211
29. Ibid., 109.

30. Ibid., 120.
31. Martin Fontius, “Winckelmann und die französische Aufklä rung,”
Sitzungsberichte der deutschen Akademie der wiessenschaften zu
Berlin. Klasse für Sprachen, Literatur und Kunst 1 (1968), 7.
32. See Harloe, Winckelmann and the Invention of Antiquity, and
Elisabeth Decultot, Johann Joachim Winckelmann: enquête sur la
genèse de l‘histoire de l‘art (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
2000).
34. Aron, Erweckung, 67.
35. Cited in Aron, Erweckung, 69.
36. Arnold Berger, Der junge Herder und Winckelmann (Halle: Niemeyer,
1903), 6.
37. See Paul Guyer, “Eighteenth-Century German Aesthetics,” Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2007, and Kai Hammermeister, The
German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002).
38. Berger, Der junge Herer, 10.
39. Ibid., 13.
40. Ibid.
41. Johann Gottfried Herder, “Über die Wirkung der Dichtkunst auf
die Sitten der Völker in alten und neuen Zeiten,” in Johann Gottfried
Herder, Werke in zehn Bänden, vol. 4, Schriften zu Philosophie,
Literatur, Kunst und Altertum, ed. Jü rgen Brummack and Martin
Bollacher (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994),
149–214.
42. Ibid., 151.
43. John Brown, A Dissertation on the Rise, Union and Power, the
Progressions, Separations and Corruptions, of Poetry and Music
(London: L. Davis and C. Reymers, Royal Society, 1763).
44. Ibid., 28.
45. See François-Joseph Lafitau, Moeurs des Sauvages Amériquains,
Comparées aux Moeurs des Premiers Temps (Paris: Saugrin, 1724).
46. Herder, “Dichtkunst,” 155–157.
47. John 4:22.
48. James Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship,
Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press: 2005), 158–159,
162, 178–180.
49. Herder, “Dichtkunst,”159–161.
50. Ibid., 166.
51. Ibid., 169–171.
52. Ibid., 172–173.
53. See Rehm, Griechentum und Goethezeit, 57–58.
54. Aron, Erweckung, 19.
212 NOTES
55. See Esther Sophia Sü nderhauf, Griechensehnsucht und Kulturkritik:

die deutsche Rezeption von Winckelmanns Antikenideal 1840–1945
(Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004).
56. See Berthold Vallentin, Winckelmann (Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1931).
57. Rehm, Griechentum und Goethezeit, 35–37.
58. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Abhanhlung von der Fähigkeit der
Empfindung des Schönen in der Kunst und dem Unterrichte in der-
selben, in Kleine Schriften, Vorreden, Entwürfe, ed. Walther Rehm
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968), 211–233.
59. See also the discussion in Max Baeumer, “Winckelmanns
Formulierung der klassischen Schönheit,” Monatshefte 65, no. 1
(1973), 61–75. Baeumer draws attention to the hermaphrodite
dimension of Winckelmann’s understanding of beauty, something
centered on the figure of Dionysus and Dionysian bodies. The gentle
features disdaining a harsh masculinity, which Winckelmann and his
admirers considered the Greek sense of measure in estimating beauty,
was thus in the first instance a property of Bacchus rather than the
Apollo Belvedere.
60. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Kleine Schriften, Vorreden, Entwürfe,
ed. Walther Rehm (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968), 268.
61. Johann Gottfried Herder, “Ist die Schönheit des Körpers ein Bote
von der Schönheit der Seele?,” in Herder, Werke in zehn Bänden, vol.
1, Frühe Schriften, ed. Ulrich Gaier (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher
Klassiker Verlag, 1985), 144.
62. Ibid., 148.
63. Guyer, “Eighteenth-Century German Aesthetics,” 74.
64. See Karl-Gustav Gerold, Herder und Diderot: ihr Einblick in die
Kunst (Frankfurt am Main: M. Diesterweg, 1941).
65. Herder, “Plastik,” in Herder, Werke in zehn Bänden, vol. 4,
245–247.
66. Ibid., 249–250.
67. Ibid., 254
68. Ibid., 256–257.
69. Ibid., 260.
70. Ibid., 277.
71. Ibid., 296–297.
72. Winckelmann, Versuch, 27.
73. Herder, “Plastik,” 300–301.
74. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Johann Winckelmanns Werke
(Stuttgart: Hoffman, 1847), vol. 2, 125.
75. Quoted in Gustav Billeter, Anschauungen vom Wesen des Griechentums
(Leipzig: Teubner, 1911), 212.
76. Winckelmann, Winckelmanns Werke, 126.
77. Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brede et de Montesquieu, The
Spirit of the Laws, ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold S.
Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 120.
NOTES 213
78. Ibid., 121.

79. Antoine-Yves Goguet, Origins of the Laws, Arts and Sciences and
Their Progress among the Most Ancient Nations, vol. 3. (Edinburgh:
Donaldson and Reid, 1775), 238–239
80. Cornelius de Pauw, Philosophical Dissertations on the Greeks (London:
Faulder, 1793), vol. 1, 101.
81. Ibid., 103.
82. Ibid., 104–105.
83. Christoph Meiners, Geschichte des Luxus der Athenienser von den
ältesten Zeiten an bis auf den Tod Philipps von Macedonien (Lemgo:
Meyer, 1782), 16.
84. Ibid, 50.
85. De Pauw, Philosophical Dissertations, 107.
 Winckelmann and the Young Herder II:

Historicity and Symbols
1. See Frederick Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011) and Georg Iggers, The German
Conception of History; the National Tradition of Historical Thought
from Herder to the Present (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press,
1968).
2. Friedrich Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook,
trans. J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge, 1972), 238.
3. Wilhelm Dilthey, “Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert und die geschich-
tliche Welt,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Dilthey, vol. 3 (Leipzig:
Teubner, 1927), 247.
4. Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to
Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 17.
5. Dilthey, “Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert,” 260.
6. Meinecke, Historism, 245. Wolf Lepenies argues against Meinecke’s
view that Winckelmann’s historicism was unripe, seeing his work
instead as a key impetus within a long transition from natural his-
tory to the history of nature, a response to a crisis of “classificatory
thought.” Wolf Lepenies, “Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Kunst-
und Naturgeschichte im achzehnten Jahrhundert,” in Johann Joachim
Winckelmann, 1717–1768: Vorträge der siebenten Jahrestagung
der Deutschen Gesellschaft für die Erforschung des achtzehnten
Jahrhunderts, vom 17.–19. November 1982 im Ägyptischen Museum in
Berlin, ed. Thomas Gaehtgens (Hamburg: Meiner, 1986), 226.
7. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums
“Zweyter Theil” (Dresden: Walther, 1764).
8. See Anne Claude Philippe, comte de Caylus, Recueil d’antiquités
egyptiennes, etrusques, greques et romaines (Paris: Desaint & Saillant,
1752–1767).
9. Winckelmann, Johann Winckelmanns Werke, vol. 2, 1.
214 NOTES
10. Harloe, Winckelmann and the Invention of Antiquity, 26.

11. Winckelmann, Johann Winckelmanns Werke, 5.
12. See Thomas Mann, Der Tod in Venedig in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8
(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1974), 444–525.
14. Ibid., 16–17.
15. Horst R üdiger, “Winckelmanns Geschichtsauffassung: Ein Dresdner
Entwurf als Keimzelle seines historischen Denkens,” Euphorion 62
(1968), 110.
16. Winckelmann, Geschichte “Zweyter Theil,” 322.
18. Justi, Winckelmann, vol. 2, 373.
19. See Jacques Hardion, “Dissertation sur l’origine et les progrès
de la Rhétorique dans la Grèce,” in Memoires de Littérature Tirez
des Registres de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres (Paris :
Imprimerie Royale, 1743), vol. 15. On rhetoric and liberty see also
Jean Starobinsky, “Eloquence and Liberty,” Journal of the History of
Ideas 38, no. 2 (1977), 195–210.
20. Ernst Gombrich, The Ideas of Progress and Their Impact on Art, 24.
22. Ibid., 19.
23. Ibid., 11–12.
25. Karl Julius Beloch, Griechische geschichte vol. 2, (Strassburg: K. J.
Tr übner, 1914), 16.
27. Ibid., 325.
28. See Katherine Harloe, “Pausanias as Historian in Winckelmann’s
History,” Classical Reception Journal 2 (2010), 174–196.
30. Ibid., 359–360.
31. Ibid., 326.
32. Ibid., 342.
33. Ibid., 331.
34. Ernst Curtius, “Die Freundschaft im Alterthume,” in Altherum und
Gegenwart: Gesammelte Reden und Vorträge, ed. Curtius (Berlin:
Hertz, 1875), 187. On Curtius see also Karl Christ, “Ernst Curtius
und Jakob Burckhardt. Zur deutschen Rezeption der griechischen
Geschichte im 19. Jahrhundert,” in L’antichità nell’Ottocento in Italia
e Germania, ed. Karl Christ and Arnaldo Momigliano (Bologna and
Berlin, 1988), 123–143.
35. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics
of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence Klein (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), 46.
36. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later
Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge
NOTES 215
University Press, 1997) and Edward Gibbon, The History of the

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 1, ed. B. Radice (London:
Folio Society, 1983).
37. Winckelmann, Kleine Schriften.
38. Ibid.
39. Justi, Winckelmann, vol. 1, 383.
40. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert,
ed. Ernst Howald (Zü rich: Rentsch, 1943), 131. In his 1943 intro-
duction, the classicist Ernst Howald said that the Herder-inspired
reception of Winckelmann’s feelings about male friendship was domi-
nant later on, as opposed to the Goethe-inspired one. It ended with a
plea for a humanism on the Goethe-inspired model. Following Heder
are Berthold Vallentin, Ernst Bergmann, and Gottfried Baumecke:
all creators of the modern myth of Winckelmann, with Vallentin in
particular emphasizing the cult of male friendship. The hinge of the
reception turns on the question of whether Winckelmann was happy.
Goethe answers in the affirmative and the others overemphasize the
pathos. Ernst Howald, “Einleitung,” in Goethe, Winckelmann und
sein Jahrhundert, 54–55.
41. See Berthold Vallentin, Winckelmann (Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1931).
43. Daniel Orrells, Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011), 54–59.
44. Christoph Meiners, “Betrachtungen über die Mä nnerliebe der
Griechen, nebst einem Auszüge aus dem Gastmahle des Plato,” in
Vermischte philosophische Schriften, ed. Meiners (Leipzig: Weygand,
1775), 65.
45. Meiners, “Betrachtungen,” 80.
46. Ibid., 90.
47. Otto Braun, “Herders Ideen zur Kulturphilosohie auf dem Höhepunkt
seines Schaffens,” Historische Zeitschrift 110, no. 2 (1913), 297.
48. Hans-Heinrich Reuter, “Herder und die Antike: Entwicklungen,
Positionen und Probleme bis zum Ende der Bückeburger Zeit,”
Impulse 1 (1978), 98 and Hans-Heinrich Reuter, “Herder und die
Antike: Übergä nge, Wandlungen und Ergebnisse vom Amtsantritt
in Weimar bis zum Tode,” Impulse 2 (1979), 140, 158.
49. Ernst-Richard Schwinge, “‘Ich bin nicht Goethe.’ Johan Gottfried
Herder und die Antike,” in “Uralte Gegenwart”: Studien zur
Antikerezeption in Deutschland, ed. Schwinge (Freiburg im Breisgau:
Rombach, 2011), 129–179.
50. Johann Gottfried Herder, “Ä lteres Kritisches Wä ldchen,” in Herder,
Werke, vol. 2, Schriften zur Ä sthetik und Literatur, ed. Gunter E.
Grimm (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993), 23.
51. Ibid., 25.
52. Ibid., 31.
53. Ibid., 33.
216 NOTES
54. Judith Shklar, “Rousseau’s Two Models: Sparta and the Age of Gold,”
Political Science Quarterly 1, no. 81 (1996), 25–51.
55. Herder, “Denkmal Johann Joachim Winckelmanns,” in Herder,
Werke, vol. 2, 643.
56. Ibid., 659–660.
57. Ibid., 664.
58. Ibid., 665.
59. Herder, “Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der
Menschheit,” in Herder, Werke, vol. 4, Schriften zu Philosophie, Literatur,
Kunst und Altertum, ed. Jürgen Brummack and Martin Bollacher
(Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994), 9–108.
60. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 138.
61. Herder, “Ä lteres Kritisches Wä ldchen,” 52–53.
62. Herder, “Auch eine Philosophie,” 28–29.
64. Herder, “Shakespeare,” in Herder, Werke, vol. 2, 498–549.
65. Herder, “Denkmal,” 672–673.
66. Herder, “Haben wir noch jetzt das Publikum und Vaterland der
Alten?,” in Herder, Werke, vol. 1, 40–56.
67. Herder, “Ursachen des gesunkenen Geschmacks, bei den Völkern da
er geblü het,” in Herder, Werke, vol. 4, 120.
68. Ibid., 121.
69. Ibid., 123.
70. Herder, “Auch eine Philosophie,” 26.
71. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der
Geschichte (Frankfurt: Sukrkamp, 1986), 297, 308–309.
72. Herder, “Auch eine Philosophie,” 28.
73. See Wilhelm von Humboldt, “Über die mä nnliche und weibliche
Form,” Die Horen 3 (1795), 80–103.
74. David Hume, “The Stoic,” in Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed.
Hume (London: Cadell, 1793), vol. 1, 146–156.
75. See Christopher Brooke, Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political
Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2012).
76. See Wilhelm Heinse, Laidion oder die eleusinischen Geheimnisse
(Lemgo: Meyer, 1774).
77. Berger, Der junge Herder und Winckelmann, 14–15.
79. Schadewaldt, Winckelmann und Homer, 28.
80. On the Fragmente in relation to Greece see Aron, Die Erweckung,
77–98.
81. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonsen
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 37.
82. Simon Richter, Laocoon’s Body and the Aesthetics of Pain: Winckelmann,
Lessing, Herder, Moritz, Goethe (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1992), 13.
NOTES 217
83. Winckelmann, Gedanken, 21–22.

