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German Philhellenism

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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

The Age of Winckelmann and the Young Herder I: Encounters

1 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 philhellenic 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 aesthetic 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

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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 achievements 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 productivity and sharp polemical tone provide a striking contrast to the passages 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 institutions, like the competitive games and other contests, the theatre and sculpture, engendered two problems that are present in different 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 institutions 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 historicity 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 philhellenic 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 historical 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 phenomenon 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 allegiances 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 philosophy of history of their age. Greece yielded its secrets piecemeal only to the right approach and through the right medium: by turns sculpture, 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, published 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 harmony 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 understanding of a wider antiquity. The second ideal was a feeling that gravitated toward a summit, and sought to fix there the boundaries of a

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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 history: Greece was the youth of mankind. And yet, for them, Greece was not only an ideal, but again, a rich historical formation, a complex 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 engendered 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, JeanJacques 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 examination 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 contemplating, 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

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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, ironically enough, that quality of Winckelmann’s mind that rendered him most Rousseauian in the eyes of subsequent commentators: the preference 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 characteristics 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

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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 impressionable seer confronted with the purest, simplest, and thus most compelling 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 universal concept of virtue was not known, the Greek word that subsequently 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 concentrated 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 majesty and the monumentality of its historical past were emphatically

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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 highest 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 understanding 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 advocated, 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

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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 masters have deviated on both sides from its not always discernible border. He who wanted to avoid an emaciated contour has fallen into voluptuousness 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 drawing 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 painting.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 selfparody harbored a serious point. The author of the letter even went so far as to defend Bernini’s portrait of Louis XIV as the embodiment 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 judgments on it.” Since it was written for those who know art, it seemed

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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, universally read in Europe at this time.27 One could also deduce from the language of Greeks the formation of their bodies, given that northern 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 climate, 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 relationship to Greece. Others more recently, like Katherine Harloe and Elisabeth Decultot, building on the work of Carl Justi, have

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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 specifically philhellenic claims and several Enlightenment historiographies 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 beautiful 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, traveling 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 education 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 climactic 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 complementary personalities that opposed the modern ethics of submissiveness 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

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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 simplicity, 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 dominant 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 language that in their effect on each other, Hamann explained, determine the character of a people in contrast to others, and reveal their character just as well as their external form.39 But alongside this validation of Winckelmann and alongside a shared disdain for cumbersome 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

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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 influence 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 fearful 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 solemnities, 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

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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 precisely 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 language 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 marvelous 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 interventions.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 counterweight 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

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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 adversaries of idolatry, of conceit and flattery, and of weak morals. Where is the unique providence of God more convincingly praised and manifested 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 beginning 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 cosmogonies, 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 intricate 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 protagonists 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 celebrated 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 everything 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 supervision 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

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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 relationship 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 teleological 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 environment, 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 “mythological” biographies, of turning their subjects into heroic, sometimes suffering, always visionary heralds of esoteric, transformative wisdom drawn from the heights of human history.56 While the historicists of the early twentieth century, like Meinecke and Dilthey, were interested in the insights into the historical whole offered by

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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 sensual part of the encounter with Greece. It is therefore worth examining 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 sympathetic, 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, dedicated 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 monumental 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 blossoming masculinity of mature years with a pleasing youth and plays

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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 ethical 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 convincing. This was because the imperturbability Winckelmann admired also allowed an admittedly subordinate but nonetheless palpable existence 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, incapable 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 relationship 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

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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 reflections, 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, corresponding to space, time, and force (Kraft).68 Without these distinctions 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 garments, with only the face, hand, and feet exposed. In the Jewish land, sculpture was forbidden and in Egypt it went down a different 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 philhellenic paradox, gently qualifying Winckelmann’s fervor, was that we could only ever wish to experience the fragments of the truths represented 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

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Greece. It begins with a significant disclaimer: this treatise was not in praise of beauty nor about physiognomy nor antiquity; he was neither 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 better 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 philosophical ideal, the Greeks saw as blind men and felt as seeing beings. This precision in the depiction of every stance and passion, every character, 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 elaborations 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 truthfulness 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 truthfulness, that proximity to natural language was itself an ethical aspiration attributed more to a stage of history than to individual character.

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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 introduced 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 significance, 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 sensibility unfolding in Winckelmann’s work, we must examine what place Greek competition had in Enlightenment historiography. The historians of the age of Enlightenment disagreed fundamentally about the significance of Greek gymnastic exercises and

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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 principal 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 wrestling 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 discussion 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

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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 dynamics 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 gymnastic 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 gymnastics 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 perspirations, 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 winning entry in 1781 was that of the Göttingen philosopher Christoph Meiners, whose work on the ancient world would be read by Herder.

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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 possessions, and Meiners was fond of citing the example of Alcmaeon, who “made his fortune neither through trade, nor agriculture, nor cattlerearing,” 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 homosexuality and physical exhaustion, for Meiners it had been the courtesans 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 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 for noble ambition 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 foreign 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 drivers overturned on the arena, or, as Sophocles expresses it, shipwrecked on the earth.”85

C H A P T E R

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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, sovereignty 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 embedded 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, particularly 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 traditions, 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 opposing 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 relationships 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

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of the narrative of these twentieth-century historians is unmistakable 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, nevertheless 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 skepticism concerning universal reason was also at the heart of the work of Hamann, who transmitted to Herder themes that would later be assimilated 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 historical 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 uncovering 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 writing 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 language,” he wrote in the introduction, and added that his purpose

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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 artists. 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 scholarship 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 passionately juxtaposed his project, with its combination of a mystical veneration of the high point of beauty with an empirical underpinning 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 conjecture 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 incorporeal 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 approximate an exposition of Winckelmann’s sentiments.12 All this only compounds the problem raised by Friedrich Meinecke, that the idealism 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 division of historical periods.

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The veneration Winckelmann had for that scene at Elis discussed in the previous chapter, though certainly looking up toward perfection, was nevertheless informed by an acute awareness of its historicity. 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 subsequent 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 different 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 particularly, 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 chapter 4.13 Yet it was not only this superstition but also the joyful disposition 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 predated 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 aristocracy. “Concerning government and constitution, he explained, freedom 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 individual.17 Winckelmann made an implicit distinction between archaic

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and classical freedom, though the former breathed life into the latter. Political freedom in the sense of later classical democracy was therefore 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 commonplace. This led Winckelmann’s great nineteenth-century biographer Carl Justi to criticize this aspect of his philosophy of history: “The author leads us through antiquity in order to show us continuously 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 exponent 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 fabric 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 surface 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 competition between cities and thus of the public spectacle and public pride that gave rise to the encounter between noble beauty and artists. 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

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Greeks, by contrast, shunned this cruelty. Winckelmann also cited Scipio Africanus’s destruction of Carthage to argue that Greek warmaking was more humane.23 Part II of the History provided a chronological sketch of art, “According to the external circumstances of the Greeks.” This separation 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 periods 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 celebrations 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 inhabitants” that, Winckelmann wrote, “touched the Greeks, particularly the Athenians most deeply.”24 Like the historian Julius Beloch, writing 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 significance 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 celebration and sponsorship of artistic achievement. A second period of flourishing brought about in the wake of the last and greatest Greek

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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 submissiveness 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 historical 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 gladiatorial 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 without 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, tragedians, artists, and athletes all submitted themselves to the judgment of an ideal public, assembled for Winckelmann at each juncture of Greek history at Elis. The second constant was the power of jealousy, 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

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reflected and championed. It represented the most compelling outline of a Greek ethic.

The Historical Problem of Male Friendship “This philia,” the historian Ernst Curtius observed in a lecture entitled “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 features of antiquity, and attracts us more than anything else; it is that which is closest to our being; it represents that which to the modern 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 virtues purely voluntary in a Christian,” Lord Shaftesbury had written 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 JeanJacques 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

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explained that he was always inclined to regard friendship pythagorically 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 friendship. This tension was played out, broadly speaking, in two models, 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 distinctly 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 ordinary 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 fascinated by the synthesis of sensuality, mysticism, and pedagogical intensity inherent in the imagined paradigm of Greek male friendship. 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 character 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

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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 opposition 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 masculine bonds to such heights. In his study, Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity, Daniel Orrells charts the debates on the meaning of pederasty, the significance of Socrates, and the purity and impurity of the practices associated with him. This holy lover of boys, Orrells explains, was to stand as a pious ideal and as an embodied personage in history who supplied 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

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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 passionate love for the beauty of the male sex, which appeared outlandish 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 animated 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 degenerated 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.

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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 encounter 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 possible 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 ErnstRichard 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 sympathies 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 antiabsolutist 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 necessitated 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

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Hume. The latter’s was philosophical history, concerned with a conscious 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 inspiration. Herder’s magnanimity as well as the plurality of his intellectual allegiances impelled him to offer a variety of compelling and complementary 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 produced 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 condition 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 question, what each people received from another in the single thread of culture, what it invented, inherited, improved, and further developed, 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 context of the life engendered by peculiarly Greek institutions, we may say they are divergent historical moralities of growth.

