Philosophy of History", beginning with a sketch of the progress of man from his childhood in the East, through his boyhood in Egypt and Phoenicia and his youth in Greece, till in Rome he reached man's estate, and attained his still maturer years in the Middle Ages and in modern times.

Here, as elsewhere, he touches on the question of the originality of Greece: That Greece received from some other quarter the seeds of civilisation, language, arts and sciences, is, to my mind, undeniable, and it can be clearly proved in the case of some of them,-Sculpture, Architecture, Mythology, and Literature. But that the Greeks, practically, did not receive all this; that, on the contrary, they gave it an entirely new nature, that, in each kind, the Beautiful, in the proper sense of that term, is certainly their work ;— this, I think, is obvious2.

Similar opinions recur in his 'Thoughts on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind' (1784-91), a vast work, only partially completed during his latest days at Weimar. Near the middle. he dwells on the Education of the Human Race', and, in the latter half, surveys the growth of civilisation in ancient times and in the Middle Ages, devoting two most suggestive books to Greece and Italy. With Greece the morning breaks', -such are the opening words of the enthusiastic passage on Greek life and history that was specially admired by Heyne and Goethe'. In other works connected with classical antiquity" he shows an interest in the historical treatment of the growth of Greek civilisation and especially of Greek poetry and art, regarding both of them as a 'School of Humanity'.

He is peculiarly interested in Homer. He was in fact one of the first to elucidate the general character of the Homeric poems. He finds in them the fullest illustration of the idiosyncrasy of national poetry".

1 Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte, 1774 (v 475 f S).

2 v 498 fS; cp. Nevinson, 212-5. 3 Ideen, books viii-ix (vol. xiii S).

4 xiii and xiv (Bursian, i 461 f), reserved for vol. xiv S. Ideen, book xiii init.; Nevinson, 366.

Ursachen des gesunkenen Geschmacks, 1775 (v 595 S); Ueber die Wirkung der Dichtkunst, 1781 (viii 334 f); Briefen zur Beförderung der Humanität, series 3-8, 1794-6 (vols. xvii, xviii); cp. Bursian, i 463.

7 Ueber Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker, 1773 (v 322). His later writings include Homer ein Günstling der Zeit, 1795 (xviii 420), and Homer und das Epos, 1803 (xxiv 229, cp. 233); cp. Bursian, i 464 f.

Homer is unique. When Homer had sung, we could expect no second Homer in his particular type of poetry; he had plucked the flower of the epic crown, and his successors were fain to rest content with the leaves alone. Hence the tragic poets took another line; they ate, indeed, as Aeschylus says, from the table of IIomer, but they also prepared for the age, in which they lived, another kind of banquet1.

In the context he contrasts Epic poetry with History, and with Tragedy, and elsewhere he enters on a full discussion of Aristotle's definition of the latter3. He produced metrical renderings of nine of the Olympian Odes of Pindar', and wrote an enthusiastic description of his characteristics as a poet. He also discriminated between the several periods and types of Greek lyric poetry in his Essay on 'Alcaeus and Sappho". He is specially interested in Horace'. In his essay on the critical efforts of the past century, he duly recognises the importance of Bentley", and even notices the lesser lights, William Baxter and Thomas Creech'.

His interest in ancient art is specially displayed in two treatises. In his work on Sculpture" he observes with surprise that Lessing had not cared to distinguish between Sculpture and Painting. Herder accordingly endeavours to establish the laws of this distinction. His short treatise 'on the Representation of Death by the Ancients'" suggests that the 'Genius with the inverted torch' on Greek tombs is not (as Lessing held) Death, the brother of Sleep, but Sleep, the brother of Death, or possibly a mourning Cupid. This last thought finds an echo in Herder's pathetic poem on the death of Lessing". Finally, he insists on the importance, and indeed the necessity, of the study of ancient Art for the study of classical literature13.

1 xxiv 244 Suphan.

3 Das Drama, xxiii 346–369 S.

Pindar ein Bote der Götter, xxiv 335 S.

7 xxvi 213 f S.

8 xxiv 183 f S.

2 xxiv 241 f, 244 f, S.

4 xxvi 188 fS.

6 xxvii 182-198 S.

9 xxiv 198 f, 223 f, S; also Samuel Clarke, ib. 225 f. 10 Plastik, 1778 (vol. viii Suphan); Nevinson, 310-4.

11 Zerstreute Blätter, 1786 (iv 656 f S), 17962.

13 Der Tod, ein Gespräch an Lessings Grabe, in Zerstreute Blätter, i (1785, 17912), xxviii 135 S.

13 xx 283 f Suphan.-First edition of Herder's Works in 45 vols. in three series, Tübingen, 1805-20; best ed. in 32 vols. ed. Suphan, 1877-99--. Cp.