84. See the texts in Winckelmann, Kleine Schriften.
87. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Laocoon: oder über die Grenzen
der Malerei und Poesie” in Lessing, Werke 1766–1769 ed. Wilfried
Barner (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1990), 11–321
88. Richter, Laocoon’s Body. For a very interesting discussion of the
Laocoon debate in Germany and its legacies see Michael Gratzke,
“So Stirbt der Eskimaux an seinem Marterpfahl: Stoizismus und
Expressivität bei Winckelmann, Lessing und Herder,” Seminar 43,
no. 3 (2007), 265–279.
89. Lessing, Laocoon, 18.
90. Charlotte Ephraim, Wandel des griechenbildes im achtzehnten
Jahrhundert: Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder (Berlin and Leipzig:
Haupt, 1936), 46.
91. Helmut Sichtermann, “Lessing und die Antike,” in ed. Joachim
Jungius, Lessing und die Zeit der Aufklärung (Göttingen:
Vandenheock und Rupprecht, 1968), 168–191, 173.
92. Lessing, Laocoon, 36.
93. Ibid., 18–20.
94. Ibid., 21–22.
95. Ibid., 43–44.
96. Ibid.
97. Ibid., 45.
98. Goethe, “Dichtung und Wahrheit” in Goethe, Sämtliche Werke,
Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche vol. 14 ed. Klaus-Detlef Mü ller
(Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1986), 345–346.
99. Goethe, “Über Laocoon” in Goethe, Sämtliche Werke vol 18, ed.
Friedmar Apel, 489–500.
100. See Michele Cometa, “Die Tragödie des Laokoon. Drama und
Skulptur bei Goethe,” in Goethes Rückblick auf die Antike, ed. B.
Witte and M. Ponzi (Berlin: Schmidt, 1999), 132–160.
101. Ibid., 138.
102. Goethe, Über Laocoon, 492.
103. Ibid., 494–495.
104. Ibid.
105. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Anmerkungen über die Geshichte
der Kunst des Alterthums (Dresden: Walther, 1767), 30.
106. Winckelmann, Versuch, 6–7.
107. Ibid., 50.
108. Herder, “Nemesis,” in Herder, Werke, vol. 4, 551.
109. Ibid., 553.
110. Ibid., 554.
111. Winckelmann, Anmerkungen, 90–91.
112. Herder, “Nemesis,” 563–565.
218 NOTES

114. Herder, “Nemesis,” 569.
115. Ibid., 565.
116. Ibid., 571.
117. Ibid., 573.
118. Ibid., 575.
119. Lessing, “Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet,” in Lessing, Gotthold
Ephraim Lessings Werke vol. 6 ed Klaus Bohnen (Frankfurt:
Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985), 720.
120. Richter, Laocoon’s Body, 76 .
121. Winckelmann, Anmerkungen, 21.
122. Ibid., 26.
124. Georg Zoëga, Li Bassirelievi antichi di Roma 2 vols. (Rome:
Piranesi, 1808).
125. Winckelmann, Versuch, 70–71.
126. Ibid., 74.
127. Lessing, “Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet,” 723.
128. Ibid., 728–729.
129. Ibid., 748.
130. Ibid., 759–761.
131. Richter, Laocoon’s Body, 77, 86.
132. Herder, “Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet,” Werke, vol. 4, 601–602.
133. Ibid., 591.
134. Ibid., 597–598.
135. Ibid., 612–613.
136. Ibid., 615.
137. Ibid., 626.
 The Women of Athens I: The Varieties of

Enlightenment History
1. Jean le Rond d’ Alembert, “Geneva,” The Collected Writings of
Rousseau, vol. 10, Letter to D’Alembert and Writings for the Theater,
ed. Christopher Kelly and Roger Master (Hanover and London:
Dartmouth College, 2004), 239–250.
2. See Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings.
3. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert and Writings for the
Theater, ed. and trans. Allan Bloom, Charles Butterworth, and
Christopher Kelly, Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 10 (Hanover
and London: University Press of New England, 2004), 251–352.
4. See the excellent discussion by Claudia Honneger, Die Ordnung
der Geschlechter. Die Wissenschaften vom Menschn und das Weib
(Mü nchen: Dtv, 1996), especially 47–71.
5. Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert, 286.
NOTES 219
6. This was in the famous Funeral Oration by Pericles. Tradition some-

times has it that this oration was written for him by a woman, his
concubine Aspasia. On Aspasia see Madeleine Henry¸ Prisoner of
History: Aspasia of Miletus and Her Biographical Tradition (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
7. Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert, 286–287.
8. Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert. Rousseau undoubtedly got this idea
from Plutarch, which was the same source used for a similar categori-
cal statement on this subject by Antoine-Yves Goguet in his book
Origins of the Laws, Arts and Sciences and Their Progress among the
Most Ancient Nations published the same year as Rousseau’s letter
and translated into English at Edinburgh in 1761. See vol. III, 211.
9. Ibid., 342.
10. Ibid., 308.
11. Ibid., 316.
12. Friedrich Schlegel, “Über die Diotima,” in Sämmtliche Werke, vol.
4, 93. This edition was personally overseen by Schlegel, in which he
added some comments on his earlier work.
13. Ibid., 106.
14. De Pauw, Philosophical Dissertations on the Greeks, vol. 1, 130.
15. Heyne, Review in the Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen,
1321–1328.
16. On Wieland and the Greek courtesan Lais see Bernhard Budde,
Aufklärung als Dialog: Wielands antithetische Prosa (Tübingen: M.
Niemeyer, 2000), especially the section entitled, “Glanz und Tragik
der intellektuellen Hetä re,” 495–538.
17. See Marilyn Katz, “Could Athenian Women Go to the Theatre?,”
Classical Philology 93, 2 (April 1998), 105–124.
18. This was a transition of which Böttiger himself was a pioneer.
19. Schlegel, “Diotima,” 1822 edition, 140.
20. See Dr. K. W. Böttiger, Karl August Böttiger: Eine biographische
Skizze von dessen Sohne, Dr K. W. Böttiger (Leipzig: Brockhaus,
1837).
21. See Hugh West, “Göttingen and Weimar: The Organization of
Knowledge and Social Theory in Eighteenth-Century Germany,”
Central European History 11, no. 2 (June 1978), 150–161.
22. E. F. Sondermann, Karl August Böttiger: Literarischer Journalist der
Goethezeit in Weimar (Bonn: Bouvier, 1983), 52.
23. Ibid., 40.
24. Böttiger, Karl August Böttiger, 34.
25. K. A. Böttiger, “Die Revolutionsdammen im neuen Paris und im
alten Rom,” Neuer Teutscher Merkur I (1794), 68–88.
26. K. A. Böttiger, “Waren die Frauen in Athen Zuschauerinnen bei den
dramatischen Vorstellungen?,” Teutscher Merkur (January 1796),
23–46.
220 NOTES
27. Ibid., 26.

28. Ibid., 30.
29. Ibid., 33–35. See also A .E. Haigh, The Attic Theatre: A Description of
the Stage and Theatre of the Athenians, and of the Dramatic Performances
at Athens (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1898), 361–368.
30. Böttiger, “Waren die Frauen,” for example, 4.
31. Ibid., 43–45.
32. Citing him with as the authority: C. L. Stieglitz, Archaeologie der
baukunst der Griechen und Römer. Zweyter Theil, Erste Abtheilung
(Weimar: Verlag des Industrie-Comptoirs, 1801), 158.
33. Schlegel, Die Griechen und Römer, published in 1797, it included
the essay on Diotima. See vol. I of the Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-
Ausgabe.
34. See Ernst Behler, “Einleitung,” in Behler ed., Kritische Friedrich-
Schlegel-Ausgabe, vol. 1 (Munich: F. Schöningh, 1958), XXIII.
35. Ibid.
36. Karl August Böttiger, “Waren die Athenierinnen wirklich vom
Theater ausgeschlossen?,” Teutscher Merkur (1797), 224–233. Here
225–226.
37. Ibid., 230–231.
38. Ibid., 228. Years later Schlegel added a remark in an edition of his
collected works on the relevant page of the Diotima essay to say that
indeed one could not draw firm conclusions from that passage in
Plato. See Sämmtliche Werke, 1822, vol. 4, 140.
39. Böttiger, “Waren die Athenierinnen wirklich vom Theater ausge-
schlossen?,” 233.
40. Schlegel to Böttiger, March 13, 1797, K A XXIII, 351.
41. For a very different explanation of the status of Spartan women
grounded in the history of economic development and family rela-
tions in terms of land tenure see James Redfield, “The Women of
Sparta,” The Classical Journal 73, no. 2 (December 1977–January
1978), 146–161.
42. The secretary of the society, appointed in 1776, was the Marquis de
Luchet, a friend of Voltaire.
43. For an excellent overview of the eighteenth-century debate see C.
Berry, The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 126–176.
44. David Hume, “Of Refinement in the Arts,” in Political Essays, ed.
K. Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
105.
45. Berry, The Idea of Luxury. See page 137 for the “classic” link with
effeminacy.
46. Rousseau, “Discourse on the Sciences and Arts,” in Rousseau, The
Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, 18.
47. Hume, “Of Refinement in the Arts,” 110–111.
NOTES 221
48. Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the

Romans and Their Decline, trans. David Lowenthal (Indianpolis and
Cambridge: Hackett, 1965), 98. It was originally published in 1734.
49. Berry, The Idea of Luxury, 140.
50. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 525–526.
51. Ibid., 528–530.
52. J. J. Bachofen, Die lex Voconia und die mit ihr zusammenhän-
genden Rechtsinstitute, eine rechtshistorische Abhandlung (Basel:
Schweighausers Buchhandlung, 1843).
53. Meiners, Geschichte des Luxus.
54. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 96–109.
55. Christoph Meiners, Geschichte des Weiblichen Geschlechts, vol. 1
(Hannover: Verlag der Helwingschen Hofbuchhandlung, 1788),
336.
56. Meiners, Geschichte des Luxus, 3–5.
57. Hume, “Of Refinement in the Arts,” 108.
58. Meiners, Geschichte des Luxus, 8.
59. Ibid., 12–13.
60. Ibid., 17–19.
61. Ibid., 23–25.
63. Meiners, Geschichte des Luxus, 44–46.
64. Ibid., 49–51.
65. Ibid., 85.
66. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth
of Nations, 97 ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1993).
67. On the role of women in Enlightenment thought and historiogra-
phy, see Ludmila Jordanova, “Sex and Gender,” in Inventing Human
Science, ed. C. Fox, R. Porter, and R. Wokler (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1995), 152–183 and Sylvana Tomaselli, “The
Enlightenment Debate on Women,” History Workshop Journal, 20
(1985): 101–124.
68. On conjectural history see Robert Wokler’s very informative essay
“Anthropology and Conjectural History in the Enlightenment,” in
Fox, Porter, and Wokler, eds., Inventing Human Science, 31–52. See
also on Goguet and conjectural history Nathaniel Wolloch, “Facts or
Conjectures: Antoine-Yves Goguet’s Histioriography,” Journal of the
History of Ideas 68, no. 3 (July 2007), 429–449.
69. Samuel Pettit, Leges Atticae, (Leiden: Verbeek, 1742).
70. Ernst Brandes, Über die Weiber (Leipzig: Weidmann Erben und
Reich, 1787).
71. Wilhlem Dilthey, “Das 18. Jahrhundert und die geschichtliche
Welt,” in Gessammelte Schriften, vol. III, Studien des deutschen Geistes
(Leipzig: Teubner: 1927), 261.
222 NOTES
72. Luigi Marino, Praeceptores Germaniae: Göttingen 1770–1820

Göttinger Universitätsschriften—Serie A: Schriften (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1995), 5.
73. Tacitus, Agricola and Germania, trans. H. Mattingly (London:
Penguin, 2009), 43.
74. Ibid., 39.
75. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol.
1, 213.
76. Theodor von Hippel, Über die bügerliche Verbesserung der Frauen
(Frankfurt und Leipzig, 1794, n.p.), 119.
77. John Millar, Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in
Society (Dublin: Ewing, 1771), 7. See also Paul Bowles, “John Millar,
the Four-Stages Theory and Women’s Position in Society,” History of
Political Economy 16, no. 4 (1984), 619–638.
78. See J. Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship,
Culture (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005),
124–125.
79. Meiners, Geschichte des weiblichen Geschlechts, vol. 1. A popular
abridged version was compiled for German readers. See J. J. Abel,
Historisches Gemälde der Lage und des Zustandes des weiblichen
Geschlechts unter allen Völkern der Erde von den ältesten bis auf die
neuesten Zeiten (Leipzig: Schumann, 1803).
80. Cornelius de Pauw, Philosophical Dissertations on the Greeks (London:
Faulder, 1793).
81. Goguet, Origins of the Laws. Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, Voyage du
jeune Anacharsis en Grèce dans le milieu du IVe siècle avant l’ère vul-
gaire (Paris: Didier, 1843). It was originally published in 1788, the
same year as de Pauw’s work but unlike the latter, had very little to
say about Greek women.
82. Ibid., 18. Goguet relies on Tacitus and Plutarch.
83. Millar, Distinction of Ranks, 45.
84. Christoph Meiners, “Beitrag zur Geschichte der Behandlung des
weiblichen Geschlechts bei verschiedenen Völkern,” Berlinische
Monatsschrift (1787), 105–117.
85. See Vermeulen, “Göttingen und die Völkerkunde. Ethnologie und
Ethnographie in der deutschen Aufklä rung, 1710–1815,” in Die
Wissenschaft vom Menschen in Göttingen um 1800. Wissenschaftliche
Praktiken, institutionelle Geographie, europäische Netzwerke, ed.
Hans Erich Bödeker, Philippe Büttgen, and Michel Espagne,
Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts f ü r Geschichte, Band
237 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 199–230.
86. Meiners, “Beitrag zur Geschichte der Behandlung des weiblichen
Geschlechts,” 109–114.
87. Ibid., 116.
88. Meiners, Geschichte des Weiblichen Geschlechts, vol. 1, 203–210.
89. Ibid., 200.
NOTES 223
90. Ibid., 212. See C. H. Dreyer, Erklärung der deutschen Rechts-

Alterthümer (Bützow und Wismar: Berger und Boedner, 1768).
92. The main source for his life was of course Plutarch.
93. See Xenophon, Memorabilia. Oeconomicus. Symposium. Apology,
Loeb Classical Library trans. E. C. Marchant and O. J. Todd,
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013) and Hiero.
Agesilaus. Constitution of the Lacedaemonians. Ways and Means.
Cavalry Commander. Art of Horsemanship. On Hunting.
Constitution of the Athenians Loeb Classical Library, trans. E.
C. Marchant and G.W. Bowerstock, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2013).
95. Ibid., 331–334.
96. See B. Wagner-Hasel, “Frauenleben in orientalischer
Abgeschlossenheit? Zur Geschichte und Nutzanwendung eines
Topos,” Der altsprachliche Unterricht 32, no. 2 (1989), 18–29.
97. Millar, Distinction of Ranks, 91–92.
98. J. Reitemeier, Geshichte und Zustand der Sklaverey und Leibeigenschaft
in Griechenland (Berlin: August Mulius, 1789), 39.
99. Meiners, Geschichte des Weiblichen Geschlechts, vol. 1, 314.
101. Herny Home, Lord Kames, Sketches on the History of Man,
Considerably Improved in a Third Edition in Two Volumes (Dublin:
James Williams, 1779), vol. 1, 328.
102. Goguet, Origins of the Laws, 227.
103. Reitemeier, Sklaverey, 9.
106. Ibid., 81–82.
107. Ibid., 74.
108. See Christoph Meiners, “Betrachtung über die Mä nnerliebe der
Griechen,” in his Vermischte Philosophische Schriften.
109. De Pauw, Philosophical Dissertations on the Greeks, vol. 1, 89–90.
110. Friedrich Lotter, “Christoph Meiners und die Lehre von der unter-
schiedlichen Wertigkeit der Menschenrassen,” in Bödeker, Büttgen,
and Espagne, eds., Die Wissenschaft vom Menschen in Göttingen um
1800, 32.
111. Ibid., 36.
112. See Christoph Meiners, Revision der Philosophie (Göttingen und
Gotha: Dieterich, 1772).
113. Christoph Meiners, Grundriss der Geschichte der Menschheit (Lemgo:
Meyer, 1785), iv.
114. Ibid., iii–iv.
115. Ibid., xxii.
116. Marino, Praeceptores Germaniae, 112.
224 NOTES
117. Vermeulen, “Göttingen und die Völkerkunde,” 205.

119. Kames, Sketches on the History of Man, 310.
120. See his Account of the Life and Writings of Dr Smith Transactions of
the Royal Society of Edinburgh Read by Mr Stewart, January 21, and
March 18, 1793.
121. Kames, Sketches on the History of Man, 287.
122. H. M. Höpfl, “From Savage to Scotsman: Conjectural History in
the Scottish Enlightenment,” Journal of British Studies 17, no. 2
(Spring 1978), 19–40.
124. Tournefort’s Relation d’un voyage du Levant of 1717 and Jean
Chardin’s Voyages en Perse et aux Indes orientales of 1686 were
cited as authorities on the condition of women in the Orient. See
for example, Reitemeier, Geschichte und Zustand der Sklaverey und
Leibeigenschaft in Griechenland (1789)
125. Wokler, “Anthropology and Conjectural History,” 40.
126. See Michael Carhart, The Science of Culture in Enlightenment
Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
127. Götz von Selle, Die Georg-August-Universität zu Göttingen. 1737 –
1937 (Göttingen Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1937), 178.
128. Wokler, “Anthropology and Conjectural History,” 31.
129. Von Selle, Die Georg-August-Universität zu Göttingen, 134.
130. Hugh West, “Göttingen and Weimar,” 150.
131. Georg Forster, A Voyage Round the World, in His Britannic
Majesty’s Sloop, Resolution, Commanded by Capt. James Cook, dur-
ing the Years 1772, 3, 4, and 5 / by George Forster, F.R.S. Member
of the Royal Academy of Madrid, and of the Society for Promoting
Natural Knowledge at Berlin. In Two Volumes (London: Printed for
B. White, J. Robson, P. Elmsly, 1777).
132. West, “Göttingen and Weimar,” 158.
133. Lotter, “Christoph Meiners und die Lehre von der unterschiedli-
chen Wertigkeit der Menschenrassen,” 62.
134. Ibid., 61–62.
135. Marino, Praeceptores Germaniae, 129.
136. Ibid., 103–104.
137. Ibid., 113.
138. Vermeulen, “Göttingen und die Völkerkunde,” 226.
139. Ibid.
140. See Martin Gierl, “Christoph Meiners, Geschichte der Menschheit
und Göttinger Universalgeschichte: Rasse und Nation and
Politisierung der deutschen Aufklä rung,” in Bödeker, Büttgen,
and Espagne, eds., Die Wissenschaft vom Menschen in Göttingen um
1800, 419–433.
141. See Meiners “Vorrede” at the start of his Grundriss der Geschichte
der Menschheit of 1785.
NOTES 225
142. See Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, “Väter der Frauengeschichte?