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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 blueprints 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 everything, since in cultivated lands these vary so much. Rather, tradition, doctrine, the chain of transmission does the most and in the mechanism of art, especially so.56 Here the two ethics of growth were juxtaposed. 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

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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 characterized 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, government, 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 orient, 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

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und Drang. This movement of young writers in the 1770s was fascinated 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 magical 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 beginning 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 artistically 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 beautiful decency and fine order. This was the point of greatest divergence

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between art form as taste and ethic as public morality. But, as we shall see, when Herder discussed art form as symbol, the relationship 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 quality 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 apotheosis 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 joyful, playful, exuberant, and youthful countenance of Greece. This composite image of the primacy of a public life centered on the physical affirmation and veneration of youth as the kernel of Greek historicity was retained by Hegel in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History.71 In 1774, Herder also articulated a problematic with aesthetic 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 concern of Philhellenic debate, one to which Wilhelm von Humboldt would return explicitly in his essay On Feminine and Masculine Form

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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 different 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 demonstrated.75 For the nascent new philhellenic sensibility in Germany, stoicism formed one of the poles between which the moral personality 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, serving 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 historicity.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 importance 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

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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 sufferings. 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 compassion 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 specifically 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 poignant representation of suffering and adversity that extant ancient statues could evoke: the Laocoon group. Laocoon was the unfortunate 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 imitation 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 expression [Ausdruck] of so great a soul,” Winckelmann enthused, “goes far beyond the representation of beautiful nature. The artist must

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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 consciously 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 consummate 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 limits 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 aesthetics, 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

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a significant difference of inflection within a philhellenic sensibility. Winckelmann wanted to offer man a model in Laocoon, wrote Charlotte Ephraim in her study of the idea of Greece in the eighteenth 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, emphasized 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 reproduced 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 differences all the more significant. For Lessing, Winckelmann’s heroic age was too severe, detracting from the humanity of Greek nobleness. 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 dormant 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 reconciled 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

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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 imagination 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 disdained 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 philhellenic notion that Lessing shared with Winckelmann and Herder concerning 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 secularization 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

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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 humanization of the Laocoon that he now undertook. The group was a combination of striving and fleeing, of activity and suffering, a synthesis 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 heavenly 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 adversity. 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 spectator’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 successfully 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

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combination of “this superstition” and their festive spirit that contributed 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 geography 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 transition from Egypt to Greece, from obscurantist mysticism to humane clarity, was then partly reversed in a cyclical progression, in late antiquity. 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 unworthy. 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

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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 ascertaining 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 terrifying 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 arrogance 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

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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 existence 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

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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 present essay. But he took the opportunity to say much more than such a provocation in itself demanded. Caylus had paid a great deal of attention 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 discussed 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 reflections, 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 ethical 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 carefully separated three years earlier and to ascribe to the whole of antiquity 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 presented both, death and sleep, with the similarity which we naturally

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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 edifice. 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 symbols for it which was afterward consistently respected. His objections 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 portraits [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 former 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 funerary representation was more than an escape from direct depictions of mortality. It was the claim that a consistent symbolism could not only

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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 consistent 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 necessity 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 resilient 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 inseparable from modern lives.

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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 magnificent 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 studied 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 contrast 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, crucially, the visibility of women, a topic at the heart of the historical problem of Greek women. The ancients, Rousseau wrote, had in general 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

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corrected by a careful reader who wrote to him, Rousseau asserted that Sparta, that light of antiquity in his mind, had not even possessed a theatre.8 The ascendancy of the theatre in the little republic 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 possible 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 courtesans were educated, Schlegel was trying to recover the female component within the apotheosis of classical Athenian culture.14 Diotima was therefore not an isolated instance that embodied a poetically constructed femininity: she was instead very real and constituted the finest 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 classical 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 historical, as was the point of view of its adversaries, whose provocations

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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 femininity 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 freedom 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 eighteenthcentury 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 sensibility 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.

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In his essay on Diotima of 1795, Schlegel agreed with the historians that the daily life of Greek women had been one of general exclusion 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 philologist 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 editors 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 something 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 mythology, which from the end of the 1790s became his main preoccupation.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 confused by a comparison with Rome, where women were indeed permitted 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

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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 comedians 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 entitled The Greeks and the Romans, in which the Diotima essay was published 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 theatre issue.34 Friedrich Schlegel had until then been in friendly regular 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 entitled “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

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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 historical Diotimas. When the Athenians wanted to honor their heroine Leana, he said, they had represented her in a monument as a lioness 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 goddess 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

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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 comprehensive 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 luxury 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 concerned, like Theodor Mommsen a century later, to emphasize the role

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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 legislation 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-historical confrontation with Carthage that the link between sumptuary 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 luxury, 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 others 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 promulgated. 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 considerable 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 saying 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 published 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 greatness and stability of the state that Christoph Meiners applied to the

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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 tradition 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 citizens 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 fortune 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

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not seen in public apart from at feasts, women, Meiners suggested, fell victim, perhaps earlier than men, to the luxury of vanity and sensuality. 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 luxury 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 capital brought about the new needs and desires that fomented vanity and luxury, and drawing heavily on Xenophon’s censorious memoirs, which had denounced the growing neglect of bodily exercises, 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 cultivation and perfection of her art more than her interventions in politics that were decisive for Meiners: “By this she damaged the whole nation more than if she had been the instigator of the Peloponnesian

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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 powers 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 philological point of view by Böttiger.69 In this section, we shall be primarily concerned with the second of the three, returning to the

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philological response to conjectural history in the following chapter. 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 systematically 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 public 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 personality, 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 interpreters 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 quality, 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

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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 empowered Greek femininity but also to an understanding of sacred scripture 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 perspective that betrayed the author’s preferred hierarchy of moral and political virtues for women. The philhellenic ideals of Greek femininity 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 multivolume 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

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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 carried 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 assemblies. 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 disempowerment 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

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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 treatment of women among every nation (not counting insignificant exceptions) stood in the closest relation to the strength or weakness 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 superstitious 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 condemnation.86 The “Celtic peoples” represented the antithesis of this mistreatment. And yet it was “one of the puzzles of the history of peoples” that the ancient Greeks were the only nation of Celtic origin 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, drawing 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

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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 themselves 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, according 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”

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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 provisions 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 history 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 circumstances of the people upon their first their advancement in civilization, 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 improvement of the art of conversation. “Hence it is,” he wrote, “that the Greeks, notwithstanding their learning and good sense, were remarkably 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

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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 seclusion 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 education 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 situation of Greek women are of importance for our story. The first is the one he shared with Meiners and the other serves as an alternative 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

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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 femininity were determined by the appraisal of the peoples in which it existed, by the scheme of development in which the latter were incorporated. For the conjectural historians it was the progress of opinions, 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.

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The two Göttingen treatments of the history of women, Meiners’s multivolume History of the Female Sex and Ernst Brandes’s single volume 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 government, 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 differences 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 comprehensive 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

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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 classification 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 estimation.” 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 history of man, comprehends great variety of matter, curious and interesting. 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 liberation 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

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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 paragraphs 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 manners 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 determined 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 comprehensive rather than an account of a “typical path” ending in modern commercial society. The cause and expression of this comprehensiveness 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

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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 voyage, 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 collision course with Forster, who in 1786, already involved in British parliamentary debates on the abolition of slavery, asked his fatherin-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 differences 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 degenerative 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 making studied value judgments.135 From such premises it was conceivable 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 polygenetic 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

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Once neutrality had been fought off and the criteria of differentiation 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 anthropological 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 political 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 distinguished 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 understanding 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 contemplation, 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 measured 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

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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 wisdom 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

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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, simplicity, and separation of respectable women from public life, from the street, and from the intellectual and political pursuits of their husbands in classical Athens.3 Where Schlegel and Gomme emphasized the paradigmatic nobility and prominence of female characters in literature, 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 foreigners 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

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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 public 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 humanity 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

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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 offensive 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 expressions 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 intellectual 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 historical. 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 distinguishing 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 prominence 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 hetaerae 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

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“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 certainly 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 having 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 advancing 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 anomalous 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 conjugal duty. The age of over-refinement by contrast, grants the female sex an exaggerated power of rule.” Both, he said, were equally barbaric.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

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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 problem 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 spoken about the power and respect enjoyed by Arete, who had arbitrated 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 chosen 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

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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 philosophers 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 private 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 entertainment value of the Contributions, they wreak havoc in Athenian society and politics. Lamia, a good flute player who had been captured 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 contributions.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.

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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 representative 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 gathering 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

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a principal school of exuberant arts of the hetaerae.36 The French historian Antoine L éonard Thomas, a friend of Denis Diderot, had written 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 history 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 purpose incorporated an element of entertainment foreign to the moral earnestness of Thomas. Yet when it came to his concluding illustration, 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 pleasure; 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 institutions 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 sinister 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 transient 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

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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 institute 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 contribution 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 writers 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 written 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

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Both the historiography and the personal politics and relationships of Göttingen provided the impetus behind the portrayal and assessment of Greek femininity. Based solely on the relevant passages of Homer and Hesiod, Lenz crafted a world, the hues of which contested 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 femininity 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 reference 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 taking 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

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often-cited story about the women of Athens cowering in the doorways 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 scholars 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 dedication 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 religiosity inimical to the city. It was the woman priestess rather than the household manager, whom Lenz always portrayed as sensible, frugal, 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

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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, implicitly, 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 flourishing 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

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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 direction, 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 posthumous 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 excellence. 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 longer essay On Diotima, published in 1795, made an elaborate case for the existence and the ethical significance of an alternative Greek femininity. But, like Jacobs’s Contributions, it contained important paradoxes. 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 relationship with ancient free constitutions. In the mid-1790s this was not merely an academic question. The muse who was Schlegel’s Diotima,

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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 smuggled 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 supporter 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 officer. 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 idealization 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 studies of the history of Greece were intensifying. Lenz had already reclaimed some ground from the historians when Schlegel, the young philologist with historiographical ambitions, studied 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

