The gods of Greece

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The Gods of Greece is a poem by Friedrich Schiller from 1788. It was first published in Wieland's Teutschem Merkur . Schiller published a second version in 1800 in collaboration with Goethe, based on the criticism of the poet Friedrich Leopold Graf zu Stolberg . The second version appeared in the first part of his poems in 1804 and 1805 ; he then added the earlier version in the second part with the subline For the Friends of the first edition .

content

The poem describes the conception of life and nature in antiquity , which was characterized as a happy and harmonious age, and in turn depicts the Christian age as a stage of loss, joylessness, alienation and division. For Schiller, the reason for this is the replacement of the diversity of the ancient world of gods, which permeated nature and human life, by a single, comparatively abstract and distant Christian God: "Since the gods were still more human, / people were more divine." (Vers 191f. ) Only in poetry does the ideal of the ancient world live on: "What is supposed to live immortally in song / must perish in life" (last verse of the second version). The poem is an important example of the enthusiasm for antiquity in German intellectual history.

shape

The poem consists of 25 stanzas of eight verses with five or - in the case of the closing verses - four-part trochaes. Exactly half of the poem is dedicated to the description of the idyllic antiquity, which breaks off in the middle of the 13th stanza:

Where do i step
Does
this sad silence announce my creator to me? Dark, like himself, is his shell,
my renunciation - what can celebrate it. (V. 101-104)

reception

Shortly after its publication, the poem was criticized as an attack on Christianity, particularly vehemently by Count Friedrich Leopold zu Stolberg . In August 1788 he wrote in Heinrich Christian Boie's magazine Deutsches Museum : “But a spirit that seeks to make virtue despicable is not a good spirit. I see the poetic merit of this poem, but the ultimate purpose of true poetry is not itself. "

It impressed Schiller enough to encourage him to drastically rework the poem, in which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was also involved. With his criticism, Stolberg generally triggered a debate about art, antiquity and religion in poetry, in which Georg Forster , Theodor Körner and August Wilhelm Schlegel also participate.

literature

  • Helmut Koopmann : Poetic recall . In: Norbert Oellers (Ed.): Poems by Friedrich Schiller (interpretations). New edition Reclam, Stuttgart 2008, ISBN 978-3-15-009473-0 , pp. 64-83.
  • Rolf Füllmann: The epochal caesura and the experience of loss: the gods of Greece between Schiller's classic and modern new classic. - In: Regine Romberg (Ed.): Friedrich Schiller on the 250th birthday. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2014. pp. 159–173.

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