Das Geschlecht als historiographische Kategorie im 18. und 19.
Jahrhundert,” Historische Zeitschrift 62 (1996), 39–71.
 The Women of Athens II: Courtesans,

Heroines, and the Greek Polis
1. A. W. Gomme, “The Position of Women in Athens in the Fifth
and Fourth Centuries,” Classical Philology (January 1925), 1–25.
For an excellent discussion of the problem of sources concerning
theories about the lives of ancient Greek women see Sarah Pomeroy,
Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity
(London: Pimlico, 1994).
2. On women in the archaic age see Pomeroy, Goddesses, 32–56.
3. For recent discussions see in particular J. Gould, “Law, Custom
and Myth: Aspects of the Social Position of Women in Classical
Athens,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 100 (1980), 38–59 and Donald
Richter, “The Position of Women in Classical Athens,” Classical
Journal 67 (1971), 1–8.
4. Friedrich Schlegel, “Über die Darstellung der weiblichen Charaktere
in den griechischen Dichtern,” in Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Schlegel,
vol. 4 (Vienna: Jacob Meyer, 1822), 66–89 and his “Über die
Diotima” in Schlegel, ed., Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 4, 92–150. This
edition contains important editorial notes added by him. For mod-
ern critical editions see Friedrich Schlegel, “Betrachtungen über die
weiblichen Charaktere in den griechischen Dichtern,” in Kritische
Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler, vol. 1, 44–69 and
“Über die Diotima,” in Behler, ed., Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-
Ausgabe, vol. 1, 70–115.
5. On the hetaerae in Athens see Wolfang Schuller, Die Welt der
Hetären: Berühmte Frauen zwischen Legende und Wirklichkeit
(Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 2008).
6. On Aspasia see Madeleine Henry, Prisoner of History: Aspasia of
Miletus and Her Biographical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995).
7. See Edwin Ardener, “Belief and the Problem of Women,” in The
Interpretation of Ritual: Essays in Honour of A.I. Richards, ed. J. S.
La Fontaine (London: Tavistock, 1972), 135–155 and a critique of
that point of view by Nicole Mathieu entitled “Homme-Culture,
Femme-Nature?,” L’ Homme July–September (1973), 101–113.
8. Friedrich Jacobs, “Beyträge zur Geschichte des weiblichen
Geschlechts, vorzüglich der Hetä ren zu Athen,” in Attisches
Museum, ed. Christoph Martin Wieland, Zweyter Band, 2. Heft
(Zü rich and Leipzig: Geßner, 1798), 131.
9. Ibid., 132–133.
10. Ibid., 128.
226 NOTES
11. De Pauw, Philosophical Dissertations on the Greeks, vol. 1, 130–131.

12. Klaus Manger, “Friedrich Jacobs ’ in Wielands Attischem Museum
veröffentlichte Hetä renkunde- Ein Emanzipationsprojekt?,” in Ernst
II. von Sachsen-Gotha-Altenburg: ein Herrscher im Zeitalter der
Aufklärung, ed. Werner Greiling, Andreas Klinger, and Christoph
Köhler (Köln: Böhlau, 2005), 381.
13. Jacobs, “Beyträge,” I, 1798, 127.
14. Ibid., 129–130.
15. Ibid., 129 and 162.
16. See Marylin Katz, “Ideology and the ‘Status of Women’ in Ancient
Greece,” in History and Feminist Theory, ed. Anne-Louise Shapiro
(Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1992), 70–97.
17. In this respect, and given that he did not object generally to the
“seclusion” thesis in its broad outlines, Jacobs was arguing along
the same lines as several twentieth-century commentators on the
life of Athenian women, like Marylin Katz, Sue Blundell, and Sarah
Pomeroy, who in different ways point out that the restrictions on
movement and limited civil rights did not have to be equated with
contempt, which they say was the emotionally motivated error of
scholars like Gomme, and 50 years later, Donald Richter. Indeed,
Sarah Pomeroy outlines what in many respects was a tradition of pro-
tection. Women were in several legal capacities the transmitters of
property and of citizenship, and the dowry system also functioned,
as several scholars have pointed out, as a form of protection against ill
treatment, since the father of the bride could always recall it.
18. Manger, “Friedrich Jacobs,” 372.
19. Ibid., 379.
21. Ibid., 165.
22. Ibid., 127.
23. Ibid., 128.
24. Ibid., 136.
25. Ibid., 140.
26. Carl Gotthold Lenz, Geschichte der Weiber im heroischen Zeitalter
(Hannover: Helwig, 1790), 102.
27. See Carl Gotthold Lenz, Über Rousseaus Verbindung mit Weibern: mit
einer Abhandlung über den Geist und die Geschichte der Rousseauischen
Bekenntnisse und einigen Beylagen (Leipzig: Reinicke, 1792).
28. Lenz, Geschichte der Weiber, 59.
30. Ibid., 152.
31. Ibid., 176.
32. Jacobs, “Beyträge,” II, Attisches Museum III, Bd. 1, 1799, 11–13.
33. Ibid.,19–20.
34. Ibid., 23.
NOTES 227
35. Ibid., 25–26.

36. Jacobs, “Beyträge,” III, Attisches Museuem III, Bd. 2, 1800, 208.
37. Antoine L éonard Thomas, Essai sur le caractère, mœurs, esprit des
femmes dans les différentes siècles (Amsterdam: Aux dépens de la
Compagnie, 1772).
38. Christoph Meiners, Geschichte des Weiblichen Geschlechts, vol. 1
(Hannover: Verlag der Helwingschen Hofbuchhandlung, 1788), VIII.
39. Jacobs, “Beyträge,”III, 208.
40. Ibid., 210.
41. Ibid., 216.
42. See note 26.
43. Lenz, Geschichte der Weiber, 5.
44. Ibid., 6–7.
45. Ibid., 14–15. See also Robert Wood, An Essay on the Original Genius
and Writings of Homer: With a Comparative View of the Ancient and
Present State of the Troade (London: H. Hughs, 1775), 163: “We
must acknowledge, that this most pleasing feature, in a portrait of
Heroic, Patriarchal and Modern Oriental life, is sadly contrasted by a
gloomy part of the picture, which produces the most striking differ-
ence between our manners and theirs; I mean, that unnatural separa-
tion of the sexes, which precludes the female half from that share in
the duties and amusements of life, which the common interests of
society demand.”
46. Lenz, Geschichte der Weiber, 10–13.
47. Ibid., 16.
48. For an account of Forster’s disputes with Meiners see Vermeulen,
“Göttingen und die Völkerkunde,” 199–230.
49. Lenz, Geschichte der Weiber, 183–184.
50. Ibid., 180. The term is “Verweserinnen.”
51. Ibid., 71.
52. Ibid., 206.
53. Ibid., 62.
54. Ibid., 63.
55. Ibid., 57.
56. Ibid., 58.
57. There was a strident polemic here against Robert Wood, who had
claimed there was no love worthy of the name in the heroic age. Lenz
dwells in some detail on the evidence of a less purely physical conjugal
love in Homer. See 114–122. There is a particularly beautiful passage
about Andromache’s love of Hector.
58. Ibid., 98–99.
59. Ibid., 97–100.
60. Ibid., 231.
61. Jacob August Mä hly, Die Frauen des griechischen Alterthums. Eine
Vorlesung (Basel: J. J. Mast, 1853), 16.
228 NOTES
62. Herder, “Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit” in

Herder, Werke in zehn Bänden vol. 6 ed. Martin Bollacher (Frankfurt:
Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989), 539.
63. See Friedrich Schlegel, “Versuch über den Begriff des
Republikanismus,” in Behler, ed., Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-
Ausgabe, vol. 7 (Munich: F. Schöningh, 1966), 11–25.
64. Ernst Behler, “Einleitung,” in Behler, ed., Kritische Friedrich-
Schlegel-Ausgabe, vol. 1, XCV.
65. Ibid., XCVIII.
66. See Frederick Beiser, “The Early Politics and Aesthetics of Friedrich
Schlegel,” in Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism: Genesis
of Modern German Political Thought, 1790–1800 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1992), 245–263.
67. Schlegel, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 4, 66.
68. Ibid., 67.
69. Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert and Writings for the Theater, vol.
10, 251–352. The most popular books in France in the context of
pedagogical ideals were Fenelon’s Telemachus of 1699 and Rousseau’s
Emile of 1761, the former, of course, set in heroic age Greece and
part of the genre of imaginary journeys so popular in the century.
70. Ibid., 337.
71. Ibid., 346.
72. Schlegel, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 4, 67–68.
73. Ibid., 68–69.
74. Ibid., 69–70. “In der That, Homers Heldinnen sind selten edel, doch
wenn sie es sind, so sind sie dann um so mehr hinreissend. Eben weil
ihr Wesen so ganz beschrä nkt und ihr Chrakter sich selbst überlassen
war, so ist der kleinste zarte oder schöne Zug, den wir hier finden,
gewiss aus reiner Weiblichkeit entsprungen, und nicht von fremder
Bildung entlehnt.”
75. Ibid., 74.
76. Ibid., 74.
77. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duineser Elegien (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1955). “Das
Schöne ist des Schrecklichen Anfang.”
79. Ibid., 79.
80. Ibid., 81–82.
81. For Schlegel’s treatment of Diotima and the trajectory of his stud-
ies see also Rudolf Haym, Die Romantische Schule: ein Beitrag zur
Geschichte des deutschen Geistes (Berlin: Weidmann, 1914), 208–209.
83. See Alfred Baeumler, Das mythische Weltalter (Munich: Beck,
1965).
85. Ibid., 94.
NOTES 229
86. For an account that emphasizes the “ideal whole” where the people
dominated Greek drama and which Schlegel read into Greek life
generally see Klaus Behrens, Friedrich Schlegels Geschichtsphilosophie
(1794–1808): ein Beitrag zur politischen Romantik (Tübingen:
Niemeyer, 1984).
88. Ibid., 95.
91. Ibid., 104.
92. For a later philhellenic account of the significance of the oracle see
Ernst Curtius, “Die Unfreiheit der alten Welt,” in Altherum und
Gegenwart: Gesammelte Reden und Vorträge, ed. Ernst Curtius
(Berlin: Hertz, 1875), 163–182.
94. For the role of women in religious feasts see Pomeroy, Goddesses,
75–78.
96. Ibid., 109.
97. Ibid., 110–111.
98. Ibid., 115.
99. Ibid., 133.
100. Ibid., 119.
101. Ibid., 130–131.
 I PH IGEN I E AUF TAUR IS : German Theatre and Philhellenism

1. “Kommentar,” in Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämmtliche Werke,
Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, ed. Dietrich Borchmeyer,
vol. 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag,
1988), 1006–1007.
2. See the essays in Volker C. Dörr, ed., “Verteufelt human?”: zum
Humanitätsideal der Weimarer Klassik (Berlin: Erich Schmidt,
2008).
3. “Kommentar,” in Goethe, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, 1008.
4. Euripides “Iphigenia at Aulis” in Euripides: Bacchae, Iphigenia at
Aulis, Rheus ed. David Kovacs, (Cambridge and London: Harvard
University Press, 2002), 317.
5. See the texts collected in Joachim Schondorff, ed., Iphigenie
(Munich: Albert Langen-Georg Mü ller, 1966).
7. See Goethe, „Die Leiden des jungen Werther“ in Goethe,
Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 8, ed. Waltraud Wiethölter (Frankfurt: :
Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994), 11–267.
230 NOTES
8. Theodor W. Adorno, “Zum Klassizismus von Goethes Iphigenie,”

in Noten zur Literatur, ed. Adorno (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1981), 509.
9. See Peter-André Alt, Friedrich Schiller (Munich: Beck, 2004).
10. Ernst-Richard Schwinge, “Schiller und die griechische Tragödie,” in
“Uralte Gegenwart”: Studien zur Antikerezeption in Deutschland, ed.
Schwinge (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2011), 210 .
11. Friedrich Schiller, “Die R äuber,” in Friedrich Schiller, Sämmtliche
Werke, ed. Albert Meier et. al, vol. 1 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch
Verlag, 2004), 504.
12. R üdiger Safranski, Goethe und Schiller. Geschichte einer Freundschaft
(Munich: Hanser, 2009), 40 .
13. Schiller, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 1, 515.
14. Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, vol. 1, The Poetry of
Desire (1749–1790) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 143.
15. Ibid., 155 .
16. Friedrich Schiller, “Wilhelm Tell,” in Friedrich Schiller, Sämmtliche
Werke, ed. Peter-André Alt, vol. 2 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch
Verlag, 2004), 913–1029.
17. Schiller, “Die R äuber,” 546. See also Ernst Osterkamp, “Die Götter-
die Menschen. Friedrisch Schillers lyrische Antike,” in Friedrisch
Schiller und die Antike, ed. Paolo Chiarini and Walter Hinderer
(Wü rzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2008), 239–255.
18. See Hans-Jü rgen Schrader, “Götter, Helden und Waldteufel: Zu
Goethes Sturm und Drang-Antike,” in Goethes Rückblick auf die
Antike, ed. Bernd Witte and Mauro Ponzi (Berlin: Erich Schmidt,
1999), 59–82.
19. My translation. Schiller, “Die R äuber,” 528.
20. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Egmont,” in Goethe, Goethe,
Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5.
21. Ibid., 84–85.
22. “ Kommentar” in Schiller, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 1, 975.
24. Ibid., 812.
25. Ibid., 836–37.
26. Ibid., 856.
27. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit,”
in Goethe, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, 73–123.
28. Joseph de la Grange Chancel, “Oreste et pylade ou Iphigénie en
Tauride,” in la Grange Chancel, Œuvres de Monsieur de La Grange
Chancel, vol. 2 (Paris: Les libraires associés, 1758), 88.
29. Johann Christoph Gottsched, Iphigenia. Ein Trauer-Spiel Des Herrn
Racine, Aus dem Französichen übersetzt vom Herrn Prof. Gottsched
zu Leipzig. Aufgeführt zu Wien im September 1749 (Vienna: Ghelen,
1749).
30. Pierre Brumoy, Théâtre des Grecs (Paris: Cussac, 1785–1789).
NOTES 231
31. Norbert Miller, “Schillers Nachdichtung der Iphigenie in Aulis von

Eurpides,” in Chiarini and Hinderer, eds., Friedrisch Schiller und die
Antike, 119.
32. Schondorff, ed., Iphigenie, 96.
33. Ibid., 101.
35. Schiller, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Albert Meier and Jörg Robert, vol. 3
(Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2004), 348.
37. Ibid., 135.
38. Ibid., 139.
39. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 27 .
40. La Grange Chancel, “Oreste et pylade,” 87.
41. Ibid., 87–88.
42. Ibid., 114.
43. Ibid., 147.
44. Ibid., 129.
45. Italienische Reise in Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Goethes Werke, vol.
11, ed. Herbert von Einem (Munich: Beck, 1981), 107.
46. Goethe, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, 189 .
47. La Grange Chancel, “Oreste et pylade,” 160.
48. Ibid., 191.
49. Claude Guimond de la Touche, “Iphigénie en Tauride, Tragédie
en cinq actes,” in Œuvres, ed. de la Touche, vol. 9 (Paris: Baudoin,
1828), 5–57.
50. Ibid., 13–14. “Des barbares rigueurs d’un culte illégitime mon bras
est l’instrument, mon cœur est la victime.”
51. Ibid., 29.
52. Ibid., 42.
53. Ibid., 51–52.
54. Adorno, “Zum Klassizismus von Goethes Iphigenie,” 508.
55. La Touche, “Iphigénie en Tauride,” 54–56.
56. Johan Elias Schlegel, “Orest und Pylades, Ein Trauerspiel,” in
Johann Elias Schlegels Werke, ed. Johann Heinrich Schlegel, vol. 1
(Copenhagen and Leipzig: Mumme, 1761), 9–66.
57. Ibid., 3.
58. Johan Elias Schlegel, “Auszug eines Briefs welche einige kritische
Anmerkungen über die Trauerspiele der Alten und Neuern enthä lt,”
in Schlegel, ed., Johann Elias Schlegels Werke, vol. 1, 205–211.
59. Ibid., 209.
60. Ibid., 211.
61. Ibid., 212.
62. Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert and Writings for the Theater, vol. 10,
337.
63. See Gombrich, The Ideas of Progress and Their Impact on Art.
64. Schlegel, “Orest und Pylades,” 9.
232 NOTES
65. Ibid., 38.