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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 paradox 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 environment. In his essay On the Representation of Female Characters in the Greek Poets, published in 1794, Schlegel announced that “a succession 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 opportunity of the ennobling sociability enjoyed by the men: “The legends 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 beautiful 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 faithfulness 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 living 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

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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 meeting 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 “unashamedly self-seeking” and far from any ideal. Yet despite the raw manners

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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 demanding 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 themselves 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 character. Schlegel posited that greatness was the beginning of beauty, just as Rilke was later to posit that beauty was the beginning of the terrible.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 literature 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

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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 character, 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 possible, regardless of its nobility. Passion was his specialty and he knew its depths well.80 For Schlegel, the Sophoclean high point was bounded by untempered 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 feelings, such as in Euripides’s Trojan Women, was rendered in Schlegel’s scheme more inimical to noble feminine character than the cold criminality and hardness of Clytemnestra. Taking account of all possibilities, the pendulum of powerful Greek femininities swung for Schlegel between the harmonious grace and noble heroism of Antigone and the

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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 beautiful 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 question 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 history of Greek women.84 The common view, he wrote, was that honorable 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 education. 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 hetaerae, 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 objectionable 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 personalities. The two aspects came together in the way in which those

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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 mildness 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 (sittenlos). 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, however odd this might sound. Aspasia places us in the noble age of the great Pericles; Lais fits into the opulent time of Alcibiades. Thais, however 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

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Friedrich Jacobs would be, simply to point out the paradox of combining 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 priestesses of Apollo. The identification with the oracle, moreover, was significant because it was acknowledged as one of the few pan-Greek institutions.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 embodiment 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 anomaly.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

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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 possible, 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 genders 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 mysteries, 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 succeeded politically, Schlegel said, because Greece was not prepared to accept casts, because Dorian life was not compatible with his philosophy, 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

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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 without 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 humanity above the distinction of genders. The realization of this principle in a community dedicated to physical 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 therefore 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 presenting 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 femininity 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 fullness 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.

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I PHIGENIE AUF TAUR IS : German Theatre and Philhellenism

The Meanings of Goethe’s I PHIGENIE

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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 overseeing 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, aesthetic, 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,

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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 component 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 selflessness, 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 priestess. 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 eventually killed both his own mother and her tyrannical lover, who had usurped power in Argos. Pursued by the furies for having shed maternal 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 material 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

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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 audience. 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 manuscript 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 honesty, the mildness of character and religion, the authenticity in action and bearing, the admirable and pure passions of friendship and heroism, 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 holistically, 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 historical context and holistic assimilation of Greek life that had characterized 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

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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 theological 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 validation 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 disciplines, he articulated and unfolded the different facets of his understanding 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 critical of Euripides’s version.10 For Goethe and Schiller, Iphigenia was a powerful female personification of moral power. In order to understand 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

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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 freedom, 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 frustrating 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 confrontation 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 understanding of morality and freedom that would characterize his philosophical 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

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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 victorious advocacy of a similar cause would characterize Schiller’s version 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 independence 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

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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 formidable 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 imagery from Greco-Roman antiquity: “I wander closer and closer to the blessed fields, the consolation of that abode of peace is already beckoning 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 compelling 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 character, 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 pretensions 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

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In the final act, she sank back into that passion and the anticipation 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 passions, 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 characters. 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 turning 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 denouement 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 adaptations of classical material had to face, was that between the salience

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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, facing 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 translations 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 balanced 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 manners 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 interpretations 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.

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Whereas Euripides’s Achilles had not anticipated the proposed wedding 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 concerning 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 exhortations 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,

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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 tragedies.” 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 adaption. 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 counterpart, 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 tauride 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 delivering the universe of a monster.43 Before this point she had been

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prepared to sacrifice Pylades, saying she wanted to appease the goddess, 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 governed the center of the action uncontested. Eliminating the Eriphyle and Thomiris figures that Racine had established, La Touche created 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 sacrifice. “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 prisoners 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 discovered her sibling before her. Her subsequent suspension of the sacrifice

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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 stranger.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 barbarian.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 audience. 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 sentimentality. Iphigenia was often reduced to an intermediary between the two friends desperate to die for each other or to live in inseparable union. Orestes and Pylades: A Tragedy, written by the 18-yearold 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 theatre 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 quality to which German theatre, emancipating itself from the French model, ought to aspire. The confused entanglements of their novels, he polemically asserted, also characterized French tragedy, which

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came down to a series of declarations of love, the refuge of a modest 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 simplicity 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 extraordinary.62 This appeal for a return from the ornate to the simple in theatre, 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 recounting 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

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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 discovered 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 violence 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 outcome 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

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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 published 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 representation of it.73 Derschau followed the French model of emphasizing 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 himself 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 prepared for a sacrifice to be carried out by the priestess Iphigenia. Not yet knowing who the victim really was, Derschau’s Iphigenia was willing 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.

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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 dedicated 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 satisfaction 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, “lionlike” 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.

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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 understanding 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 assimilation 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 individual 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, “occasionalist,” 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

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larger audience than Herder’s or Winckelmann’s essays. If our understanding 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 latter understanding is more consistent with the aspirations and selfimage 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 various 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 corrective of Enlightenment demands for individual autonomy and the primacy of reason.82 It privileged feeling and the open expression of profound emotion, rendered it intellectually and ethically meaningful. 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

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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 otherwise 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 eighteenthcentury 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 principles of his play and a critique of Euripides’s treatment of the legend.89 Wieland’s fundamental complaint was that Euripides’s Alceste followed 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 single 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 contributed 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

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sought to purify the raw Greek manners of Euripides for the requirements 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 disregard 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 characters 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 continued, “to win back my wife from the enemy, to defend my possessions and yet . . . ” Wieland interrupted him and said to all of the sprits present: “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,

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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 dimensions 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 material 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 inadequate,” 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 theatre 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 himself in the underworld, reconciled to his mother and in the company

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of his father too. Iphigenia rejected Thoas’s proposals of marriage to which he reacted by restoring the practice of the sacrifice of foreigners, 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 cunning, the great fame of men, Orestes admitted, are put to shame by beautiful truth and childlike trust.6 Finally a potentially lethal confrontation 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 personified 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

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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 redemption 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 relationship 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 political 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 chorus 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, published in 1941, argued that Iphigenie auf Tauris was the culmination 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 powerful 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

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ideal that it was said to represent became entwined and identified with these quintessentially modern struggles and was thus even further 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 heroine 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 generations of German school children and literary critics. They believed that “she had to be seen as a saint, who on the strength of her humanity 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

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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 placing it within a narrative of eighteenth-century theological polemics, 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 overcoming 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 trajectory. 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 foundation. What had to be overcome was the harsh and melancholic message 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 underworld 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

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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 character 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 underworld 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 trickery 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 providence.” 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 idiosyncratic reconciliation between the two, recalls Rousseau’s famous

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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 goddess 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 undertaking of Goethe the Enlightenment moralist, who according to Wolfdieter Rasch, set about systematically advancing a new morality and theology in this play. Staiger’s greater emphasis on the personal dimension and Rasch’s exploration of contemporary theological debates produced two incompatible variants of Humanität. Both contain strong elements of plausibility and both help us to understand how this philhellenic generation fundamentally altered the parameters 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 desideratum that had to be realized by the moderns both personally and collectively. 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

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Oreste, of 1750.32 It was performed in Wilhelm Gotter’s German version 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 poignant 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 contrasted 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 tragédie, 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 concerning 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 greatest 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

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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 without 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 indication 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 liberating 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 multivolume 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 sacrifices 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.

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Staiger’s Goethe was also interested in making a theological point about humanity and forgiveness. But while for Rasch, his main target was the repudiation of theological tyranny and political absolutism, 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 outraged.” Today, he continued, “we are hardly in a position to appreciate, 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 rational 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 presaged in the abandonment of Goethe’s prosaic and personal humanity. Orestes’s healing, Staiger wrote, was not effected by him simply unburdening himself by speaking. That would have been too modern. 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 unpalatable 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

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interpretation of the play and which threatened to eclipse the protoKantian 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 imagine 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 precisely 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

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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 original.54 This may be taken to diminish the significance of her influence. The question of Iphigenia’s power is therefore one of the most significant problems of Goethe’s play and one characterized by a fundamental 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 authoritative 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 authority 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 significant 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 concerned 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 assimilated while respecting the wide gulf that separated their age from the modern. Drama by contrast, invited not only reconstruction but reinterpretation 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

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Greek hero, so that the unreflective gracefulness of his sitting, standing, 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 reminisced about the writing of the play, he would never have completed it.57 But he was clear in this reminiscent reflection, on the subordination 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 subjective 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 interpretations 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 [aufgesogen] by the artistically or mythically enhanced traditions. The circle of human ideas had been brought back to that which was essential 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 arbitrary 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 biographical enterprises of the George-Kreis, the circle of poets and historians gathered around the figure of Stefan George, whom they venerated 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

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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 constructions of the epigone age and the garish hermaphrodite colors of the circus stage. Only as long as und only where the belief was dominant, 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 imagination but it was also due to the need to protect the sites of that symbolic 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 understanding 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, aristocratic 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 devalued. Where there is a Mommsen or a Ranke, no Schiller is possible. Either one receives, like the medieval man or Shakespeare, everything

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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 provided 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 interpretation, 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 personality, while at the same time evoking the sense of a hidden treasure drawn from the emotional intimacy that the novel granted the initiated 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 discovered, 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 symbol 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

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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 dedication.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 unprecedented 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 backdrop 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.