Wieland

In the latter part of a long literary career, Christian Martin Wieland (1733-1813) did much for the diffusion of an interest in the old classical world, although the influence of French literature is apparent in his classical romances, the best known of which is Agathon, while the modern element is also prominent in his poem, Musarion. He had a far higher appreciation of Euripides than of Aristophanes, and one of his favourite authors was Xenophon. He produced a rather free translation of nearly the whole of Lucian, with notes on points of textual, historical, or aesthetic criticism (1788-9). He had already translated the Epistles and Satires of Horace (1782-6), and, in his 75th year, he began a rendering of Cicero's Letters in chronological order, a work completed by Gräter (1808-21). The Attisches Museum, which he founded, and edited in 1796-1811, included translations of Attic writers of the ages of Pericles and Alexander1. Among Wieland's pupils at Erfurt was Wilhelm Heinse (1746-1803), Heinse the translator of Petronius, and the author of the romance of Ardinghello (1787), the scene of which is laid in Italy in the sixteenth century. Like his Letters, it gives abundant proof of the familiarity with ancient and modern art, which he had acquired during a residence of three years in that classic land.

Heyne

Among professional scholars, Christian Gottlob Heyne (17291812) has been justly praised for the new interest in ancient literature and ancient art, which he awakened both by his teaching and by his published works. He was the eldest son of a poor weaver in Upper Saxony, and, as a boy at school, when he first heard of a tyrannicide, he burned to be a Brutus and thus to avenge the wrongs inflicted on his parents by the tyranny of middle-men. Having no text-books of his own, he was compelled to borrow those of his school-fellows, and to Julian Schmidt, ii 316–326, 352–5; 415–423; 446–450; 463-8; 490-4, 596-601; 686-690; H. Nevinson's Herder and his Times, 1884, and the earlier literature there quoted; later Lives in German by Haym (1880-5), Kuehnemann (1895) and Buerkner (1904), also Suphan in Goedeke's Grundrisz, IV i 274-282, with bibliography, ib. 282—299 (18912); cp. Herder's Ansichten des kl. Alterthums, ed. Danz, 1805-6; G. A. Schöll, Herder's Verdienst um Würdigung der Antike und der bildenden Kunst, and A. G. Gernhard, Herder als Humanist, pp. 193 f and 255 f of Weimarisches Herder-Album (Jena, 1845); L. Keller, Herder und die Kultgesellschaften des Humanismus (Berlin, 1904); and Bursian, i 454–469. Portrait in Nevinson, and several in Könnecke, 248 f.

1 Bursian, i 470-5. Portraits in Könnecke, 242 f. Cp. Goethe's farce Götter, Helden und Wieland.

9 Bursian, i 475 f; portrait in Könnecke, 256; Ziegler in Baumeister's Handbuch, i (1) 257.

copy out the portion required for each lesson. He complains that (like others since his time) he was compelled to make Latin verses before he had read any authors, or acquired any store of words. His master himself had only 'an Owen', 'a Fabricius", a couple of 'Collections of Epigrams', and a few sacred poets, from whose pages he used to dictate verses for his pupils to paraphrase. To learn Greek he had to borrow Weller's Grammar, and his god-father's copy of Pasor". In his last year at school a new master came, by whom he was happily introduced to the Ajax of Sophocles. At the age of nineteen he went to Leipzig, there to endure all the miseries of a poor student's life. But he succeeded in gaining admission to the lectures of Ernesti, and it was thus that he first learnt what was meant by 'the interpretation' of the Classics. Professor Christ, whose lectures were 'a tissue of endless digressions', took some interest in him, and recommended the poor youth, who was almost destitute of books, to follow the example of Scaliger and read all the Classics in chronological order. Heyne had to borrow the necessary books, and for half-a-year slept for only two nights in each week, and consequently fell into a fever. At the end of four years he graduated, and in the following year some Latin verses of his attracted the attention of Count Brühl, who made him an underclerk in his library at Dresden, where Heyne shared a garret with a young divine, and was content to sleep on the floor, with a few folios for his pillow. In the library he made the acquaintance of Winckelmann, who was then preparing for his journey to Italy. During this period Heyne produced an edition of Tibullus and of Epictetus (1755-6). In the latter year Dresden was attacked by Frederic the Great, and Brühl's library was destroyed'. Heyne thereupon promptly obtained a tutorship in the Schönberg family, where he met his future wife; accompanied young Schönberg to Wittenberg, where he continued his own 1 John Owen, Epigrammata, 1624 etc.

"Georg von Goldschmied (of Chemnitz), Elegantiae Poeticae, 1554, Poemata Sacra, 1560, De re poëtica, 1565 etc.

3 Heeren, Heyne, 13.

4 Georg Pasor, Manuale graecarum vocum N. T. 1640 (Leipzig, 1735); Gramm. gr. sacra N. T. 1655.

5 Heeren, 30.

6 Heeren, 44.

7 Heeren, 62.