67. Schlegel, “Orest und Pylades,” 39 and 45.
68. Ibid., 51.
70. Schlegel, “Orest und Pylades,” 53.
71. Ibid., 69.
72. Christoph Friedrich von Derschau, Orest und Pylades oder Denckmaal
der Freundschaft (Liegnitz: Sigismund Abraham Waetzoldt, 1747).
73. Ibid., 88.
74. Ibid., 15.
75. Ibid., 24–25.
76. Ibid., 28–29.
77. Ibid., 39–40.
78. Ibid., 79.
79. Christoph Martin Wieland, “Alceste,” in Christoph Martin Wieland,
Wielands Werke: Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe, vols. 1–2, ed. Klaus
Manger and Jan Philipp Reemtsa (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter),
417–465.
80. See Carl Schmitt, Politische Romantik (Munich: Duncker & Humblot,
1925).
81. See chapters 1 and 2 of this book.
82. Thorsten Valk, Der junge Goethe. Epoche, Werk, Wirkung (Munich:
Beck, 2012), 21–23.
83. Wieland, “Alceste,” 417.
84. Wolfdieter Rasch, Goethes “Iphignie auf Tauris” als Drama der
Autonomie (Munich: Beck, 1979), 8.
86. Ibid., 444.
87. Ibid., 450.
88. Ibid., 458.
89. Christoph Martin Wieland, “Briefe an einen Freund über das deutsche
Singspiel Alceste,” in Wieland, Wielands Werke, vols 1–2, 492–523.
90. Ibid., 522.
91. Ibid., 494.
92. Ibid., 509–511.
93. “Kommentar,” in Goethe, Götter, Helden und Wieland in Goethe,
Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, ed. Dietrich
Borchmeyer, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag,
1985), 878.
94. Ibid., 880.
95. Goethe, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Klaus-Detlef Mü ller, vol. 14
(Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1986), 706.
97. Goethe, Götter, Helden und Wieland, 431–432.
NOTES 233
98. Ibid., 437.

99. Schrader, “Götter, Helden und Waldteufel,” 65.
100. Ibid., 75.
 The Legacies of I PH IGEN I E AUF TAUR IS

1. Sybille Schönborn, “Vom Geschlechterkampf zum symbolischen
Geschlechtertausch: Goethes Arbeit am antiken Mythos am Beispiel
der Iphigenie auf Tauris,” in Goethes Rückblick auf die Antike, ed.
Bernd Witte and Mauro Ponzi (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1999), 83.
2. Boyle, Goethe, 321.
4. Goethe, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, 173.
5. Ibid., 191.
6. Ibid., 196.
7. Ibid., 151.
8. Ibid., 153.
9. Ibid., 1022.
10. Emil Staiger, Goethe 1749–1786 (Zü rich: Atlantis, 1957), 357.
11. Humphrey Trevelyan, Goethe and the Greeks (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981), 92–93.
12. Rasch, Goethes “Iphigenie auf Tauris,” 7.
13. Gü nther Mü ller, “Das Parzenlied in Goethes Iphigenie,” in
Morphologische Poetik. Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. Mü ller (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968), 511–533.
14. See note 12.
15. Rasch, Goethes “Iphigenie auf Tauris,” 9–16.
16. Friedrich Gundolf, Goethe (Berlin: Bondi, 1930).
17. Ibid., 306–307.
19. Christoph Martin Wieland, “Briefe an einen Freund über das
deutsche Singspiel, Alceste,” in Wieland, Wielands Werke, vols. 1–2,
492–523.
20. Goethe, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, 69–123.
21. Goethe, “Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit,” in Goethe,
Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, 73–123.
22. Trevelyan, Goethe and the Greeks, 87.
23. Goethe, “Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit,” 99.
24. Ibid., 76.
25. Ibid., 117.
27. See note 10.
28. Staiger, Goethe, 355.
29. See chapter 7.
30. See Baeumler, Das mythische Weltalter.
234 NOTES

33. Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), “Oreste Tragédie. Telle qu’on la
joue aujourd’hui sur le théâtre du Roi a Paris,” in Œuvres complètes de
Voltaire, ed. Voltaire, vol. 4 (Kehl: Société Littéraire Typographique,
1785). It was originally published in 1750. See also Friedrich Wilhelm
Gotter, Orest und Elektra. Ein Trauerspiel in fünf Aufzügen (Gotha:
Ettinger, 1774). Gotter’s play was first performed at the court theatre
in Gotta in January 1772.
34. Voltaire, “Oreste Tragédie.,” 145.
35. Ibid., 176.
36. Ibid., 198.
37. Ibid., 225.
38. Goethe, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, 193–196.
40. Ibid., 117–118.
43. Ibid., 33.
44. Johann Lorenz Mosheim, Sittenlehre der heiligen Schirft (Helmstadt:
Weygand, 1753–1770), vol. 5, 1762.
46. Staiger, Goethe, 366–367.
47. Ibid., 368.
48. Ibid., 372.
51. Ibid., 359.
53. See Hans-Robert Jauss, „Racine und Goethes Iphigenie. Mit einem
Nachwort über die Partialität“ in ed. Jauss, Rezeptionsästhetik:
Theorie und Praxis, ed. Rainer Warning (Munich: W. Fink, 1975),
353–405.
54. Erich Heller, “Goethe und die Vermeidung der Tragödie,” in
Enterbter Geist. Essays über modernes Dichten und Denken, ed. Heller
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), 61–98.
55. See note 16.
56. “Kommentar,” in Goethe, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, 1298–1299.
57. See note 1.
58. Gundolf, Goethe, 304.
59. See Thomas Karlauf, Stefan George: die Entdeckung des Charisma
(Munich: Blessing, 2007).
61. See Manfred Frank, “Stefan George’s neuer Gott,” in Gott im Exil.
Vorlesungen über die Neue Mythologie, ed. Frank (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1988), 257–341.
62. See Stefan George, Der Stern des Bundes (Berlin: Bondi, 1914).
NOTES 235

64. Ibid., 315.
65. Ibid., 145.
66. Goethe, “Italienische Reise,” 550–554.
67. “Kommentar,” in Goethe, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, 1301–1321
69. Jauss, “Racine und Geothes Iphigenie,” 376.
70. Ibid., 367–368.
71. Sybille Schönborn, “Vom Geschlechterkampf zum symbolischen
Geschlechtertausch: Goethes Arbeit am antiken Mythos am Beispiel
der Iphigenie auf Tauris,” in Goethes Rückblick auf die Antike,
ed. Bernd Witte and Mauro Ponzi (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1999),
90–91.
73. Boyle, Goethe, vol. 1, 325–326.
74. Adorno, “Zum Klassizismus von Goethes Iphigenie,” 504–505.
75. Ibid., 505.
76. Ibid., 508–509.
77. Hermann August Korff, Geist der Goethezeit: Versuch einer ideellen
Entwicklung der klassisch-romantischen Literaturgeschichte (Leipzig:
J. J. Weber, 1923–1957), vol.2, 1930, 163–178.
81. Ibid., 138.
82. Ibid., 22.
83. I am indebted to Jonathan Teubner for this point and for the refer-
ence to Harnack.
84. Adolf von Harnack, Reden und Aufsätze, vol. 1 (Gieszen: J.
Ricker’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1904), 64.
86. Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1975), 229–230.
 From S T UR M UND D R A NG to Italy

1. Beiser, The Fate of Reason, 19–22.
2. Johann Georg Hamann, Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten; Aesthetica in
nuce, ed. Sven-Aage Jørgensen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1968).
3. Ibid., 23.
4. Ibid., 31.
5. See Valk, Der junge Goethe.
6. Hamann, “Sokratische Denkwuerdigkeiten,” 23–25.
7. Ibid., 55.
8. Ibid., 27.
9. Boyle, Goethe, vol. 1, 93 .
236 NOTES
10. Ibid., 98 .
11. See Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition.
12. Boyle, Goethe, vol. 1, 99 .
13. Bernd Witte, “Goethe und Homer. Ein Paradigmenwechsel,” in
Goethes Rückblick auf die Antike, ed. Bernd Witte and Mauro Ponzi
(Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1999), 23–24.
14. Boyle, Goethe, vol. 1, 197.
15. Valk, Der junge Goethe, 107–113.
16. Goethe, Werke vol. 28 ed. Wilhelm Große (Frankfurt: Deutscher
Klassiker Verlag, 1997).
17. Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werther, 73.
18. Goethe, “Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit,” in Goethe, Sämmtliche
Werke, vol. 5, 83.
19. Boyle, Goethe, vol. 1, 194.
20. Goethe to Herder, July 10 1772. Goethe, Werke vol. 28, 255–256.
21. Mauro Ponzi, “Eines Schattens Traum: Goethe und Pindar,” in
Goethes Rückblick auf die Antike, ed. Bernd Witte and Mauro Ponzi
(Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1999), 39–57.
22. Johann Gottfried Herder, “Shakespeare,” in Herder, Werke in zehn
Bänden, vol. 2, 525–527.
23. Ibid., 520.
24. Montesquieu, Persian Letters, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008), 175.
25. For a survey of the history of the appraisals of Athenian democracy,
particularly in the modern history of ideas see Jennifer T. Roberts,
Athens on Trial: The Antidemocratic Tradition in Western Thought
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
26. On rise of Academies and on Leibniz see Dilthey, “Das achtzehnte
Jahrhundert und die geschichtliche Welt.”
27. Johann Gottfried Herder, Vom Einfluß der Regierung auf die
Wissenschaften und der Wissenschaften auf die Regierung (Berlin:
Decker, 1781) and Christoph Meiners, Geschichte des Ursprungs,
Forgangs und Verfalls der Wissenschaften in Griechenland und Rom,
vol. 1 (Lemgo: Meyer, 1781).
28. Meiners, “Vorrede,” in Meiners, Geschichte des Ursprungs.
29. See Edward Gibbon, Essai sur l’étude de la littérature (London:
Becket and Hondt, 1762).
30. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Sciences and Arts,” in
Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, 9.
31. See Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible, 160–168.
32. Ibid., 159.
33. This was a rivalry more common in terms of poetry where Athens was
often explicitly juxtaposed to Jerusalem. This is discussed by Sheehan
and in the case of baroque and Enlightenment Germany by Joachim
Dyck, Athen und Jerusalem: Die Tradition der argumentativen
NOTES 237
Verknüpfung von Bibel und Poesie im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Munich:
Beck, 1977).
34. Herder, “Vom Einfluss,” 10 . “Alles mag die Kunst schaffen können,
nur nicht Natur.”
35. Ibid, 16.
36. On the relationship between Herder and Rousseau see the long and
detailed treatment by Hans M. Wolff, “Der junge Herder und die
Entwicklungsidee Rousseaus,” Publications of the Modern Language
Association 57 (1942), 753–819.
37. Herder, “Vom Einfluss,” 23 .
38. Herder, “Vom Einfluss,” 24. “Die Regierung unter der allein Natur,
rechtes Ma ß und Verhä ltnis stattfindet ist, -Freiheit.”
39. Meiners, Geschichte des Ursprungs, 1.
40. Ibid.
41. Herder, “Vom Einfluss,” 27 .
42. Meiners, Geschichte des Ursprungs, vol. 2, 2.
43. Johann Gottfried Herder, “Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte
der Menschheit,” in Herder, Werke in Zehn Bänden vol. 6, Ideen
zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit ed. Martin Bollacher
(Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989), 568.
44. See the introduction in Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition.
45. Hans-Dietrich Irmscher, “Die geschichtsphilosophische Kontroverse
zwischen Kant und Herder,” in Hamann, Kant, Herder: Acta des
vierten Internationalen Hamann-Kolloquiums im Herder-Institut zu
Marburg/Lahn 1985, ed. Bernhard Gajek (Frankfurt am Main: P.
Lang, 1987), 113.
46. Hans-Dietrich Irmscher, “Goethe und Herder- eine schwier-
ige Freundschaft,” in Johann Gottfried Herder: Aspekte seines
Lebenswerkes, ed. Martin Kessler and Volker Leppin (Berlin and New
York: De Gruyter, 2005), 256.
47. Irmscher, “Die geschichtsphilosophische Kontroverse,” 119.
48. Immanuel Kant, “Review of Herder’s Ideas on the Philosophy of the
History of Mankind,” in Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, ed. H.
S. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 201–220.
49. Irmscher, “Die geschichtsphilosophische Kontroverse,” 128–131.
50. See Irmscher, “Nationalität und Humanität im Denken Herders,”
Orbis Littterarum 49 (1994), 189–215.
51. On the problem of sociability in the eighteenth century, see John
Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples
1680–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) and
Brooke, Philosophic Pride.
52. Irmscher, “Goethe und Herder,” 239.
53. Herder, “Ideen,” 523.
54. Ibid., 527.
55. Ibid., 550–551.
238 NOTES
56. Hamann, “Sokratische Denkwuerdigkeiten,” 23.

57. José de Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las indias. En que se
tratan de las cosas notables del cielo, elementos, metales, plantas y ani-
males dellas y de los ritos y ceremonias, leyes y gobierno de los indios,
ed. Mart í Soler (Mexico City: Fondo de cultura económica, 2006),
354–356.
58. Herder, “Ideen,” 553–534.
59. Ibid., 546.
60. Ibid., 573–574.
61. Goethe, “Italienische Reise,” in Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Goethes
Werke, vol. 11, 9.
62. Boyle, Goethe, vol. 1, 413–430 .
63. Ludwig Curtius, “Goethe und Italien. Vortrag zur Paliliensitzung
des Deutschen Archäeologischen Instituts in Rom,” Die Antike VIII
(1932), 187.
64. Ibid., 190.
66. Goethe, “Italienische Reise,” 148.
67. Curtius, “Goethe und Italien,” 192–193.
71. Ibid., 45.
72. Ibid., 106.
73. Ibid., 122.
74. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für
das Leben,” in Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische
Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari (Berlin:
de Gruyter, 1988), 243–334.
76. Ibid., 240–241.
77. See Wood, An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer.
78. See Robert Wood, Robert Woods Versuch über das Originalgenie des
Homers, trans. Christian Friedrich Michaelis (Frankfurt am Main:
Andreas, 1773).
79. Wood, An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer, vii.
80. Ibid., 253.
81. Ibid., 284.
82. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Nausikaa,” in Goethe, Sämmtliche Werke,
vol. 5, 624.
83. Ibid., 625–626.
85. Witte, “Goethe und Homer,” 34.
87. See Hatfield, Winckelmann and His German Critics, 1755–1781.
88. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Faust I,” in Johann Wolfgang Goethe,
Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 7, 34 .
NOTES 239

90. Ibid., 209.
91. Ibid., 381.
92. See Karl Philipp Moritz, “Götterlehre oder Mythologische
Dichtungen der Alten,” in Moritz, Werke, ed. Horst Gü nther, vol.
2. (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1981).
93. Voltaire, Candide: Or Optimism, trans. Theo Cuffe (London:
Penguin, 2005).
94. Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, 234.
95. Ibid., 246.
96. Herder, “Ideen,” 647–649.
97. Ibid., 668.
98. Ibid., 669–670.
100. Moritz, “Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen,” in Moritz,
Werke, vol. 2, 958–991.
101. See note 91.
102. Moritz, “Götterlehre,” 669–670.
103. Ludwig Curtius, “Goethe und die Antike,” Neue Jahrbücher fuer
wissenschaftliche Bildung 8, no. 4 (1932), 295.
104. Moritz, “Götterlehre,” 635.
105. Ibid., 638
106. See Johann Jacob Bachofen, “Versuch über die Gräbesymbolik der
Alten,” in Johann Jakob Bachofens Gesammelte Werke, ed. Ernst
Howald, vol. 4 (Basel: Benno Schwabe, 1954).
107. Moritz, “Götterlehre,” 662.
108. Beiser, The Fate of Reason, 153–164.
109. Johann Gottfried Herder, “Gott: Einige Gespräche,” in Herder,
Werke in zehn Bänden, vol. 4, 720.
110. Ibid., 739.
111. Ibid., 712.
112. Ibid., 764.
113. Irmscher, “Die geschichtsphilosophische Kontroverse,” 141 .
114. Moritz, “Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen,” 986.
115. Ibid., 990.
116. Bernhard Neutsch, “Antiken-Erlebnisse Goethes in Italien und ihre
Nachklä nge,” Heidelberger Jahrbücher 7 (1963), 88.
118. Curtius, “Goethe und Italien,” 189.
120. Ibid., 372.
121. Ibid., 395.
123. Hans-Heinrich Reuter, “Herder und die Antike,” 170.
124. Curtius, “Goethe und die Antike,” 297.
125. See Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, vol. 2, Revolution
and Renunciation (1790–1803) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991).
240 NOTES