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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 subject matter of this myth, Schönborn writes, was the central motif of renunciation, which already in Euripides holds back the chain of violence. This was the route, she continues, by which Goethe arrived at the Enlightenment ideal of pure humanity.71 Iphigenia was not receptive 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 continuation 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 foundations 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

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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 injustice, 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 apology 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, disavows, 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 asceticism. 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 independence of the self-helper following her own interests with practical acumen, Adorno instead indicts the aristocratic exclusivity and therefore 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 continues 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 postulates of the revolutionary Enlightenment.78 This in turn builds on

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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-determination. 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 latter. 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 proposal 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 forgiveness. In 1862, the theologian Ernst Wilhelm Herstenberg, writing in

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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 assessment 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 without equal, and therefore Iphigenie remains, even without considering 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

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personality, a world-historical development attributed to German Protestantism.86 Goethe’s own distance from the contextual philellenism 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 significance of Iphigenia, two opposing foundations for Humanität.

C H A P T E R

F rom STUR M

UN D

7

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 diplomatic 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 skepticism 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

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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 inspiration 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 criticism? 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 encompass and delineate the whole in retrospectively imposed categories. Hamann’s third insight therefore appeared to enjoin a mimetic relationship 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 contributed 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 history, 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 fundamental to Goethe’s relationship with Greek antiquity.

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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 language with Goethe. The first words, Herder explained, were exclamatory 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 interlocutor 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 countermodel 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 rendered 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 defiance 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

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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 defiant 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 mastery 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 concluded 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 myriad 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.

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Yet, for Herder, Shakespeare formed northern men. In the comparison 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 inventor 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 epistemology 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 cluster 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 protection against the incursions of the kings of Persia. That is not all: Greece

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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 considerations 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 passionate 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 personalities 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 history 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 ultimately 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 century 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 separated the ancient biblical world from modern times by the means of

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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 simplicity 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 constitutions,” 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 cities. Neither compulsion nor gold yet played a role.35 Like Rousseau, Herder drew a powerful distinction between idealized pastoral customs 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 sciences 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

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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 competition and emulation of the citizens of each, for Meiners, their rise resulted more from the forces of trade than the ubiquity of competitive 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 attributing 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 volume 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 individuality” governing Herder’s “historicism.” The history of a given age or people was more than merely a stage on the way to the realization of freedom or of an extraneous end, but in itself a whole, possessed 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 psychology 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 history, 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

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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 reference 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 achievements 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 eighteenthcentury 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 engender 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

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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 living 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 further 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 providential 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

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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 competition between the free states. It was in reading Pindar that Herder arrived at his image of public games animated by the ardent emulation 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 everything 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 consequence 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 violating 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,

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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 equilibrium 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 relationship 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 increasingly 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 southern 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 (archetypal 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 distinguished gentleman nor the scholar of antiquity possessed.” The breath of the earth in its climate, its constitution in its rocks, its natural 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 encountered 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 experience of Greece in the late eighteenth century was ultimately mediated by Italy. None of the German Philhellenes of these generations ever

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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 produce a holistic portrayal of ancient Greece, of an art embedded in a social and political context with the right practices and forms of judgment, 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 component elements of an elaborate ideal. Reading Winckelmann’s letters in Italy, Goethe remarked that he imparted a terribly German earnestness 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 ambitious 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 observation 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 readers 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 prevalence of the Greek bodily form that sculptors later encountered in

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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 mindset 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 moralaesthetic 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 indictments of right-wing extremism. Goethe’s Italy was thus the sanctuary 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 historical 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 little to him to stand on the Pnyx and reflect that here Themistocles

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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 inexpressible 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 representations 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 distinguished 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 unmistakable. 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 natural character of Italian life, with a lively description of court cases

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that were more like performances than the dry juristic drudgery his father had forced on him during his brief career as an active lawyer 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 physiognomy 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 burden 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 learning, recounting in detail how Hannibal once fought a battle here and

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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 engagement 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 edition 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 extensive 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 unreflective 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

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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 measure 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 unimpeachable 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

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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, accompanied 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 premature 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 characterized by a profound vulnerability, both evoked expansive scenes and landscapes and a complex of virtue and sin, an intense companionship 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 descriptions 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

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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 implication 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 sociability, 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 fundamental 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 traveler 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 unloosens 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 surprising 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 dominant as he turned northward in the late spring of 1787 and made

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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 captured, 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, contained 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 contemplation 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 contemplation 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 rendered all the more poignant by the devastating Lisbon earthquake

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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 defiant 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 infuriated 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 harmonious 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

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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 written 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 culminated 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 selfsufficiency 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 eternal 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 evergreen 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 horror, 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 uncompromising minions of death, which in Wieland’s Alceste had inspired such terror, were in Moritz’s rendering “after all, feminine and beautifully formed, weaving and singing the song of the sirens.” It was the “lightest work of feminine hands, whereby the secret course of things

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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 published in 1859, the Basel historian Johann Jacob Bachofen would designate 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, maternal forces.106 Its antithesis was the escape from the self-sufficiency of nature toward higher spiritual ends, a development heralded by patriarchal 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 corporeal nature was to Herder and Moritz the sublime embodiment of edifying 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 incidental 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 “pantheism 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 interlocutor Theophron about the image of the beautiful goddess he has before him. It was the Greek Nemesis, Theophron explained. “The

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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 ontological 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 necessity, that is, by means of sufficient concepts which alone can grant us the knowledge and love of God.”110 Such concepts were the harmonious self-sufficiency and self-renewal of nature, the purest manifestations of God. The highest conception of freedom lay therefore in contemplative veneration. Theophron had earlier referred to the eternity 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 previous 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 reconstitute 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

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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 sculpture 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 representation 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 convictions” 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 practice.119 That practice was not only part of his endeavor to understand form, something related to his often frustrating efforts at improving 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 elation, he said. “Just the idea that something like that is in the world,

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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 represented 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 constituted 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 possibilities 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 historian 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

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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 ErnstRichard 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 different periods. It was not a swing of the pendulum toward the idealistic 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 understanding of the form of nature in botany, geology, and anatomy that encouraged him to see Greek art and Greek naturalness as a manifestation 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 characteristics, 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 enjoyment 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

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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

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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 philosophy faculty, since history otherwise served in an auxiliary role either as ecclesiastical history in the faculty of theology or as the history 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.

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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 practical social and material ameliorations that facilitated governance and trade. 5 Schiller began his lecture with a scathing and rousing 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 impression 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 independent 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

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was to have profound consequences for the development of philhellenic thought in Germany. These consequences were compounded by the shock of the French Revolution. The role of Greece changed fundamentally. It underwent a transition from the immanent ethics of Herder’s Nemesis, in which the ethical value was discernible in the object of contemplation to a transcendental ethic where the individual had to strive to match a norm that lay outside the sensible world. What had made Greece so attractive 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 command, 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 weakening 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 affirmation 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

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in a famous passage of the Groundwork when he discussed the independence 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 summoning 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 experiment 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 contemplative 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

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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 freedom.” 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 ennobling 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 relationship to nature that the Sturm und Drang and subsequent thought had celebrated and regarded as the threshold of ethical values, clustered 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 sedentary 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 catastrophe 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

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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 thesis, 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 threatening 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 inculcated in various parts of the Iliad and Odyssey. The immortality of the soul, a future state, rewards and punishments and most of

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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 privileged the mysteries, and derived Greek wisdom from the proximity to nature. But though both Wood and Warburton had been translated 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 repudiation 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 refutation 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 blossomed 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 obscurantism 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 mysteries 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 anticlerical 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

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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 legislation of Lycurgus and Solon.”31 This was a concerted attempt to apply to early Greek history the template of Kant’s conjectural narrative and to delineate the struggles of a nascent freedom in its various 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 beautiful 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 citizen 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 citizenship, 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 republicanism 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

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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 guarantor 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 character 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 difference 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 arrangement, 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.

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Aesthetic Education and the G ENIE ’S Role in History Yet it was in Schiller’s engagement with Greek tragedy and Greek literature 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 meaning 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 powerful dimensions. At the same time, the dialectic between esotericelite 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 evenings, and, as Caroline von Lengerfeld remembered it, “this great portrayal of humanity in its universality and eternal natural veracity 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 philosophical 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 magnanimity, how little he allows him to raise himself above mankind!”46 By contrast, Schiller’s enthusiasm for Goethe’s Orestes was boundless, particularly the scene where at the end of his trance, the furies

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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 articulated 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 distinction 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 humiliating and painful for a freely determined being, Schiller protested, and it was that latter being that was missing in even the finest productions 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 discontent caused by fate lost itself in a “clear consciousness of the teleological 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 determination was at its most radiant, he elaborated, when it won the upper hand against opposition. By natural forces was meant “everything

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that is not moral, everything that does not stand under the highest law-giving of reason: sentiments, drives, affects, passions, just as physical necessity and fate. The greater the adversary the more glorious 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 struggle 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 freedom with better exactitude and emotional poignancy than history. The French Revolution and its presumed intellectual origins rendered 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 revolution. 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

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philhellenic sensibility of previous decades in Germany, with wideranging 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, written 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 subject capable of projecting a future. Second, in dealing with the everpresent 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 departure 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 condition, 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

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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 subjects,” 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 reconciled whole, Schiller was adopting an idea of the previous philhellenic 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 satisfaction, 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 conflicts 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 feeling (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

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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 paradise that had a violent outlet in the French Revolution, and his subsequent 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 reviving 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 dialectic 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 individual 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

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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 deities.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 lecture. 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 disgruntled 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, everything 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 literary 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