127. Ernst-Richard Schwinge, “Goethe und die Poesie der Griechen,” in
Schwinge, ed. “Uralte Gegenwart,” 49.
128. Goethe, “Faust I,” 61 .
 The Loss of Paradise and the History of Freedom:

German Philhellenism in the s
1. R üdiger, Goethe und Schiller, 69.
2. Ulrich Muhlack, “Schillers Konzept der Universalgeschichte zwis-
chen Aufklä rung und Historismus,” in Schiller als Historiker, ed.
Otto Dann, Norbert Oellers, and Ernst Osterkamp (Stuttgart:
Metzler, 1995), 6.
3. See Wilhelm Dilthey, “Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert und die
geschichtliche Welt,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Dilthey,
vol. 3 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1927) and Luigi Marino, Praeceptores
Germaniae: Göttingen 1770–1820 Göttinger Universitatsschriften—
Serie A: Schriften (G öttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht,
1995).
4. Muhlack, “Schillers Konzept der Universalgeschichte,” 18.
5. Marino, Praeceptores Germaniae, 25–30.
6. Schiller, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Peter-André Alt, vol. 4 (Munich:
Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2004), 751.
7. Ibid., 764.
8. See Malter, “Schiller und Kant,” in Schiller als Historiker, ed. Otto
Dann, Norbert Oellers, and Ernst Osterkamp (Stuttgart: Metzler,
1995), 281–291.
10. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Mary
Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 35.
11. Ibid., 8.
12. Immanuel Kant, “Conjectures on the Beginning of Human
History,” in Kant, Political Writings, 223.
13. Ibid., 223–224.
14. Schiller, “Etwas über die erste Menschengesellschaft nach dem
Leitfaden der mosaischen Urkunde,” in Schiller, Sämmtliche Werke,
vol. 4, 768.
15. Goethe, “Faust I,” 141 .
16. Schiller, “Etwas über die erste Menschengesellschaft,” 769.
17. Ibid., 780.
18. Schiller, “Die Sendung Moses,” in Schiller, Sämmtliche Werke, vol.
4, 783–804.
19. See William Warburton, The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated:
On the Principles of a Religious Deist, from the Omission of the
Doctrine of a Future State of Reward and Punishment in the Jewish
Dispensation. In Six Books (London: Gyles, 1738–1741).
NOTES 241
20. Klaus Weimar, “Der Effekt Geschichte” in Dann, Oellers, and

Osterkamp, eds., Schiller als Historiker, 192.
21. John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment, 280.
22. See Wood, An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer,
117–118.
23. Ibid., 125.
24. Ibid., 126–127.
25. See Karl Reinhold, Die Hebräischen Mysterien oder die älteste religiöse
Freymauerei (Leipzig: Göschen, 1788).
26. Weimar, “Effekt Gechichte,” 198.
27. Ibid., 197–198.
28. Schiller, “Die Sendung Moses,” 790–791.
30. Schiller, “Die Sendung Moses,” 804.
31. Schiller, “Die Gesetzgebung des Lykurgus und Solon,” in Schiller,
Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 4, 805–836.
32. Ibid., 814–815.
33. Ibid., 816.
34. Benjamin Constant, “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared
with That of the Moderns,” in Constant, Political Writings, ed.
Biancamaria Fonatana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988), 309–328.
35. Schiller, “Wilhelm Tell,” 976.
36. Schiller, “Gesetzgebung,” 823–824.
37. Ibid., 828.
38. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Homer on Competition,” in Friedrich
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 191.
39. Schiller, “Gesetzgebung,” 829–830.
40. Ibid., 833.
41. Schwinge, ed., “Uralte Gegenwart,” 201–203.
42. Friedrich Schiller, “Die Götter Griechenlands,” in Schiller, Sämmtliche
Werke, ed. Albert Meier, vol. 1 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch
Verlag, 2004), 169–173.
43. Schwinge, “Uralte Gegenwart,” 203.
44. Ibid., 204.
45. Ibid., 213.
46. Friedrich Schiller, “Iphigenie auf Tauris,” in Schiller, Sämmtliche
Werke, ed. Albert Meier and Jörg Robert, vol. 3, 951.
47. Ibid., 966.
48. Schwinge, “Uralte Gegenwart,” 214.
49. Friedrich Schiller, Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden (Frankfurt am
Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag 1992), vol. 8, 261.
50. Ibid., 241.
51. Schiller, “Über Anmut und Wü rde,” in Schiller, Sämmtliche Werke,
ed. Wolfgang Riedel, vol. 5 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag,
2004), 455–456.
242 NOTES
52. Schiller, Werke, vol. 8, 570–571.

53. On Schiller and the problem of historical totality see Behrens,
Friedrich Schlegels Geschichtsphilosophie (1794–1808), 17. “Von
Lessing und der Spinoza-Reinassance leitet sich das roman-
tische ‘Totalitätspathos’ her, wie es gerade an Friedrich Schlegels
Religionsbegriff ablesbar ist, der zunächst auf die geschichtsphiloso-
phische Idealität des griechischen Lebenszusammenhanges, dann
auf einen gegenwartsbezogenen, universalen Christianismus und
nach 1802 auf die mittelalterlichen Lebensformen bezogen ist, wie
er sie im Stä ndestaat und einem übernationalen Papstum represä nti-
ert findet.”
54. Schiller, Werke vol. 8, 572.
55. Ibid., 576.
56. Ibid., 578.
57. Kant, “Answer to the Question ‘What is Enlightenment?’,” in Kant,
Political Writings, 54–60.
58. Schiller, Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden, vol. 8, 580–582.
59. Ibid., 582.
60. Ibid., 582–584.
61. Ibid., 590.
62. Ibid., 607.
63. Ibid., 613 .
64. Safranski, Goethe und Schiller, 181.
65. Schiller,Werke und Briefe vol. 11 ed. Georg Kurscheidt (Frankfurt:
Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2002), 702 .
66. Goethe, Werke vol. 31 ed. Völker Dörr and Norbert Oellers
(Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998), 20.
67. Schiller Werke und Briefe =, vol. 8 ed. Rolf-Peter Janz (Frankfurt:
68. Peter Szondi, “Das Naive ist das Sentimentalische: Zur Begriffsdialektik
in Schillers Abhandlung,” in Lektüren und Lektionen: Versuche
über Literatur, Literaturtheorie und Literatursoziologie, ed. Szondi
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 92.
69. Ibid., 63.
70. See Helmut Koopmann, “Das Rad der Geschichte: Schiller und die
Überwindung der aufgeklä rten Geschichtsphilosophie,” in Dann,
Oellers, and Osterkamp, eds., Schiller als Historiker, 95–76.
72. “Johann Peter Eckermann Gespräche mit Goethe” in Goethe, Werke
vol. 39 ed. Christoph Michel (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag,
1999), 395., March 21, 1830.
73. Hans-Robert Jauss, “Schlegels und Schiller’s Replik auf die‚ ‘Querelle
des Anciens et des Modernes’,” in Literaturgeschichte als Provokation,
ed. Jauss (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 94.
74. Ernst Behler, “Einleitung” in Über das Studium der Griechischen
Poesie, ed. Friedrich Schlegel (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1982), 52.
NOTES 243
75. Schiller, Werke. Nationalausgabe vol. 20 ed. Norbert Oellers

(Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus, 2001) 429–430.
76. Aborgast Schmitt, “‘Antik’ und ‘modern’ in Schillers Über naive und
sentimentalische Dichtung,” in Friedrisch Schiller und die Antike,
ed. Paolo Chiarini and Walter Hinderer (Wü rzburg: Königshausen
und Neumann, 2008), 267–269.
77. See Rehem, Griechentum und Goethezeit.
78. Schiller, Werke. Nationalausgabe vol. 20, 431.
79. Ibid.
80. Ibid., 438.
82. Schiller, Werke. Nationalausgabe vol. 20, 451–452.
83. Ibid., 459.
84. Ibid., 503.
85. Otto Regenbogen, Griechische Gegenwart. Zwei Vorträge über
Goethes Griechentum (Leipzig: Koehler und Amelang, 1942).
86. Ibid., 27–28.
87. See Ernst Grumach’s collection of Goethe’s extended references
to antiquity: Goethe und die Antike: eine Sammlung (Berlin: De
Gruyter, 1949).
88. On Wolf see Anthony Grafton, “Prolegomena to Friedrich August
Wolf,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 44 (1981),
101–129 and Harloe, Winckelmann and the Invention of Antiquity,
193–202.
89. Ernst-Richard Schwinge, “‘Ich bin nicht Goethe.’ Johan Gottfried
Herder und die Antike,” in Schwinge, ed., “Uralte Gegenwart,”
170–178.
90. Ibid.
91. Johann Gottfried Herder, “Homer ein Günstling der Zeit,” in
Herder, Werke vol. 8 ed. Hans Dietrich Irmscher (Frankfurt:
92. Schwinge, “Uralte Gegenwart,” 170–178.
93. Herder, “Homer ein Günstling der Zeit,” 90.
94. Wood, An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer, 165.
95. Letter to Schiller December 23 1797. Goethe, Werke vol. 31, 467.
96. Ibid, 543.
97. Goethe, “Achilleis,” in Goethe, Werke, 885.
98. David Constantine, “Achilleis and Nausikaa: Goethe in Homer’s
World,” Oxford German Studies 15 (1984), 110.
99. Goethe, “Achilleis,” 889.
100. Schlegel, Über das Studium der Griechischen Poesie, 208–209.
101. Ibid., 209.
103. Goethe, “Über Epische und dramatische Dichtung, in Goethe,
Werke vol. 18 ed. Friedmar Apel (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker
Verlag, 1998) 445.
244 NOTES
104. Regenbogen, Griechische Gegenwart, 31.

105. Goethe, “Einleitung in die Propyläen, in Goethe, Werke vol. 18,
475.
106. Schlegel, Über das Studium der Griechischen Poesie, 224.
107. Ibid., 226.
109. Goethe, “Einleitung in die Propyläen,” 462.
110. Ibid., 467.
112. Goethe, “Einleitung in die Propyläen,” 486.
114. Ibid., 238.
Bibl io gr a ph y
Primary Literature
Abel, J. J., Historisches Gemälde der Lage und des Zustandes des weiblichen
Geschlechts unter allen Völkern der Erde von den ältesten bis auf die neues-
ten Zeiten (Leipzig: Schumann, 1803).
Acosta, José de, Historia natural y moral de las indias. En que se tratan de
las cosas notables del cielo, elementos, metales, plantas y animales dellas y de
los ritos y ceremonias, leyes y gobierno de los indios, ed. Mart í Soler (Mexico
City: Fondo de cultura económica, 2006).
Bachofen, Johann Jacob, Die lex Voconia und die mit ihr zusammenhängenden
Rechtsinstitute, eine rechtshistorische Abhandlung (Basel: Schweighausers
Buchhandlung, 1843).
———, Johann Jakob Bachofens Gesammelte Werke, ed. Ernst Howald (Basel:
Benno Schwabe, 1954).
Barthélemy, Jean-Jacques, Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce dans le milieu
du IVe siècle avant l’ère vulgaire (Paris: Didier, 1843).
Beloch, Karl Julius, Griechische geschichte (Strassburg: K. J. Tr übner,
1912–1927).
Böttiger, Karl August, “Die Revolutionsdammen im neuen Paris und im
alten Rom,” Neuer Teutscher Merkur I (1794), 68–88.
———, “Waren die Athenierinnen wirklich vom Theater ausgeschlossen?,”
Teutscher Merkur (1797), 224–233.
———, “Waren die Frauen in Athen Zuschauerinnen bei den dramatischen
Vorstellungen?,” Teutscher Merkur (January 1796), 23–46.
Brandes, Ernst, Über die Weiber (Leipzig: Weidmann Erben und Reich,
1787).
Brown, John, A Dissertation on the Rise, Union and Power, the Progressions,
Separations and Corruptions, of Poetry and Music (London: L. Davis and
C. Reymers, Royal Society, 1763).
Brumoy, Pierre, Théâtre des Grecs (Paris: Cussac, 1785–1789).
Caylus, Anne Claude Philippe, Recueil d’antiquités egyptiennes, etrusques,
greques et romaines (Paris: Desaint & Saillant, 1752–1767).
Chardin, Jean, Journal du voiage du Chevalier Chardin en Perse (Amsterdam:
Jean Wolters & Ysbrand Haring, 1686).
Constant, Benjamin, Political Writings, ed. Biancamaria Fontana
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
246 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Curtius, Ernst, Altherum und Gegenwart: Gesammelte Reden und Vorträge

(Berlin: Hertz, 1875).
D’Alembert, Jean le Rond, “Geneva,” The Collected Writings of Rousseau,
vol. 10, Letter to D’Alembert and Writings for the Theater, ed. Christopher
Kelly and Roger Master (Hanover and London: Dartmouth College,
2004), 239–250.
Derschau, Christoph Friedrich von, Orest und Pylades oder Denckmaal der
Freundschaft (Liegnitz: Sigismund Abraham Waetzoldt, 1747).
Diderot, Denis, Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. Geoffrey
Bremner (London: Penguin, 1994).
Dreyer, C. H., Erklärung der deutschen Rechts-Alterthümer (Bützow und
Wismar: Berger und Boedner, 1768).
Dyck, Joachim, Athen und Jerusalem: Die Tradition der argumentativen
Verknüpfung von Bibel und Poesie im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Munich:
Beck, 1977).
Forster, Georg, A Voyage Round the World, in His Britannic Majesty’s
Sloop, Resolution, Commanded by Capt. James Cook, during the
Years 1772, 3, 4, and 5 / by George Forster, F.R.S. Member of the
Royal Academy of Madrid, and of the Society for Promoting Natural
Knowledge at Berlin. In Two Volumes. (London: B. White, J. Robson,
and P. Elmsly, 1777).
George, Stefan, Der Stern des Bundes (Berlin: Bondi, 1914).
Gibbon, Edward, Essai sur l’étude de la littérature (London: Becket and
Hondt, 1762).
———, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 1, ed.
B. Radice (London: Folio Society, 1983).
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Die Leiden des jungen Werther (Berlin: Insel
Verlag, 2011).
———, Egmont, Torquato Tasso, (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2009).
———, Goethes Werke, vol. 11, ed. Herbert von Einem (Munich: Beck,
1981).
———, Sämmtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, ed. Hendrik
Birus et al, (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2003).
———, Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert, ed. Ernst Howald (Zü rich:
Rentsch, 1943).
Goguet, Antoine-Yves, Origins of the Laws, Arts and Sciences and Their
Progress among the Most Ancient Nations, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Donaldson
and Reid, 1761).
Gotter, Friedrich Wilhelm, Orest und Elektra. Ein Trauerspiel in fünf
Aufzügen (Gotha: Ettinger, 1774).
Gottsched, Johann Christoph, Iphigenia. Ein Trauer-Spiel Des Herrn
Racine, Aus dem Franz ösichen übersetzt vom Herrn Prof. Gottsched
zu Leipzig. Aufgeführt zu Wien im September 1749 (Vienna: Ghelen,
1749).
BIBLIOGRAPHY 247
Guimond de la Touche, Claude, “Iphigénie en Tauride, Tragédie en cinq