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transcended philhellenic debates but which contributed to determining 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 individual 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 childhood 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 sentimental 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 formative powers in history attributed to the complex creative force of the Genie. The people of the Netherlands, Schiller had written in his introduction 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

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the aim of proving the superiority of Genie to contingency, he wrote, “but I present a portrait here where adversity creates Genie and contingency 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 political 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 freedom 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 different Genies, now the motor of history, were measured against or illustrated 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 implications 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

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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 question 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 contented 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 natural 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 sentimentalism 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 classical 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 ability 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 supposedly 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 melancholic, he turned his back on Homer and read Ossian. The Greek ideas of the gods (Götterlehre) was the product of a na ïve feeling,

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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 characterized 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 natural 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 limitations. 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

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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 foremost 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 patriotism, 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 masculinity, 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 pessimism, 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

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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 opposition between morality and sensuality, had superseded the GotheanHerderian 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 controversy developed an unpleasant personal dimension.90 Herder published 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 threatened 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 philhellenes, 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 attention 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 genuinely Homeric and uniquely Greek ethic was the figure of Achilles. For Goethe, Achilles became the new subject of the attempt he had

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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 exhibited human Nature in almost every shape, and under every view, has not given a single instance of the powers and effects of love, distinct 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 attachment 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 coloring, 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 longer 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 evocation of couples reunited out of the underworld, and the unwritten 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

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and female, which an Achilles fixated on male friendship could not deliver. Friedrich Schlegel’s Achilles embodied the quintessentially philhellenic virtue of measure (Ebenmass). Simplicity, grace, and lively naturalness 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 sensitivity.101 Homer’s figures, Herder wrote, renounced everything monstrous; 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 mechanically 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 emulated. 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 overcame 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,

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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 country.105 It compromised the holistic integrity of art, people, and landscape 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 sensuality 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 contrast, “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 faithful 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

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effect and countereffect, assimilate the hidden, the still, the foundation 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 foundations, 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 experienced 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 approximate 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 activity, which Schlegel shared with Schiller, Goethe’s visual approximation 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 tranquil 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 heralded in Kant’s philosophy of history, taken up by Schiller, and culminating in an affirmation of the Fall as the origin of conscious moral

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choice. The challenge to the unity of the Homeric epics was an additional 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 literature 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: WinckelmannGesellschaft, 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 content 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. 21. Winckelmann, Gedanken, 21. 22. Winckelmann’s “Sendschreiben über die Gedanken” and his “Erläuterung über die Gedanken” were published in the 1756 edition 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. 24. Winckelmann, Gedanken, 72. 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). 28. Winckelmann, Gedanken, 106.

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). 33. Winckelmann, Gedanken, 108. 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 derselben, 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 geschichtliche 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 history to the history of nature, a response to a crisis of “classificatory thought.” Wolf Lepenies, “Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Kunstund 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. 13. Winckelmann, Johann Winckelmanns Werke, 8. 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. 17. Winckelmann, Johann Winckelmanns Werke, 13. 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. 21. Winckelmann, Johann Winckelmanns Werke, 18. 22. Ibid., 19. 23. Ibid., 11–12. 24. Winckelmann, Geschichte “Zweyter Theil,” 324. 25. Karl Julius Beloch, Griechische geschichte vol. 2, (Strassburg: K. J. Tr übner, 1914), 16. 26. Winckelmann, Geschichte “Zweyter Theil,” 324. 27. Ibid., 325. 28. See Katherine Harloe, “Pausanias as Historian in Winckelmann’s History,” Classical Reception Journal 2 (2010), 174–196. 29. Winckelmann, Geschichte “Zweyter Theil,” 357. 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

37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

50.

51. 52. 53.

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). Winckelmann, Kleine Schriften. Ibid. Justi, Winckelmann, vol. 1, 383. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert, ed. Ernst Howald (Zü rich: Rentsch, 1943), 131. In his 1943 introduction, the classicist Ernst Howald said that the Herder-inspired reception of Winckelmann’s feelings about male friendship was dominant 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. See Berthold Vallentin, Winckelmann (Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1931). Rehm, Griechentum und Goethezeit, 33. Daniel Orrells, Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 54–59. 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. Meiners, “Betrachtungen,” 80. Ibid., 90. Otto Braun, “Herders Ideen zur Kulturphilosohie auf dem Höhepunkt seines Schaffens,” Historische Zeitschrift 110, no. 2 (1913), 297. 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. 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. 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. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 31. 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. 63. Rehm, Griechentum und Goethezeit, 59–86. 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. 78. Winckelmann, Versuch, 76. 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

83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88.

89. 90.

91.

92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

99. 100.

101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112.

217

Winckelmann, Gedanken, 21–22. See the texts in Winckelmann, Kleine Schriften. Winckelmann, Geschichte “Zweyter Theil,” 348. Winckelmann, Gedanken, 23. 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 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. Lessing, Laocoon, 18. Charlotte Ephraim, Wandel des griechenbildes im achtzehnten Jahrhundert: Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder (Berlin and Leipzig: Haupt, 1936), 46. Helmut Sichtermann, “Lessing und die Antike,” in ed. Joachim Jungius, Lessing und die Zeit der Aufklärung (Göttingen: Vandenheock und Rupprecht, 1968), 168–191, 173. Lessing, Laocoon, 36. Ibid., 18–20. Ibid., 21–22. Ibid., 43–44. Ibid. Ibid., 45. 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. Goethe, “Über Laocoon” in Goethe, Sämtliche Werke vol 18, ed. Friedmar Apel, 489–500. 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. Ibid., 138. Goethe, Über Laocoon, 492. Ibid., 494–495. Ibid. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Anmerkungen über die Geshichte der Kunst des Alterthums (Dresden: Walther, 1767), 30. Winckelmann, Versuch, 6–7. Ibid., 50. Herder, “Nemesis,” in Herder, Werke, vol. 4, 551. Ibid., 553. Ibid., 554. Winckelmann, Anmerkungen, 90–91. Herder, “Nemesis,” 563–565.

218

NOTES

113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119.

120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137.

Winckelmann, Versuch, 12. Herder, “Nemesis,” 569. Ibid., 565. Ibid., 571. Ibid., 573. Ibid., 575. Lessing, “Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet,” in Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim Lessings Werke vol. 6 ed Klaus Bohnen (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985), 720. Richter, Laocoon’s Body, 76 . Winckelmann, Anmerkungen, 21. Ibid., 26. Winckelmann, Versuch, 69. Georg Zoëga, Li Bassirelievi antichi di Roma 2 vols. (Rome: Piranesi, 1808). Winckelmann, Versuch, 70–71. Ibid., 74. Lessing, “Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet,” 723. Ibid., 728–729. Ibid., 748. Ibid., 759–761. Richter, Laocoon’s Body, 77, 86. Herder, “Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet,” Werke, vol. 4, 601–602. Ibid., 591. Ibid., 597–598. Ibid., 612–613. Ibid., 615. 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 sometimes 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 categorical 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-SchlegelAusgabe. 34. See Ernst Behler, “Einleitung,” in Behler ed., Kritische FriedrichSchlegel-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 ausgeschlossen?,” 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 relations 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 zusammenhängenden 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. 62. De Pauw, Philosophical Dissertations on the Greeks, vol. 1, 79. 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 historiography, 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 vulgaire (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 RechtsAlterthümer (Bützow und Wismar: Berger und Boedner, 1768). 91. Meiners, Geschichte des Weiblichen Geschlechts, vol. 1, 362–363. 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). 94. Meiners, Geschichte des Weiblichen Geschlechts, vol. 1, 322–323. 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. 100. Millar, Distinction of Ranks, 92. 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. 104. Meiners, Geschichte des Weiblichen Geschlechts, vol. 1, 329–330. 105. De Pauw, Philosophical Dissertations on the Greeks, vol. 1, 132. 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 unterschiedlichen 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.

224 117. 118. 119. 120.

121. 122.

123. 124.

125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131.

132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140.

141.

NOTES

Vermeulen, “Göttingen und die Völkerkunde,” 205. Meiners, Geschichte des Weiblichen Geschlechts, vol. 1, 198. Kames, Sketches on the History of Man, 310. 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. Kames, Sketches on the History of Man, 287. H. M. Höpfl, “From Savage to Scotsman: Conjectural History in the Scottish Enlightenment,” Journal of British Studies 17, no. 2 (Spring 1978), 19–40. Millar, Distinction of Ranks, 40. 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) Wokler, “Anthropology and Conjectural History,” 40. See Michael Carhart, The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Götz von Selle, Die Georg-August-Universität zu Göttingen. 1737 – 1937 (Göttingen Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1937), 178. Wokler, “Anthropology and Conjectural History,” 31. Von Selle, Die Georg-August-Universität zu Göttingen, 134. Hugh West, “Göttingen and Weimar,” 150. Georg Forster, 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: Printed for B. White, J. Robson, P. Elmsly, 1777). West, “Göttingen and Weimar,” 158. Lotter, “Christoph Meiners und die Lehre von der unterschiedlichen Wertigkeit der Menschenrassen,” 62. Ibid., 61–62. Marino, Praeceptores Germaniae, 129. Ibid., 103–104. Ibid., 113. Vermeulen, “Göttingen und die Völkerkunde,” 226. Ibid. 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. 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 modern 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-SchlegelAusgabe, 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 protection. 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. 20. Jacobs, “Beyträge,” I, 1798, 137. 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. 29. Jacobs, “Beyträge,” I, 1798, 137. 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 difference between our manners and theirs; I mean, that unnatural separation 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-SchlegelAusgabe, vol. 7 (Munich: F. Schöningh, 1966), 11–25. 64. Ernst Behler, “Einleitung,” in Behler, ed., Kritische FriedrichSchlegel-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.” 78. Schlegel, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 4, 77–78. 79. Ibid., 79. 80. Ibid., 81–82. 81. For Schlegel’s treatment of Diotima and the trajectory of his studies see also Rudolf Haym, Die Romantische Schule: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des deutschen Geistes (Berlin: Weidmann, 1914), 208–209. 82. Schlegel, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 4, 92. 83. See Alfred Baeumler, Das mythische Weltalter (Munich: Beck, 1965). 84. Schlegel, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 4, 92–93. 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). 87. Schlegel, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 4, 97. 88. Ibid., 95. 89. Meiners, Geschichte des Weiblichen Geschlechts, vol. 1, 357. 90. Schlegel, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 4, 101. 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. 93. Schlegel, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 4, 105. 94. For the role of women in religious feasts see Pomeroy, Goddesses, 75–78. 95. Schlegel, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 4, 106–108. 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). 6. “Kommentar,” in Goethe, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, 1006. 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 Götterdie 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. 23. Schiller, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 1, 765. 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. 34. Rehm, Griechentum und Goethezeit, 130–131. 35. Schiller, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Albert Meier and Jörg Robert, vol. 3 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2004), 348. 36. Schondorff, ed., Iphigenie, 125. 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 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