actes,” in Œuvres, ed. Claude Guimond de la Touche, vol. 9 (Paris:
Baudoin, 1828), 5–57.
Hamann, Johann Georg, Hamann’s Schriften: Briefe bis 1764. Kleine
Aufsätze von 1764. Briefe bis 1769. Kleine Aufsätze bis 1769: Teil 3, ed.
Friedrich Roth (Berlin: De Gruyeter, 1822).
———, Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten; Aesthetica in nuce, ed. Sven-Aage
Jørgensen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1968).
Hardion, Jacques, “Dissertation sur l’origine et les progrès de la Rhétorique
dans la Grèce,” in Memoires de Littérature Tirez des Registres de l’Académie
des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1743), vol. 15.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der
Geschichte (Frankfurt: Sukrkamp, 1986).
Heinse, Wilhelm, Laidion oder die eleusinischen Geheimnisse (Lemgo: Meyer,
1774).
Herder, Johann Gottfried, Vom Einfluß der Regierung auf die Wissenschaften
und der Wissenschaften auf die Regierung (Berlin: Decker, 1781).
———, Werke in zehn Bänden, ed. Martin Bollacher et al., 10 vols (Frankfurt
a.M., 1985–2000).
Hippel, Theodor von, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Frauen
(Frankfurt und Leipzig, 1794, n.p.).
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, “Über die mä nnliche und weibliche Form,” Die
Horen 3 (1795), 80–103.
Hume, David, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, vol. 1 (London: Cadell,
1793).
———,“Of Refinement in the Arts,” in Political Essays, ed. K. Haakonssen
Jacobs, Friedrich, “Beyträge zur Geschichte des weiblichen Geschlechts,
vorzüglich der Hetä ren zu Athen,” in Attisches Museum, ed. Christoph
Martin Wieland (Zü rich and Leipzig: Geßner, 1798–1800).
Kames, Herny Home Lord, Sketches on the History of Man, Considerably
Improved in a Third Edition in Two Volumes (Dublin: James Williams,
1779).
Kant, Immanuel, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Mary Gregor
———, Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991).
La Grange-Chancel, Joseph de, Oreste et pylade ou Iphigénie en Tauride in
Joseph de la Grange Chancel, Œuvres de Monsieur de La Grange Chancel,
vol. 2 (Paris: Les libraires associés, 1758).
Lafitau, François-Joseph, Moeurs des Sauvages Amériquains, Comparées aux
Moeurs des Premiers Temps (Paris: Saugrin, 1724).
Lenz, Carl Gotthold, Geschichte der Weiber im heroischen Zeitalter (Hannover:
Helwig, 1790).
248 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lenz, Carl Gotthold, Über Rousseaus Verbindung mit Weibern: mit einer
Abhandlung über den Geist und die Geschichte der Rousseauischen
Bekenntnisse und einigen Beylagen (Leipzig: Reinicke, 1792).
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden, ed. Wilfried
Barner et al, (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2003).
Mä hly, Jacob August, Die Frauen des griechischen Alterthums. Eine Vorlesung
(Basel: J. J. Mast, 1853).
Mann, Thomas, Der Tod in Venedig in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8 (Frankfurt
am Main: Fischer, 1974), 444–525.
Meiners, Christoph, “Beitrag zur Geschichte der Behandlung des weibli-
chen Geschlechts bei verschiedenen Völkern,” Berlinische Monatsschrift
(1787), 105–117.
———, “Betrachtungen über die Mä nnerliebe der Griechen, nebst einem
Auszüge aus dem Gastmahle des Plato,” in Vermischte philosophische
Schriften, ed. Christoph Meiners (Leipzig: Weygand, 1775).
———, Geschichte des Luxus der Athenienser von den ältesten Zeiten an bis
auf den Tod Philipps von Macedonien (Cassel: Hamper, 1781).
———, Geschichte des Ursprungs, Fortgangs und Verfalls der Wissenschaften
in Griechenland und Rom, vol. 1 (Lemgo: Meyer, 1781).
———, Geschichte des Weiblichen Geschlechts, vol. 1 (Hannover: Verlag der
Helwingschen Hofbuchhandlung, 1788).
———, Grundriss der Geschichte der Menschheit (Lemgo: Meyer, 1785).
Millar, John, Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society
(Dublin: Ewing, 1771).
Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brede et de,
Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their
Decline, trans. David Lowenthal (Indianpolis and Cambridge: Hackett,
1965).
———, Persian Letters, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008).
———, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and
Harold S. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Moritz, Karl Philipp, Werke, ed. Horst Gü nther (Frankfurt am Main: Insel,
1981).
Mosheim, Johann Lorenz, Sittenlehre der heiligen Schirft (Helmstadt:
Weygand, 1753–1770), vol. 5, 1762.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio
Colli und Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988).
———, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Pauw, Cornelius de, Philosophical Dissertations on the Greeks (London:
Faulder, 1793).
Reinhold, Karl, Die Hebräischen Mysterien oder die älteste religiöse Freymauerei
(Leipzig: Göschen, 1788).
Reitemeier, Johann, Geshichte und Zustand der Sklaverey und Leibeigenschaft
in Griechenland (Berlin: August Mulius, 1789).
BIBLIOGRAPHY 249
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings,

ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997).
———, Letter to D’Alembert and Writings for the Theater, ed. and trans.
Allan Bloom, Charles Butterworth, and Christopher Kelly, Collected
Writings of Rousseau, vol. 10 (Hanover and London: University Press of
New England, 2004), 251–352.
———, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Victor
Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Schiller, Friedrich, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Albert Meier et al. (Munich:
Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2004).
———, Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden 12 vols. ed. Otto Dann et al
(Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag 1988–2004).
———, Werke: Nationalausgabe, ed. Julius Petersen, Hermann Schneider,
et al, (Weimar: Höhlau, 1943– _).
Schlegel, Friedrich, Kritische Friedrich -Schlegel -Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler
(Munich: F. Schöningh, 1958– _).
———, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. IV (Wien: Jacob Mayer, 1822).
———, Über das Studium der Griechischen Poesie (Paderborn: Schöningh,
1982).
Schlegel, Johan Elias, Johann Elias Schlegels Werke, ed. Johann Heinrich
Schlegel, vol. 1 (Copenhagen and Leipzig: Mumme, 1761).
Schondorff, Joachim ed., Iphigenie: Iphigenie in Aulis. Euripides, Racine,
Gluck, Hauptmann. Ipigenie auf Tauris. Euripides, Gluck, Goethe.
Iphigenie in Delphi. Hauptmann. (Munich and Vienna: Langen-Mü ller,
1966).
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of, Characteristics of Men,
Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge
Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonsen
———, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 97
ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Tacitus, Agricola and Germania, trans. H. Mattingly (London: Penguin,
2009).
Thomas, Antoine L éonard, Essai sur le caractère, mœurs, esprit des femmes dans
les différentes siècles (Amsterdam: Aux dépens de la Compagnie, 1772).
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), Candide: Or Optimism, trans. Theo Cuffe
(London: Penguin, 2005).
———, “Oreste Tragédie. Telle qu’on la joue aujourd’hui sur le théâtre du
Roi a Paris,” in Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Voltaire, vol. 4 (Kehl:
Société Littéraire Typographique, 1785).
Warburton, William, The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated: On the
Principles of a Religious Deist, from the Omission of the Doctrine of a
Future State of Reward and Punishment in the Jewish Dispensation. In Six
Books (London: Gyles, 1738–1741).
250 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Wieland, Christoph Martin, Wielands Werke: Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe,

vols. 1–2, ed. Klaus Manger and Jan Philipp Reemtsa (Berlin and New
York: De Gruyter).
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, Anmerkungen über die Geshichte der Kunst
des Alterthums (Dresden: Walther, 1767).
———, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der
Malerey und Bildhauerkunst (Dresden: Walther, 1756).
———, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (Dresden: Walther, 1764).
———, Johann Winckelmanns Werke (Stuttgart: Hoffman, 1847).
———, Kleine Schriften, Vorreden, Entwürfe, ed. Walther Rehm (Berlin: De
Gruyter, 1968).
———, Versuch einer Allegorie besonders für die Kunst, ed. Albert Dressel
(Leipzig: Mendelsohn, 1866).
Wood, Robert, An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer:
With a Comparative View of the Ancient and Present State of the Troade
(London: H. Hughs, 1775).
———, Robert Woods Versuch über das Originalgenie des Homers, trans.
Christian Friedrich Michaelis (Frankfurt am Main: Andreas, 1773).
Secondary Literature
Adorno, Theodor W., “Zum Klassizismus von Goethes Iphigenie,” in Noten
zur Literatur, ed. Theodor W. Adorno (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1981), 495–514.
Alt, Peter-André, Friedrich Schiller (Munich: Beck, 2004).
Ardener, Edwin, “Belief and the Problem of Women,” in The Interpretation of
Ritual: Essays in Honour of A. I. Richards, ed. J. S. La Fontaine (London:
Tavistock, 1972), 135–155.
Aron, Erich, Die Erweckung des Griechentums durch Winckelmann und
Herder (Heidelberg: Kampann, 1929).
Baeumer, Max, “Winckelmanns Formulierung der klassischen Schönheit,”
Monatshefte 65, no. 1 (1973), 61–75.
Baeumler, Alfred, Das mythische Weltalter (Munich: Beck, 1965).
Behler, Ernst, “Einleitung,” in Behler ed., Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-
Ausgabe.
Behrens, Klaus, Friedrich Schlegels Geschichtsphilosophie (1794–1808): ein
Beitrag zur politischen Romantik (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1984).
Beiser, Frederick, Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism: Genesis of
Modern German Political Thought, 1790–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
———, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
———, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011).
Berger, Arnold, Der junge Herder und Winckelmann (Halle: Niemeyer, 1903).
BIBLIOGRAPHY 251
Berry, Christopher, The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical

Investigation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Billeter, Gustav, Anschauungen vom Wesen des Griechentums (Leipzig:
Teubner, 1911).
Böttiger, K. W., Karl August Böttiger: Eine biographische Skizze von dessen
Sohne, Dr K. W. Böttiger (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1837).
Bowles, Paul, “John Millar, the Four-Stages Theory and Women’s Position
in Society,” History of Political Economy 16, no. 4 (1984), 619–638.
Boyle, Nicholas, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, vol. 1, The Poetry of Desire
(1749–1790) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991).
Braun, Otto, “Herders Ideen zur Kulturphilosohie auf dem Höhepunkt
seines Schaffens,” Historische Zeitschrift 110, no. 2 (1913), 292–362.
Brooke, Christopher, Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from
Lipsius to Rousseau (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
Budde, Bernhard, Aufklärung als Dialog: Wielands antithetische Prosa
(Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 2000).
Butler, Eliza Marian, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany: A Study of the
Influence Exercised by Greek Art and Poetry over the Great German Writers
of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge:
Carhart, Michael, The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
Christ, Karl, “Ernst Curtius und Jakob Burckhardt. Zur deutschen
Rezeption der griechischen Geschichte im 19. Jahrhundert,” in
L’antichità nell’Ottocento in Italia e Germania, ed. Karl Christ and
Arnaldo Momigliano (Bologna and Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1988),
123–143.
Cometa, Michele, “Die Tragödie des Laokoon. Drama und Skulptur bei
Goethe,” in Goethes Rückblick auf die Antike, ed. B. Witte and M. Ponzi
(Berlin: Schmidt, 1999), 132–160.
Constantine, David, “Achilleis and Nausikaa: Goethe in Homer’s World,”
Oxford German Studies 15 (1984), 95–111.
Curtius, Ludwig, “Goethe und die Antike,” Neue Jahrbücher für wissen-
schaftliche Bildung 8, no. 4 (1932), 289–306.
———, “Goethe und Italien. Vortrag zur Paliliensitzung des Deutschen
Archäeologischen Instituts in Rom,” Die Antike VIII (1932), 187–199.
Decultot, Elisabeth, Johann Joachim Winckelmann: enquête sur la genèse de
l’histoire de l’art (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000).
Dilthey, Wilhelm, “Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert und die geschichtliche
Welt,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Wilhelm Dilthey, vol. 3 (Leipzig:
Teubner, 1927).
Dörr, Volker C., ed., “Verteufelt human?”: zum Humanitätsideal der
Weimarer Klassik (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2008).
Dummer, Jü rgen, ed., Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Seine Wirkung in
Weimar und Jena (Stendal: Winckelmann-Gesellschaft, 2007).
252 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ephraim, Charlotte, Wandel des griechenbildes im achtzehnten Jahrhundert:

Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder (Berlinand Leipzig: Haupt, 1936).
Fontius, Martin, “Winckelmann und die französische Aufklä rung,”
Sitzungsberichte der deutschen Akademie der wiessenschaften zu Berlin.
Klasse für Sprachen, Literatur und Kunst 1 (1968), 3–27.
Frank, Manfred, Gott im Exil. Vorlesungen über die Neue Mythologie
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988).
Fuhrmann, Manfred, “Winckelmann: Ein deutsches Symbol,” Neue
Rundschau 83, no. 2 (1972), 265–283.
Gerold, Karl-Gustav, Herder und Diderot: ihr Einblick in die Kunst (Frankfurt
am Main: M. Diesterweg, 1941).
Gierl, Martin, “Christoph Meiners, Geschichte der Menschheit und
Göttinger Universalgeschichte: Rasse und Nation and Politisierung der
deutschen Aufklä rung,” in Die Wissenschaft vom Menschen in Göttingen
um 1800. Wissenschaftliche Praktiken, institutionelle Geographie, europäis-
che Netzwerke, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker, Philippe Büttgen, and Michel
Espagne. Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts f ü r Geschichte,
Band 237 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 419–433.
Gombrich, Ernst, The Ideas of Progress and Their Impact on Art (New York:
Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture, 1971).
Gomme, A. W., “The Position of Women in Athens in the Fifth and Fourth
Centuries,” Classical Philology (January 1925), 1–25.
Gould, J., “ Law, Custom and Myth: Aspects of the Social Position of Women
in Classical Athens,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 100 (1980), 38–59.
Grafton, Anthony, “Prolegomena to Friedrich August Wolf,” Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 44 (1981), 101–129.
Gratzke, Michael, “So Stirbt der Eskimaux an seinem Marterpfahl: Stoizismus
und Expressivität bei Winckelmann, Lessing und Herder,” Seminar 43,
no. 3 (2007), 265–279.
Grumach, Ernst, Goethe und die Antike: eine Sammlung (Berlin: De Gruyter,
1949).
Gundolf, Friedrich, Goethe (Berlin: Bondi, 1930).
Guyer, Paul, “Eighteenth-Century German Aesthetics,” Stanford Encyclo-
pedia of Philosophy, 2007.
Haigh, A. E., The Attic Theatre: A Description of the Stage and Theatre of
the Athenians, and of the Dramatic Performances at Athens (Oxford: The
Clarendon Press, 1898).
Hammermeister, Kai, The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge:
Harloe, Katherine, Winckelmann and the Invention of Antiquity: History and
Aesthetics in the Age of Altertumswissenschaft (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013).
———, “Pausanias as Historian in Winckelmann’s History,” Classical
Reception Journal 2 (2010), 174–196
BIBLIOGRAPHY 253
Harnack, Adolf von, Reden und Aufsätze, vol. 1 (Gieszen: J. Ricker’sche

Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1904).
Hatfield, Henry, Winckelmann and His German Critics, 1755–1781: A
Prelude to the Classical Age (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1943).
Haym, Rudolf, Die Romantische Schule: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des
deutschen Geistes (Berlin: Weidmann, 1914).
Heller, Erich, “Goethe und die Vermeidung der Tragödie,” in Enterbter Geist.
Essays über modernes Dichten und Denken, ed. Erich Heller (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), 61–98.
Henry¸ Madeleine, Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and Her Biographical
Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Honneger, Claudia, Die Ordnung der Geschlechter. Die Wissenschaften vom
Menschn und das Weib (Mü nchen: Dtv, 1996).
Höpfl, H. M., “From Savage to Scotsman: Conjectural History in the
Scottish Enlightenment,” Journal of British Studies 17, no. 2 (Spring
1978), 19–40.
Howald, Ernst, “Einleitung,” in Goethe, Winckelmann und sein
Jahrhundert.
Iggers, Georg, The German Conception of History; the National Tradition
of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown: Wesleyan
Irmscher, Hans-Dietrich, “Die geschichtsphilosophische Kontroverse zwis-
chen Kant und Herder” in Hamann, Kant, Herder: Acta des vierten
Internationalen Hamann-Kolloquiums im Herder-Institut zu Marburg/
Lahn 1985, ed. Bernhard Gajek (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 1987),
111–192.
———, “Goethe und Herder- eine schwierige Freundschaft,” in Johann
Gottfried Herder: Aspekte seines Lebenswerkes, ed. Martin Kessler and
Volker Leppin (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter), 233–270.
———, “Nationalität und Humanität im Denken Herders,” Orbis
Littterarum 49 (1994), 189–215.
Jauss, Hans-Robert, Racine und Goethes Iphigenie. Mit einem Nachwort
über die Partialität“ in ed. Jauss, Rezeptionsästhetik: Theorie und Praxis,
ed. Rainer Warning (Munich: W. Fink, 1975), 353–405.
———, “Schlegels und Schiller’s Replik auf die‚‘Querelle des Anciens et des
Modernes’,” in Literaturgeschichte als Provokation, ed. Hans-Robert Jauss
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 67–106 .
Jordanova, “Ludmila, Sex and Gender,” in Inventing Human Science, ed. C.
Fox, R. Porter, and R. Wokler (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995), 152–183.
Justi, Carl, Winckelmann und seine zeitgenossen (Leipzig: Koehler und
Amelang, 1943).
Karlauf, Thomas, Stefan George: die Entdeckung des Charisma (Munich:
Blessing, 2007).
254 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Katz, Marylin, “Ideology and the ‘Status of Women’ in Ancient Greece,”

in History and Feminist Theory, ed. Anne-Louise Shapiro (Middletown:
Wesleyan University Press, 1992), 70–97.
———,“Could Athenian Women Go to the Theatre?, Classical Philology 93,
2 (April 1998), 105–124
Koopmann, Helmut, “Das Rad der Geschichte: Schiller und die Überwindung
der aufgeklä rten Geschichtsphilosophie,” in Schiller als Historiker, ed.
Otto Dann, Norbert Oellers, and Ernst Osterkamp (Stuttgart: Metzler,
1995), 95–76.
Korff, Hermann August, Geist der Goethezeit: Versuch einer ideellen
Entwicklung der klassisch-romantischen Literaturgeschichte (Leipzig: J. J.
Weber, 1923–1957).
Landfester, Manfred, “Winckelmann und Nietzsche,” in Johann Joachim
Winckelmann. Seine Wirkung in Weimar und Jena, ed. Jü rgen Dummer
(Stendal: Winckelmann-Gesellschaft, 2007), 135–150.
Larson, James L., “Winckelmann on Imitation,” Eighteenth-Century Studies
9, no. 3 (Spring 1976).
Lepenies, Wolf, “Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Kunst- und Naturgeschichte
im achzehnten Jahrhundert,” in Johann Joachim Winckelmann, 1717–
1768: Vorträge der siebenten Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für
die Erforschung des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts, vom 17.–19. November 1982
im Ägyptischen Museum in Berlin, ed. Thomas Gaehtgens (Hamburg:
Meiner, 1986), 221–237.
Lotter, Friedrich, “Christoph Meiners und die Lehre von der unter-
schiedlichen Wertigkeit der Menschenrassen,” in Die Wissenschaft vom
Menschen in Göttingen um 1800. Wissenschaftliche Praktiken, institu-
tionelle Geographie, europäische Netzwerke, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker,
Philippe Büttgen, and Michel Espagne. Veröffentlichungen des Max-
Planck-Instituts f ü r Geschichte, Band 237 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 2008).
Malter, Rudolf, “Schiller und Kant,” in Schiller als Historiker, ed. Otto
Dann, Norbert Oellers, and Ernst Osterkamp (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995),
281–291.
Manger, Klaus, “Friedrich Jacobs’ in Wielands Attischem Museum veröffen-
tlichte Hetä renkunde- Ein Emanzipationsprojekt?,” in Ernst II. von
Sachsen-Gotha-Altenburg: ein Herrscher im Zeitalter der Aufklärung, ed.
Werner Greiling, Andreas Klinger, and Christoph Köhler (Köln: Böhlau,
2005), 371–386.
Marchand, Suzanne, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in
Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
Marino, Luigi, Praeceptores Germaniae: Göttingen 1770–1820 Göttinger
Universitätsschriften—Serie A: Schriften (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und
Ruprecht, 1995).
Mathieu, Nicole, “Homme-Culture, Femme-Nature?,” L’ Homme, July–
September (1973), 101–113.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 255
Meinecke, Friedrich, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, trans.

J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge, 1972).
Miller, Norbert, “Schillers Nachdichtung der Iphigenie in Aulis von
Eurpides,” in Friedrisch Schiller und die Antike, ed. Paolo Charini and
Walter Hinderer (Wü rzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2008),
111–165.
Muhlack, Ulrich, “Schillers Konzept der Universalgeschichte zwischen
Aufklä rung und Historismus,” in Schiller als Historiker, ed. Otto Dann,
Norbert Oellers, and Ernst Osterkamp (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995), 5–28.
Mü ller, Gü nther, “Das Parzenlied in Goethes Iphigenie,” in Morphologische
Poetik. Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. Gü nther Mü ller (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968), 511–533.
Neutsch, Bernhard, “Antiken-Erlebnisse Goethes in Italien und ihre
Nachklä nge,” Heidelberger Jahrbücher 7 (1963), 82–110.
Orrells, Daniel, Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford
Osterkamp, Ernst, “Die Götter- die Menschen. Friedrisch Schillers lyrische
Antike,” in Friedrisch Schiller und die Antike, ed. Paolo Chiarini and
Walter Hinderer (Wü rzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2008),
239–255.
Pomeroy, Sarah, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical
Antiquity (London: Pimlico, 1994).
Ponzi, Mauro, “Eines Schattens Traum: Goethe und Pindar,” in Goethes
Rückblick auf die Antike, ed. Bernd Witte and Mauro Ponzi (Berlin:
Erich Schmidt, 1999), 39–57.
Rasch, Wolfdieter, Goethes “Iphignie auf Tauris” als Drama der Autonomie
(Munich: Beck, 1979).
Redfield, James, “The Women of Sparta,” The Classical Journal 73, no. 2
(December 1977–January 1978), 146–161.
Regenbogen, Otto, Griechische Gegenwart. Zwei Vorträge über Goethes
Griechentum (Leipzig: Koehler und Amelang, 1942).
Rehm, Walther, Griechentum und Goethezeit. Gechichte eines Glaubens
(Leipzig: Dietrich, 1936).
Reuter, Hans-Heinrich, “Herder und die Antike: Entwicklungen, Positionen
und Probleme bis zum Ende der Bückeburger Zeit,” Impulse 1 (1978),
89–135.
———,“Herder und die Antike: Übergä nge, Wandlungen und Ergebnisse
vom Amtsantritt in Weimar bis zum Tode,” Impulse 2 (1979), 134–206.
Richter, Donald, “The Position of Women in Classical Athens,” Classical
Journal 67 (1971), 1–8.
Richter, Simon, Laocoon’s Body and the Aesthetics of Pain: Winckelmann,
Lessing, Herder, Moritz, Goethe (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1992).
Roberts, Jennifer T., Athens on Trial: The Antidemocratic Tradition in
Western Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
256 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Robertson, John, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–
1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
R üdiger, Horst, “Winckelmanns Geschichtsauffassung: Ein Dresdner
Entwurf als Keimzelle seines historischen Denkens,” Euphorion 62
(1968), 99–116.
Safranski, R üdiger, Goethe und Schiller. Geschichte einer Freundschaft
(Munich: Hanser, 2009).
Schadewaldt, Wolfgang, Winckelmann und Homer (Leipzig: Barth, 1941).
Schmitt, Aborgast, “‘Antik’ und ‘modern’ in Schillers Über naive und sen-
timentalische Dichtung,” in Friedrisch Schiller und die Antike, ed. Paolo
Chiarini and Walter Hinderer (Wü rzburg: Königshausen und Neumann,
2008), 259–298.
Schmitt, Carl, Politische Romantik (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1925).
Schönborn, Sybille, “Vom Geschlechterkampf zum symbolischen
Geschlechtertausch: Goethes Arbeit am antiken Mythos am Beispiel der
Iphigenie auf Tauris,” in Goethes Rückblick auf die Antike, ed. Bernd
Witte and Mauro Ponzi (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1999), 83–100.
Schrader, Hans-Jü rgen, “Götter, Helden und Waldteufel: Zu Goethes Sturm
und Drang-Antike,” in Goethes Rückblick auf die Antike, ed. Bernd Witte
and Mauro Ponzi (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1999), 59–82.
Schuller, Wolfang, Die Welt der Hetären: Berühmte Frauen zwischen Legende
und Wirklichkeit (Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 2008).
Schwinge, Ernst-Richard, ed., “Uralte Gegenwart ”: Studien zur
Antikerezeption in Deutschland (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2011).
Selle, Götz von, Die Georg-August-Universität zu Göttingen. 1737–1937
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1937).
Sheehan, Jonathan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship,
Culture (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Shklar, Judith, “Rousseau’s Two Models: Sparta and the Age of Gold,”
Political Science Quarterly 1, no. 81 (1996), 25–51.
Sichtermann, Helmut, “Lessing und die Antike,” in ed. Jungius Gesellschaft
Lessing und die Zeit der Aufklärung (Göttingen: Vandenheock und
Rupprecht, 1968), 168–191.
Sondermann, E. F., Karl August Böttiger: Literarischer Journalist der
Goethezeit in Weimar (Bonn: Bouvier, 1983).
Sonenscher, Michael, Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the
French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
Staiger, Emil, Goethe 1749–1786 (Zü rich: Atlantis, 1957).
Starobinsky, Jean, “Eloquence and Liberty,” Journal of the History of Ideas
38, no. 2 (1977), 195–210.
Stieglitz, C. L., Archaeologie der baukunst der Griechen und Römer. Zweyter
Theil, Erste Abtheilung (Weimar: Verlag des Industrie-Comptoirs, 1801).
Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara, “Väter der Frauengeschichte? Das Geschlecht
als historiographische Kategorie im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert,” Historische
Zeitschrift 62 (1996), 39–71.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 257
Sü nderhauf, Esther Sophia, Griechensehnsucht und Kulturkritik: die deutsche

Rezeption von Winckelmanns Antikenideal 1840–1945 (Berlin: Akademie
Verlag, 2004).
Szondi, Peter, “Das Naive ist das Sentimentalische: Zur Begriffsdialektik
in Schillers Abhandlung,” in Lektüren und Lektionen: Versuche über
Literatur, Literaturtheorie und Literatursoziologie, ed. Peter Szondi
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 47–102.
Tomaselli, Sylvana, “The Enlightenment Debate on Women,” History
Workshop Journal, 20 (1985): 101–124.
Trevelyan, Humphrey, Goethe and the Greeks (Cambridge: Cambridge
Valk, Thorsten, Der junge Goethe. Epoche, Werk, Wirkung (Munich: Beck,
2012).
Vallentin, Berthold, Winckelmann (Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1931).
Vermeulen, “Göttingen und die Völkerkunde. Ethnologie und Ethnographie
in der deutschen Aufklä rung, 1710–1815,” in Die Wissenschaft vom
Menschen in Göttingen um 1800. Wissenschaftliche Praktiken, institu-
tionelle Geographie, europäische Netzwerke, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker,
Philippe Büttgen, and Michel Espagne. Veröffentlichungen des Max-
Planck-Instituts f ü r Geschichte, Band 237 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 2008), 199–230.
Vick, Brian, “Greek Origins and Organic Metaphors: Ideals of Cultural
Autonomy in Neohumanist Germany from Winckelmann to Curtius,”
Journal of the History of Ideas 63, no. 3 (2002), 483–500.
Wagner-Hasel, Beate, “Frauenleben in orientalischer Abgeschlossenheit?
Zur Geschichte und Nutzanwendung eines Topos,” Der altsprachliche
Unterricht 32, no. 2 (1989), 18–29.
Weimar, Klaus, “Der Effekt Geschichte,” in Schiller als Historiker, ed. Otto
Dann, Norbert Oellers, and Ernst Osterkamp (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995),
191–204.
West, Hugh, “Göttingen and Weimar: The Organization of Knowledge
and Social Theory in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Central European
History 11, no. 2 (June 1978), 150–161.
Witte, Bernd, “Goethe und Homer. Ein Paradigmenwechsel,” in Goethes
Rückblick auf die Antike, ed. Bernd Witte and Mauro Ponzi (Berlin:
Erich Schmidt, 1999), 22–35.
Wokler, Robert, “Anthropology and Conjectural History in the
Enlightenment” in Inventing Human Science, ed. C. Fox, R. Porter, and
R. Wokler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 31–52.
Wolff, Hans M., “Der junge Herder und die Entwicklungsidee Rousseaus,”
Publications of the Modern Language Association 57 (1942), 753–819.
Wolloch, Nathaniel, “Facts or Conjectures: Antoine-Yves Goguet’s
Histioriography,” Journal of the History of Ideas 68, no. 3 (July 2007),
429–449.
Inde x
Achilles, 87, 98, 108, 164, 169 in morality, 95–105, 192–3

in French and German theatre, religious power of, 29–30, 66,
115–16, 120 89, 103, 108
Goethe and, 201–4 Beiser, Frederick, 41, 158
Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund Berger, Arnold, 13, 44
(1903–1969), 110, 119, Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 9, 33
139, 145–6 Bible, 13, 15, 41, 49, 69, 156–7,
Aeschylus, 99, 108 160, 184–5
Agamemnon, 94, 108, 115–16, 136 body. See also beauty, sculpture,
Alceste. See Wieland sensuality
allegory, 7, 44, 50–1. See also and climate, 11
Winckelmann: Essay on and exercise, 9, 12, 22–5, 32, 95,
Allegory 104–5, 124
Antigone, 83, 100–1 and form, 6, 13, 17, 19, 29,
Apelles, 13 176–8, 206
Apollo, 45, 53, 103–4, 173 and pain, 45–9, 192
Apollo, Belvedere, 170 Böhmer, Caroline, 91,
Aristophanes, 61, 89 96, 105
Aristotle, 35, 43, 50, 102 Böttiger, Karl August, 60–1, 67,
Aron, Erich, 5, 12, 17, 125 84, 86, 88
art Boyle, Nicholas, 129, 139,
historical development of, 145, 153
30–3, 39 Braun, Otto, 38
and morality, 14, 16, 20–1, 51, Brooke, Christopher, 44
130–2, 160–1, 205–7 Brown, John (1715–1766), 14–15,
taste and, 42–3 16, 159, 161, 168
Aspasia, 25, 66–7, 83, 86, 89–90, Burke, Edmund, 15
95, 100–2 Butler, Eliza Marian (1885–1959),
Athens, 32, 57–67, 101–5, 156, 161 11, 125
Bachofen, Johann Jacob, 64, 174 Carl August, Duke of Saxony,

Baeumler, Alfred, 101, 135 Weimar and Eisenach, 7, 129,
baroque, 5, 8, 21, 33, 170 136, 162
beauty, 99, 171 Catholicism, 161
causes of, 9, 11 Chardin, Jean, 11
interpretations of, 17–22 Christ, 49, 69
260 INDEX
Christianity, 12, 15, 16, 147–8, and history, 59, 65–6, 69, 76–81
166, 167, 186 and symbols, 44
and death, 55, 114, 165 Euripides, 50, 100, 126, 141, 191
and friendship, 34–6 Iphigenia in Aulis, 107–8,
Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 48 114–19, 121, 127, 190
Clytemnestra, 94, 99, 100, 108, and Schiller, 110, 116
116, 136
competition, 9, 22, 31, 33, 161, fate, 48–9, 51, 53–5, 68, 99, 173–4
189, 196. See also body, and Goethe, 133–5, 203
friendship, games, sensuality in theatre, 108, 114–15, 117, 191
Constant, Benjamin, 188 femininity. See also women,
Constantine, David, 203 friendship
courtesans. See Hetaerae Greek, 58–9, 62, 99, 101–5
Curtius, Ernst (1814–1896), 34 religious power of, 68–9, 71, 86,
Curtius, Ludwig, 162–4, 176–7 89, 93, 103, 132, 139–40,
death 144, 147
ancients and, 52–5, 114, 165 Fontius, Martin, 11
in philhellenic theatre, 113, Forster, Georg, 77, 79, 96
125–8, 133 freedom
in ancient Greece, 30–1, 120,
Decultot, Elisabeth, 11 155–60, 188–9
democracy, 30, 70, 83, 87, 96, 102, in morality, 110–14, 159, 182–5,
104–5, 156 189, 191–3
Derschau, Christoph Friedrich, French Revolution, 96, 190,
122–3 192, 194–5
Diderot, Denis, 6, 21 friendship
Dilthey, Wilhelm, (1833–1911) 17, between men in ancient Greece,
27–8, 30, 68 33–7, 94–5, 98, 169, 203
Diotima, 58, 75, 81, 83. See also between Orestes and Pylades,
Schlegel, Friedrich 119, 121–3
Dubos, Jean-Baptiste Winckelmann and, 7, 34–6
(1670–1742), 11
duty, 110, 113–14, 130, 132 games, 9, 22, 50, 66, 95, 161, 196
Genie, 3, 42, 109, 153–5,
education, 12. See also women 167–8, 175–6
Egypt, 16, 40 in philosophy of history, 152,
Empfindsamkeit, 125–6 190–1, 195–8
Enlightenment, 28–9, 41, 133 George-Kreis, 17, 141
and historiography, 2, 12, 37, George, Stefan, 35, 141
67, 75 Gesner, Johann Mathias, 36
Epaminondas, 17, 23, 33, 34, 37 Gibbon, Edward, 34, 68
Ephraim, Charlotte, 47 God, 15, 109, 111, 137, 151, 153,
Eros, 17 173–5, 177, 187, 200
ethics Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
and ancient Greece, 5 (1749–1832)
INDEX 261
Achilleis, 201–3 Herder, Johann Gottfried