94. 95. 96. 97.

NOTES

Ibid., 38. Schondorff, ed., Iphigenie, 125. Schlegel, “Orest und Pylades,” 39 and 45. Ibid., 51. Goethe, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, 185 . Schlegel, “Orest und Pylades,” 53. Ibid., 69. Christoph Friedrich von Derschau, Orest und Pylades oder Denckmaal der Freundschaft (Liegnitz: Sigismund Abraham Waetzoldt, 1747). Ibid., 88. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 24–25. Ibid., 28–29. Ibid., 39–40. Ibid., 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. See Carl Schmitt, Politische Romantik (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1925). See chapters 1 and 2 of this book. Thorsten Valk, Der junge Goethe. Epoche, Werk, Wirkung (Munich: Beck, 2012), 21–23. Wieland, “Alceste,” 417. Wolfdieter Rasch, Goethes “Iphignie auf Tauris” als Drama der Autonomie (Munich: Beck, 1979), 8. Wieland, “Alceste,” 420. Ibid., 444. Ibid., 450. Ibid., 458. Christoph Martin Wieland, “Briefe an einen Freund über das deutsche Singspiel Alceste,” in Wieland, Wielands Werke, vols 1–2, 492–523. Ibid., 522. Ibid., 494. Ibid., 509–511. “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. Ibid., 880. Goethe, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Klaus-Detlef Mü ller, vol. 14 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1986), 706. Rehm, Griechentum und Goethezeit, 59–86. 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. 3. “Kommentar,” in Goethe, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, 1010. 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. 18. Wieland, “Alceste,” 420. 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. 26. Trevelyan, Goethe and the Greeks, 103. 27. See note 10. 28. Staiger, Goethe, 355. 29. See chapter 7. 30. See Baeumler, Das mythische Weltalter. 31. Staiger, Goethe, 351.

234

NOTES

32. Rasch, Goethes “Iphigenie auf Tauris,” 72. 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. 39. Rasch, Goethes “Iphigenie auf Tauris,” 30. 40. Ibid., 117–118. 41. “Kommentar,” in Goethe, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, 1283. 42. Rasch, Goethes “Iphigenie auf Tauris,” 123. 43. Ibid., 33. 44. Johann Lorenz Mosheim, Sittenlehre der heiligen Schirft (Helmstadt: Weygand, 1753–1770), vol. 5, 1762. 45. Rasch, Goethes “Iphigenie auf Tauris,” 58–59. 46. Staiger, Goethe, 366–367. 47. Ibid., 368. 48. Ibid., 372. 49. Rasch, Goethes “Iphigenie auf Tauris,” 150–162. 50. Staiger, Goethe, 372. 51. Ibid., 359. 52. Rasch, Goethes “Iphigenie auf Tauris,” 110. 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). 60. Gundolf, Goethe, 305. 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

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

235

Gundolf, Goethe, 305. Ibid., 315. Ibid., 145. Goethe, “Italienische Reise,” 550–554. “Kommentar,” in Goethe, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, 1301–1321 Rasch, Goethes “Iphigenie auf Tauris,” 19. Jauss, “Racine und Geothes Iphigenie,” 376. Ibid., 367–368. 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. “Kommentar,” in Goethe, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, 1310. Boyle, Goethe, vol. 1, 325–326. Adorno, “Zum Klassizismus von Goethes Iphigenie,” 504–505. Ibid., 505. Ibid., 508–509. 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. “Kommentar,” in Goethe, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, 1321. Rehm, Griechentum und Goethezeit, 131. Rasch, Goethes “Iphigenie auf Tauris,” 131–135. Ibid., 138. Ibid., 22. I am indebted to Jonathan Teubner for this point and for the reference to Harnack. Adolf von Harnack, Reden und Aufsätze, vol. 1 (Gieszen: J. Ricker’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1904), 64. Goethe, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, 605 . 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 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

NOTES

Ibid., 98 . See Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition. Boyle, Goethe, vol. 1, 99 . 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. Boyle, Goethe, vol. 1, 197. Valk, Der junge Goethe, 107–113. Goethe, Werke vol. 28 ed. Wilhelm Große (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1997). Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werther, 73. Goethe, “Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit,” in Goethe, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, 83. Boyle, Goethe, vol. 1, 194. Goethe to Herder, July 10 1772. Goethe, Werke vol. 28, 255–256. 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. Johann Gottfried Herder, “Shakespeare,” in Herder, Werke in zehn Bänden, vol. 2, 525–527. Ibid., 520. Montesquieu, Persian Letters, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 175. 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). On rise of Academies and on Leibniz see Dilthey, “Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert und die geschichtliche Welt.” 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). Meiners, “Vorrede,” in Meiners, Geschichte des Ursprungs. See Edward Gibbon, Essai sur l’étude de la littérature (London: Becket and Hondt, 1762). Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Sciences and Arts,” in Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, 9. See Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible, 160–168. Ibid., 159. 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

34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

46.

47. 48.

49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55.

237

Verknüpfung von Bibel und Poesie im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Munich: Beck, 1977). Herder, “Vom Einfluss,” 10 . “Alles mag die Kunst schaffen können, nur nicht Natur.” Ibid, 16. 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. Herder, “Vom Einfluss,” 23 . Herder, “Vom Einfluss,” 24. “Die Regierung unter der allein Natur, rechtes Ma ß und Verhä ltnis stattfindet ist, -Freiheit.” Meiners, Geschichte des Ursprungs, 1. Ibid. Herder, “Vom Einfluss,” 27 . Meiners, Geschichte des Ursprungs, vol. 2, 2. 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. See the introduction in Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition. 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. Hans-Dietrich Irmscher, “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, 2005), 256. Irmscher, “Die geschichtsphilosophische Kontroverse,” 119. 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. Irmscher, “Die geschichtsphilosophische Kontroverse,” 128–131. See Irmscher, “Nationalität und Humanität im Denken Herders,” Orbis Littterarum 49 (1994), 189–215. 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. Irmscher, “Goethe und Herder,” 239. Herder, “Ideen,” 523. Ibid., 527. 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 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), 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. 65. Trevelyan, Goethe and the Greeks, 125. 66. Goethe, “Italienische Reise,” 148. 67. Curtius, “Goethe und Italien,” 192–193. 68. Rehm, Griechentum und Goethezeit, 131. 69. Trevelyan, Goethe and the Greeks, 125. 70. Goethe, “Italienische Reise,” 42. 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. 75. Goethe, “Italienische Reise,” 233. 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. 84. Goethe, “Italienische Reise,” 300. 85. Witte, “Goethe und Homer,” 34. 86. Goethe, “Italienische Reise,” 323. 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

89. 90. 91. 92.

93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106.

107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125.

239

Goethe, “Italienische Reise,” 323. Ibid., 209. Ibid., 381. See Karl Philipp Moritz, “Götterlehre oder Mythologische Dichtungen der Alten,” in Moritz, Werke, ed. Horst Gü nther, vol. 2. (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1981). Voltaire, Candide: Or Optimism, trans. Theo Cuffe (London: Penguin, 2005). Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, 234. Ibid., 246. Herder, “Ideen,” 647–649. Ibid., 668. Ibid., 669–670. Goethe, “Italienische Reise,” 393. Moritz, “Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen,” in Moritz, Werke, vol. 2, 958–991. See note 91. Moritz, “Götterlehre,” 669–670. Ludwig Curtius, “Goethe und die Antike,” Neue Jahrbücher fuer wissenschaftliche Bildung 8, no. 4 (1932), 295. Moritz, “Götterlehre,” 635. Ibid., 638 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). Moritz, “Götterlehre,” 662. Beiser, The Fate of Reason, 153–164. Johann Gottfried Herder, “Gott: Einige Gespräche,” in Herder, Werke in zehn Bänden, vol. 4, 720. Ibid., 739. Ibid., 712. Ibid., 764. Irmscher, “Die geschichtsphilosophische Kontroverse,” 141 . Moritz, “Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen,” 986. Ibid., 990. Bernhard Neutsch, “Antiken-Erlebnisse Goethes in Italien und ihre Nachklä nge,” Heidelberger Jahrbücher 7 (1963), 88. Goethe, “Italienische Reise,” 546. Curtius, “Goethe und Italien,” 189. Goethe, “Italienische Reise,” 371. Ibid., 372. Ibid., 395. Rehm, Griechentum und Goethezeit, 164. Hans-Heinrich Reuter, “Herder und die Antike,” 170. Curtius, “Goethe und die Antike,” 297. See Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, vol. 2, Revolution and Renunciation (1790–1803) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991).