Egmont, 112–13 (1744–1803)
On Epic and Dramatic poetry Do We Still Have a Public and a
(with Schiller), 204 Fatherland Like the
Faust, 109, 148, 170, 179, 185 Ancients?, 42
Gods, heroes and Wieland, 127 God: Some Dialogues, 173–5, 177
Götz von Berlichingen with the How the ancients conceived of
Iron Hand, 111 death, 55
Introduction to the Propyläen, Ideas on a philosophical history of
205–7 mankind, 158–62, 172–3
Iphigenie auf Tauris, 107, Is the Beauty of the Body a Sign of
109–10, 129–49, 171, 195 the Beauty of the Soul?, 19
Italian Journey, 143, 162–79 Nemesis, 50–2, 124, 140, 161,
On Laocoon, 48–9 172, 174
Nausikaa, 168–9, 202 Older Critical Forest, 38
Prometheus, 109, 153 On the Effect of Poetic Art on the
Sorrows of Young Werther, 107, Morals of Peoples in Ancient
109, 143, 154, 169, 192, 197, and Modern Times, 14
199–200 Plastik (On Sculpture), 19–20,
Torquato Tasso, 112 171, 205
Triumph of Sensibility, 114, prize essay on Winckelmann, 40
133–4, 154 This Too a Philosophy of History, 41
Winckelmann and his century, 35 Herodotus, 22, 30, 32, 38–9
Goguet, Antoine-Yves (1716–1758), heroic age, 5, 7–8, 87, 168
23, 40, 69–70, 74, 91–2 in French theatre, 115–16
Gombrich, Ernst, 6, 31, 40, 120 in Greek tragedy and epic, 91–9
Gomme, A. W., 83, 85 hetaerae, 25, 66–8, 83–91, 101–3
Gottsched, Johann Christoph, Heyne, Christian Gottlob, 58,
115, 119 91, 96
grandeur, 12, 17 Hippel, Theodor von, 69
Gundolf, Friedrich, 133, Hirt, Aloys Ludwig, 48
140–6, 148 historicism, 27–8, 143, 158
Guyer, Paul, 19 historicity, of Greece, 6, 27–34,
38, 95
Hamann, Johann Georg (1730– Hogarth, William, 10
1788), 12–15, 28, 151–3, 160 Homer, 18, 47, 99, 153, 154, 168,
Hamilton, Sir William, 170 169, 186–7, 189
Harloe, Katherine, 1, 11, 29, 32 and death, 53–4
Harnack, Adolf von, 148 Iliad, 12, 13, 16, 36, 92, 98, 112,
Hebrews, 15, 157 201–2
Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Odyssey, 167, 170
(1770–1831), 43, 148 and Winckelmann, 6–7, 44
Heinse, Wilhelm, 44, 48, 127 homosexuality, 75, 95
Helen of Troy, 95, 99, 108, 175 Humanität, 107, 130, 132, 135–8,
Heller, Erich, 140, 169 140, 143, 145–9
262 INDEX
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 43 Greek, 7, 54–5

Hume, David, 44, 63 Herder and, 12–13
significance of, 13, 153
Iliad. See Homer Laocoon, 12, 45–6, 124, 140.
Iphigenia. See Euripides, Goethe, See also Goethe, Lessing,
theatre Winckelmann
Irmscher, Hans-Dietrich, 158, 160 lawgiver, 15, 78, 157–8, 189. See
also Lycurgus, Moses, Solon
Jacobs, Friedrich (1764–1847), 59, Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 13,
97, 102–3 28, 154
History of the female sex, Lengerfeld, Caroline von, 190
principally of the courtesans in Lenz, Carl Gotthold, 67, 85, 87–8,
Athens, 83–91 91–4, 96–7, 100, 105
Jauss, Hans-Robert, 144–5, 198 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim
Jupiter, 16 (1729–1781)
Justi, Carl (1832–1912), 10, 11, How the ancients conceived of
31, 34 death, 52–5, 114
Laocoon, 44–8
Kames, Henry Home Lord, 69, 73 Lotter, Friedrich, 76
Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804), 12, Luther, Martin, 69, 148, 151, 155
15, 96, 173–5, 192, 197 luxury, 63–7
Answer to the question ‘what is Lycurgus, 16, 37, 188–9
Enlightenment?,’ 194
Conjectures on the beginnings of Mähly, Jacob August, 94–5, 98
human history, 182–4, 188 Mann, Thomas, 29
Groundwork of the metaphysics of Marchand, Suzanne, 1
morals, 183–4 masculinity, 9, 17–18, 22, 35–6, 95,
and Herder, 172 98. See also body, competition,
on moral freedom, 159 friendship, Olympic Games
on race, 79 measure, sense of. See also art,
and Rousseau, 6 morality
and Schiller, 110 in bodily form, 10
Kalokagathia, 18, 19, 36 in history, 157, 161–2, 172
Kaufmann, Angelika, 176 in theatre, 100, 131
knowledge, esoteric, 16–17, 41, as virtue of art and morality, 10,
125, 134–5, 141, 186–7, 190, 19–20, 43, 46, 51–2, 175, 204
195–6 Meinecke, Friedrich (1862–1954),
17, 27–30, 32
la Grange Chancel, Joseph de, 115, Meiners, Christoph (1747–1810), 2,
117–19 24, 96, 100, 102, 155,
la Touche, Guimond de, 118–19 181–2, 187
Lafitau, François-Joseph, 14, History of the female sex, 63,
16, 160 69–80, 90
Lais, 83, 86, 102–3 History of the Luxury of the
language Athenians, 25, 65–7, 86
INDEX 263
History of the Origin, Progress and Phryne, 30, 66, 83,

Decline of the Sciences in Greece 93, 103
and Rome, 156–8 Pindar, 9, 25, 126,
Reflections on the love of men 154, 161
among the Greeks, 36–7 Plato, 16, 23, 15, 53, 74, 104
Mendelssohn, Moses, 46 Laws, 62, 65
Mengs, Anton Raphael, 10, 131 Phaedrus, 18, 29, 35–6
Millar, John, 69–70, 73 Symposium, 101, 105
Miller, Norbert, 115 Plutarch, 23, 111
mimesis, 167 poetry, 5, 8, 14–16
Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Protestantism, 27–8, 41, 147–8,
Secondat, Baron de, 12, 151–3
23–4, 25 providence, 41, 134–5, 152, 154,
Persian Letters, 155–6 155, 160, 171–2, 200
Spirit of the Laws, 63–4, 117
morality. See art, beauty, freedom race, 75–81
Moritz, Karl Philipp (1756–1793), Racine, Jean, 114–17, 121,
171, 173–7 144, 145
Möser, Justus, 112, 153 Rasch, Wolfdieter, 132, 135–9,
Moses, 15, 153, 187–8 144–8
Müller, Günther, 132 Regenbogen, Otto, 201–2, 204
music, 14, 159–61, 168 Rehm, Walther (1901–1963), 1, 5,
11, 17, 18, 35–6, 125,
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844–1900), 200, 201
17, 138, 146, 166, 189, 201 on Iphigenie auf Tauris, 115,
145, 147
Odysseus, 116, 120, 164, Reitemeier, Johann Friedrich,
168–9, 202 73–4, 81
Odyssey. See Homer religion, 29, 46, 50, 109. See also
Orestes, 108, 117–18, 195 beauty, Christianity, femininity
Goethe and, 129, 130–2, 135–8, rhetoric, 31, 33, 38, 42,
146–7, 168, 190 158, 161–2
Orient, 52, 72–3, 102 Robertson, John, 186
Orrells, Daniel, 36 Romanticism, 34
Rome, 31, 48, 53, 55, 63–4
pain. See body Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–
passions, 10, 19–20, 42, 44, 154. 1778), 34, 40, 58, 135, 157,
See also art, morality 159, 172
in theatre, 115, 118, 144 Discourse on the origins of
Pausanias, 32, 50, 54, 89 inequality, 6–7, 176
Pauw, Cornelius de (1739–1799), and Herder, 157
23, 25, 58, 66, 69, 74–5, Letter to D’Alembert on the
83–5, 187 theatre, 57, 87, 97–8, 120
Pericles, 32, 66, 89, 102 and Schiller, 192–3, 197,
Phidias, 9, 12, 13, 16, 32, 50, 90 199–200
264 INDEX
Schadewaldt, Wolfgang slavery, 73, 85, 92–3, 103

(1900–1974), 6, 44, 125 Smith, Adam (1723–1790), 45, 48,
Schiller, Friedrich (1759–1805), 63, 67, 69
116, 135 Socrates, 90, 151–2, 160
Die Räuber, 110–14 and Diotima, 101, 103
On epic and dramatic poetry (with and youth, 9, 36
Goethe), 204 Solon, 65, 72–3, 102,
On the Grounds of Enjoyment in 188–9, 202
Tragic Pieces, 191–2 Sonenscher, Michael, 6
Jena lectures, 181–9 Sophocles, 25, 32, 45, 99–100,
Kabale und Liebe, 111, 113–14 108, 119
Letters on the aesthetic education Sparta, 16, 58, 61, 104–5, 188
of man, 193–6 Spinoza, Baruch, 174, 175
On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, Staiger, Emil, 131, 134–5, 137–9,
191–2, 197, 199 145–6
On the Tragic Art, 191 Stein, Charlotte von, 162, 196
Über Anmut und Würde, 193 stoicism, 44, 199
Wilhelm Tell, 112, 188 Sturm und Drang, 42, 112, 127,
Schlegel, Friedrich (1772–1829), 151–5, 176, 207
58–9, 83–5, 91, 94, 198–9 Szondi, Peter, 197
On Diotima, 60–1, 95, 101–5
On the Representation of Female Tacitus, 68–9, 71, 74
Characters in the Greek Poets, Tantalid cycle, 108
95–100 theatre. See also Goethe, Schiller,
On the Study of Greek poetry, tragedy, Wieland
202–7 in France, 114–19
Schlegel, Johann Elias, 119–21 in Germany before Goethe,
scholarship 119–23
in East Germany, 38 by Goethe and Schiller in the
Enlightenment and, 29 1770s and 1780s, 110–14, 169
of the twentieth century, 3, 17, women and, 57–62
101, 125, 162–4, 176–7, 201–3 theodicy, 154–5, 159, 171–9, 200
Schröter, Corona, 129 Thomas, Antoine Léonard, 90
Schwinge, Ernst-Richard, 38, Tischbein, Johann Heinrich,
178, 190 170, 171
sculpture, 19–20, 22, 46, 49–50, touch, sense of, 20
176–8. See also body tragedy, 95–100, 108–9, 190, 205.
sensuality, 18, 101, 128. See also See also theatre
body Trevelyan, Humphrey, 131,
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley 133–4, 162, 165
Cooper, third Earl of (1671– Troy, 91–3, 99
1713), 18, 21, 30, 34, 36 truth, 142, 175
Shakespeare, William, 42, 154–5 in art, 21, 154, 167, 168, 171,
Sheehan, Jonathan, 15 174, 178
Shklar, Judith, 40 in theatre, 119, 130, 139, 143,
sight. See vision 146–8
INDEX 265
Valk, Thorsten, 125 History of the Art of Antiquity,

Vallentin, Berthold (1877–1933), 18–19, 22–3, 28–34
17, 35 On the Imitation of Greek Works
Vico, Giambattista, 8 in Sculpture and Painting, 10,
Virgil, 46, 93 45–6, 124
Virgin Mary, 69 Remarks on the History of the Art
vision, 6, 7, 176–9, 204, 206–7. See of Antiquity, 48–9
also art, morality Wokler, Robert, 78
Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet Wolf, Friedrich August, 202
(1694–1778), 12, 36, 156, women. See also femininity
172, 175 and debate on luxury, 63–7
Oreste, 135–6, 144 and education, 86–90, 101–5
Voss, Heinrich, 201 position in Athens and antiquity,
37, 57–67, 70, 73–4, 83–93
Warburton, William, 50, 185–7 power over men, 72, 86, 90
Wieland, Christoph Martin (1733– Wood, Robert (1717–1771), 50, 91,
1813), 59, 61, 83–4, 86 159, 167–8, 186–7, 202–3
Alceste, 123–8, 133, 173
Winckelmann, Johann, Joachim youth, 43, 173
(1717–1768) German, 7
Essay on Allegory, 7, 44, 53 Greek, 8–9

Damian Valdez (Auth.) - German Philhellenism - The Pathos of The Historical Imagination From Winckelmann To Goethe-Palgrave Macmillan US (2014)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Damian Valdez (Auth.) - German Philhellenism - The Pathos of The Historical Imagination From Winckelmann To Goethe-Palgrave Macmillan US (2014)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Damian Valdez (Auth.) - German Philhellenism - The Pathos of The Historical Imagination From Winckelmann To Goethe-Palgrave Macmillan US (2014)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

What is the book about?

What is the book about?

What time period does it cover?

What time period does it cover?

German Philhellenism

This page intentionally left blank

All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

1. Greece—Civilization—To 146 B.C.—Historiography.

The first juxtaposition is that of philhellenic aesthetics, theatre,

the position of women and to derive meaning from the uniqueness of

The Age of Winckelmann and the

Seen in both their German and wider European contexts, Johann

Winckelmann and the Primacy of Visual Art

compelling embodiment of the qualities and ideas that attracted and

proper to it than the subsequently invented signs of our ideas: for it is

a twofold affirmation of the peculiarly Greek sense of measure and

superfluous to add layers of scholarship, he said, adding, that “artists

convincingly demonstrated the significance of French historiography

Herder and the Moral Stature of Poetry

life.”40 Hamann’s interest in language as the means of ascertaining

brought to its truest and highest representation that which Homer

The Meanings of Greek Beauty

Winckelmann and Herder, it was above all the discussion of Greek

sustained by John Locke and Denis Diderot, among others, about

Greece. It begins with a significant disclaimer: this treatise was not

It is thus to the constructions of history in the interpretation of Greek

“Shipwrecked on the Earth”: Enlightenment

competitions and about the historical trajectory in which they were

exercises, races, and competitions as embodying an inherent tendency

Meiners told a story of decline and corruption from an early golden

Winckelmann and the Young Herder II:

The Chariots of Elis: Winckelmann

of the narrative of these twentieth-century historians is unmistak-

was to deliver an “instructive edifice” (Lehrgebäude). It was not to

The veneration Winckelmann had for that scene at Elis discussed

Greeks, by contrast, shunned this cruelty. Winckelmann also cited

hero, the Theban commander Epaminondas, the great sculptures

reflected and championed. It represented the most compelling out-

The Historical Problem of Male Friendship

explained that he was always inclined to regard friendship pythagori-

enjoyment of the sight of a masculine youthful body, Rehm wrote,

Taste and Rhetoric: Herder and

Hume. The latter’s was philosophical history, concerned with a con-

We have seen that Gombrich had postulated the affinity of

sense of a chain of sensibilities manifesting itself in the history of

between art form as taste and ethic as public morality. But, as we

of 1795.73 It gave primacy at different times, to different forms of art

F rom Laocoon to Nemesis

anchored either in the cultic community or in the ideal individual

have felt in himself the strength of spirit, which he imprinted on his

a significant difference of inflection within a philhellenic sensibil-

postulate would have to allow so many exceptions, that general laws

liberate Laocoon from religious and mythological associations and

combination of “this superstition” and their festive spirit that con-

a Nemesis and Phidias helped him to complete it. Nemesis thereby

How the Ancients Conceived of Death

concerning Count Caylus’s comments on ancient representations of

expect between twins.” Drawing on Pausanias, he said that on a chest