240

NOTES

126. Goethe, “Italienische Reise,” 542. 127. Ernst-Richard Schwinge, “Goethe und die Poesie der Griechen,” in Schwinge, ed. “Uralte Gegenwart,” 49. 128. Goethe, “Faust I,” 61 . 129. Goethe, “Italienische Reise,” 545. 

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 zwischen 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. 9. Goethe, “Italienische Reise,” 441. 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. 29. De Pauw, Philosophical Dissertations on the Greeks, vol. 1, 51. 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 romantische ‘Totalitätspathos’ her, wie es gerade an Friedrich Schlegels Religionsbegriff ablesbar ist, der zunächst auf die geschichtsphilosophische 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 ntiert 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: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992), 706–810. 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. 71. Schiller, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 4, 34. 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. 81. Rehm, Griechentum und Goethezeit, 79. 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: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998), 89–115. 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. 102. Herder, “Homer ein Günstling der Zeit,” 100. 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. 108. Herder, “Homer ein Günstling der Zeit,” 104. 109. Goethe, “Einleitung in die Propyläen,” 462. 110. Ibid., 467. 111. Schlegel, Über das Studium der Griechischen Poesie, 215. 112. Goethe, “Einleitung in die Propyläen,” 486. 113. Schlegel, Über das Studium der Griechischen Poesie, 231. 114. Ibid., 238.

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Inde x

Achilles, 87, 98, 108, 164, 169 in French and German theatre, 115–16, 120 Goethe and, 201–4 Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund (1903–1969), 110, 119, 139, 145–6 Aeschylus, 99, 108 Agamemnon, 94, 108, 115–16, 136 Alceste. See Wieland allegory, 7, 44, 50–1. See also Winckelmann: Essay on Allegory Antigone, 83, 100–1 Apelles, 13 Apollo, 45, 53, 103–4, 173 Apollo, Belvedere, 170 Aristophanes, 61, 89 Aristotle, 35, 43, 50, 102 Aron, Erich, 5, 12, 17, 125 art historical development of, 30–3, 39 and morality, 14, 16, 20–1, 51, 130–2, 160–1, 205–7 taste and, 42–3 Aspasia, 25, 66–7, 83, 86, 89–90, 95, 100–2 Athens, 32, 57–67, 101–5, 156, 161

in morality, 95–105, 192–3 religious power of, 29–30, 66, 89, 103, 108 Beiser, Frederick, 41, 158 Berger, Arnold, 13, 44 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 9, 33 Bible, 13, 15, 41, 49, 69, 156–7, 160, 184–5 body. See also beauty, sculpture, sensuality and climate, 11 and exercise, 9, 12, 22–5, 32, 95, 104–5, 124 and form, 6, 13, 17, 19, 29, 176–8, 206 and pain, 45–9, 192 Böhmer, Caroline, 91, 96, 105 Böttiger, Karl August, 60–1, 67, 84, 86, 88 Boyle, Nicholas, 129, 139, 145, 153 Braun, Otto, 38 Brooke, Christopher, 44 Brown, John (1715–1766), 14–15, 16, 159, 161, 168 Burke, Edmund, 15 Butler, Eliza Marian (1885–1959), 11, 125

Bachofen, Johann Jacob, 64, 174 Baeumler, Alfred, 101, 135 baroque, 5, 8, 21, 33, 170 beauty, 99, 171 causes of, 9, 11 interpretations of, 17–22

Carl August, Duke of Saxony, Weimar and Eisenach, 7, 129, 136, 162 Catholicism, 161 Chardin, Jean, 11 Christ, 49, 69

260

INDEX

Christianity, 12, 15, 16, 147–8, 166, 167, 186 and death, 55, 114, 165 and friendship, 34–6 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 48 Clytemnestra, 94, 99, 100, 108, 116, 136 competition, 9, 22, 31, 33, 161, 189, 196. See also body, friendship, games, sensuality Constant, Benjamin, 188 Constantine, David, 203 courtesans. See Hetaerae Curtius, Ernst (1814–1896), 34 Curtius, Ludwig, 162–4, 176–7 death ancients and, 52–5, 114, 165 in philhellenic theatre, 113, 125–8, 133 Decultot, Elisabeth, 11 democracy, 30, 70, 83, 87, 96, 102, 104–5, 156 Derschau, Christoph Friedrich, 122–3 Diderot, Denis, 6, 21 Dilthey, Wilhelm, (1833–1911) 17, 27–8, 30, 68 Diotima, 58, 75, 81, 83. See also Schlegel, Friedrich Dubos, Jean-Baptiste (1670–1742), 11 duty, 110, 113–14, 130, 132 education, 12. See also women Egypt, 16, 40 Empfindsamkeit, 125–6 Enlightenment, 28–9, 41, 133 and historiography, 2, 12, 37, 67, 75 Epaminondas, 17, 23, 33, 34, 37 Ephraim, Charlotte, 47 Eros, 17 ethics and ancient Greece, 5

and history, 59, 65–6, 69, 76–81 and symbols, 44 Euripides, 50, 100, 126, 141, 191 Iphigenia in Aulis, 107–8, 114–19, 121, 127, 190 and Schiller, 110, 116 fate, 48–9, 51, 53–5, 68, 99, 173–4 and Goethe, 133–5, 203 in theatre, 108, 114–15, 117, 191 femininity. See also women, friendship Greek, 58–9, 62, 99, 101–5 religious power of, 68–9, 71, 86, 89, 93, 103, 132, 139–40, 144, 147 Fontius, Martin, 11 Forster, Georg, 77, 79, 96 freedom in ancient Greece, 30–1, 120, 155–60, 188–9 in morality, 110–14, 159, 182–5, 189, 191–3 French Revolution, 96, 190, 192, 194–5 friendship between men in ancient Greece, 33–7, 94–5, 98, 169, 203 between Orestes and Pylades, 119, 121–3 Winckelmann and, 7, 34–6 games, 9, 22, 50, 66, 95, 161, 196 Genie, 3, 42, 109, 153–5, 167–8, 175–6 in philosophy of history, 152, 190–1, 195–8 George-Kreis, 17, 141 George, Stefan, 35, 141 Gesner, Johann Mathias, 36 Gibbon, Edward, 34, 68 God, 15, 109, 111, 137, 151, 153, 173–5, 177, 187, 200 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749–1832)

INDEX

Achilleis, 201–3 Egmont, 112–13 On Epic and Dramatic poetry (with Schiller), 204 Faust, 109, 148, 170, 179, 185 Gods, heroes and Wieland, 127 Götz von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand, 111 Introduction to the Propyläen, 205–7 Iphigenie auf Tauris, 107, 109–10, 129–49, 171, 195 Italian Journey, 143, 162–79 On Laocoon, 48–9 Nausikaa, 168–9, 202 Prometheus, 109, 153 Sorrows of Young Werther, 107, 109, 143, 154, 169, 192, 197, 199–200 Torquato Tasso, 112 Triumph of Sensibility, 114, 133–4, 154 Winckelmann and his century, 35 Goguet, Antoine-Yves (1716–1758), 23, 40, 69–70, 74, 91–2 Gombrich, Ernst, 6, 31, 40, 120 Gomme, A. W., 83, 85 Gottsched, Johann Christoph, 115, 119 grandeur, 12, 17 Gundolf, Friedrich, 133, 140–6, 148 Guyer, Paul, 19 Hamann, Johann Georg (1730– 1788), 12–15, 28, 151–3, 160 Hamilton, Sir William, 170 Harloe, Katherine, 1, 11, 29, 32 Harnack, Adolf von, 148 Hebrews, 15, 157 Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm (1770–1831), 43, 148 Heinse, Wilhelm, 44, 48, 127 Helen of Troy, 95, 99, 108, 175 Heller, Erich, 140, 169

261

Herder, Johann Gottfried (1744–1803) Do We Still Have a Public and a Fatherland Like the Ancients?, 42 God: Some Dialogues, 173–5, 177 How the ancients conceived of death, 55 Ideas on a philosophical history of mankind, 158–62, 172–3 Is the Beauty of the Body a Sign of the Beauty of the Soul?, 19 Nemesis, 50–2, 124, 140, 161, 172, 174 Older Critical Forest, 38 On the Effect of Poetic Art on the Morals of Peoples in Ancient and Modern Times, 14 Plastik (On Sculpture), 19–20, 171, 205 prize essay on Winckelmann, 40 This Too a Philosophy of History, 41 Herodotus, 22, 30, 32, 38–9 heroic age, 5, 7–8, 87, 168 in French theatre, 115–16 in Greek tragedy and epic, 91–9 hetaerae, 25, 66–8, 83–91, 101–3 Heyne, Christian Gottlob, 58, 91, 96 Hippel, Theodor von, 69 Hirt, Aloys Ludwig, 48 historicism, 27–8, 143, 158 historicity, of Greece, 6, 27–34, 38, 95 Hogarth, William, 10 Homer, 18, 47, 99, 153, 154, 168, 169, 186–7, 189 and death, 53–4 Iliad, 12, 13, 16, 36, 92, 98, 112, 201–2 Odyssey, 167, 170 and Winckelmann, 6–7, 44 homosexuality, 75, 95 Humanität, 107, 130, 132, 135–8, 140, 143, 145–9

262

INDEX

Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 43 Hume, David, 44, 63 Iliad. See Homer Iphigenia. See Euripides, Goethe, theatre Irmscher, Hans-Dietrich, 158, 160 Jacobs, Friedrich (1764–1847), 59, 97, 102–3 History of the female sex, principally of the courtesans in Athens, 83–91 Jauss, Hans-Robert, 144–5, 198 Jupiter, 16 Justi, Carl (1832–1912), 10, 11, 31, 34 Kames, Henry Home Lord, 69, 73 Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804), 12, 15, 96, 173–5, 192, 197 Answer to the question ‘what is Enlightenment?,’ 194 Conjectures on the beginnings of human history, 182–4, 188 Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals, 183–4 and Herder, 172 on moral freedom, 159 on race, 79 and Rousseau, 6 and Schiller, 110 Kalokagathia, 18, 19, 36 Kaufmann, Angelika, 176 knowledge, esoteric, 16–17, 41, 125, 134–5, 141, 186–7, 190, 195–6 la Grange Chancel, Joseph de, 115, 117–19 la Touche, Guimond de, 118–19 Lafitau, François-Joseph, 14, 16, 160 Lais, 83, 86, 102–3 language

Greek, 7, 54–5 Herder and, 12–13 significance of, 13, 153 Laocoon, 12, 45–6, 124, 140. See also Goethe, Lessing, Winckelmann lawgiver, 15, 78, 157–8, 189. See also Lycurgus, Moses, Solon Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 13, 28, 154 Lengerfeld, Caroline von, 190 Lenz, Carl Gotthold, 67, 85, 87–8, 91–4, 96–7, 100, 105 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729–1781) How the ancients conceived of death, 52–5, 114 Laocoon, 44–8 Lotter, Friedrich, 76 Luther, Martin, 69, 148, 151, 155 luxury, 63–7 Lycurgus, 16, 37, 188–9 Mähly, Jacob August, 94–5, 98 Mann, Thomas, 29 Marchand, Suzanne, 1 masculinity, 9, 17–18, 22, 35–6, 95, 98. See also body, competition, friendship, Olympic Games measure, sense of. See also art, morality in bodily form, 10 in history, 157, 161–2, 172 in theatre, 100, 131 as virtue of art and morality, 10, 19–20, 43, 46, 51–2, 175, 204 Meinecke, Friedrich (1862–1954), 17, 27–30, 32 Meiners, Christoph (1747–1810), 2, 24, 96, 100, 102, 155, 181–2, 187 History of the female sex, 63, 69–80, 90 History of the Luxury of the Athenians, 25, 65–7, 86

INDEX

History of the Origin, Progress and Decline of the Sciences in Greece and Rome, 156–8 Reflections on the love of men among the Greeks, 36–7 Mendelssohn, Moses, 46 Mengs, Anton Raphael, 10, 131 Millar, John, 69–70, 73 Miller, Norbert, 115 mimesis, 167 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de, 12, 23–4, 25 Persian Letters, 155–6 Spirit of the Laws, 63–4, 117 morality. See art, beauty, freedom Moritz, Karl Philipp (1756–1793), 171, 173–7 Möser, Justus, 112, 153 Moses, 15, 153, 187–8 Müller, Günther, 132 music, 14, 159–61, 168 Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844–1900), 17, 138, 146, 166, 189, 201 Odysseus, 116, 120, 164, 168–9, 202 Odyssey. See Homer Orestes, 108, 117–18, 195 Goethe and, 129, 130–2, 135–8, 146–7, 168, 190 Orient, 52, 72–3, 102 Orrells, Daniel, 36 pain. See body passions, 10, 19–20, 42, 44, 154. See also art, morality in theatre, 115, 118, 144 Pausanias, 32, 50, 54, 89 Pauw, Cornelius de (1739–1799), 23, 25, 58, 66, 69, 74–5, 83–5, 187 Pericles, 32, 66, 89, 102 Phidias, 9, 12, 13, 16, 32, 50, 90

263

Phryne, 30, 66, 83, 93, 103 Pindar, 9, 25, 126, 154, 161 Plato, 16, 23, 15, 53, 74, 104 Laws, 62, 65 Phaedrus, 18, 29, 35–6 Symposium, 101, 105 Plutarch, 23, 111 poetry, 5, 8, 14–16 Protestantism, 27–8, 41, 147–8, 151–3 providence, 41, 134–5, 152, 154, 155, 160, 171–2, 200 race, 75–81 Racine, Jean, 114–17, 121, 144, 145 Rasch, Wolfdieter, 132, 135–9, 144–8 Regenbogen, Otto, 201–2, 204 Rehm, Walther (1901–1963), 1, 5, 11, 17, 18, 35–6, 125, 200, 201 on Iphigenie auf Tauris, 115, 145, 147 Reitemeier, Johann Friedrich, 73–4, 81 religion, 29, 46, 50, 109. See also beauty, Christianity, femininity rhetoric, 31, 33, 38, 42, 158, 161–2 Robertson, John, 186 Romanticism, 34 Rome, 31, 48, 53, 55, 63–4 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712– 1778), 34, 40, 58, 135, 157, 159, 172 Discourse on the origins of inequality, 6–7, 176 and Herder, 157 Letter to D’Alembert on the theatre, 57, 87, 97–8, 120 and Schiller, 192–3, 197, 199–200

264

INDEX

Schadewaldt, Wolfgang (1900–1974), 6, 44, 125 Schiller, Friedrich (1759–1805), 116, 135 Die Räuber, 110–14 On epic and dramatic poetry (with Goethe), 204 On the Grounds of Enjoyment in Tragic Pieces, 191–2 Jena lectures, 181–9 Kabale und Liebe, 111, 113–14 Letters on the aesthetic education of man, 193–6 On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, 191–2, 197, 199 On the Tragic Art, 191 Über Anmut und Würde, 193 Wilhelm Tell, 112, 188 Schlegel, Friedrich (1772–1829), 58–9, 83–5, 91, 94, 198–9 On Diotima, 60–1, 95, 101–5 On the Representation of Female Characters in the Greek Poets, 95–100 On the Study of Greek poetry, 202–7 Schlegel, Johann Elias, 119–21 scholarship in East Germany, 38 Enlightenment and, 29 of the twentieth century, 3, 17, 101, 125, 162–4, 176–7, 201–3 Schröter, Corona, 129 Schwinge, Ernst-Richard, 38, 178, 190 sculpture, 19–20, 22, 46, 49–50, 176–8. See also body sensuality, 18, 101, 128. See also body Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of (1671– 1713), 18, 21, 30, 34, 36 Shakespeare, William, 42, 154–5 Sheehan, Jonathan, 15 Shklar, Judith, 40 sight. See vision

slavery, 73, 85, 92–3, 103 Smith, Adam (1723–1790), 45, 48, 63, 67, 69 Socrates, 90, 151–2, 160 and Diotima, 101, 103 and youth, 9, 36 Solon, 65, 72–3, 102, 188–9, 202 Sonenscher, Michael, 6 Sophocles, 25, 32, 45, 99–100, 108, 119 Sparta, 16, 58, 61, 104–5, 188 Spinoza, Baruch, 174, 175 Staiger, Emil, 131, 134–5, 137–9, 145–6 Stein, Charlotte von, 162, 196 stoicism, 44, 199 Sturm und Drang, 42, 112, 127, 151–5, 176, 207 Szondi, Peter, 197 Tacitus, 68–9, 71, 74 Tantalid cycle, 108 theatre. See also Goethe, Schiller, tragedy, Wieland in France, 114–19 in Germany before Goethe, 119–23 by Goethe and Schiller in the 1770s and 1780s, 110–14, 169 women and, 57–62 theodicy, 154–5, 159, 171–9, 200 Thomas, Antoine Léonard, 90 Tischbein, Johann Heinrich, 170, 171 touch, sense of, 20 tragedy, 95–100, 108–9, 190, 205. See also theatre Trevelyan, Humphrey, 131, 133–4, 162, 165 Troy, 91–3, 99 truth, 142, 175 in art, 21, 154, 167, 168, 171, 174, 178 in theatre, 119, 130, 139, 143, 146–8

INDEX

Valk, Thorsten, 125 Vallentin, Berthold (1877–1933), 17, 35 Vico, Giambattista, 8 Virgil, 46, 93 Virgin Mary, 69 vision, 6, 7, 176–9, 204, 206–7. See also art, morality Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), 12, 36, 156, 172, 175 Oreste, 135–6, 144 Voss, Heinrich, 201 Warburton, William, 50, 185–7 Wieland, Christoph Martin (1733– 1813), 59, 61, 83–4, 86 Alceste, 123–8, 133, 173 Winckelmann, Johann, Joachim (1717–1768) Essay on Allegory, 7, 44, 53

265

History of the Art of Antiquity, 18–19, 22–3, 28–34 On the Imitation of Greek Works in Sculpture and Painting, 10, 45–6, 124 Remarks on the History of the Art of Antiquity, 48–9 Wokler, Robert, 78 Wolf, Friedrich August, 202 women. See also femininity and debate on luxury, 63–7 and education, 86–90, 101–5 position in Athens and antiquity, 37, 57–67, 70, 73–4, 83–93 power over men, 72, 86, 90 Wood, Robert (1717–1771), 50, 91, 159, 167–8, 186–7, 202–3 youth, 43, 173 German, 7 Greek, 8–9