"Germany and the West, 1830-1900," in Perceptions of the Ancient Greeks, edited by K. J. Dover, Basil Blackwell, Ltd., 1992, pp. 225-45.

[In the following essay, Grafton examines the development of Hellenism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany, which contributed to the later and more pervasive growth in England. He delineates two competing strains of methodology in the German universities: one advocating the most precise forms of philology, with its narrow focus on language; the other expounding the effort to evoke ancient Greece in a more broad and holistic fashion.]

Confronting the Greeks

Early in the 1860s two Untersekundaner (fourth-formers) wandered in the fields outside their gymnasium, reciting Anacreon as they went, "filled with all the more enthusiasm for his poems as their easy Greek presented few obstacles to the understanding."¹ Their friendship continued after their departure from school in 1864, and they rented rooms together at the romantic University of Bonn, where both registered to study theology—but in the event, like many of their contemporaries, studied philology. One of them soon decided that his life's vocation lay with the science of antiquity. He attached himself to Friedrich Ritschl, leaving with him for Leipzig when the Bonn philological school exploded in a famous quarrel in 1865. Once there he lost no opportunity to berate his friend for his failure to dedicate himself also to philology, and thus make productive use of his youthful years, when he could still hope to do original work.

The young Philolog discoursed at length about the value of philology: "This is a study in which one must pay with many a drop of sweat, but also one that really rewards every effort." But he also admitted that the philologist was a very different animal from the schoolboy who light-heartedly recited Greek lyrics in the fields. He needed "erudition and routine—that is, experience and practice" to make any progress at all; and "for that one needs time, much time." And he confessed that the real philologist might have to swallow a peck of scholarly dust as the price of entrance to the professional study of the eternally wise and luminous texts of the Greeks.² Thus he discouraged his friend from entering what seemed a deeply important but also a heavily trodden area of study, the development of Plato's thought. Such a field might offer rich rewards for one's Geist, but it presented few possibilities for one's career, since one could hardly hope to exhaust it or arrive at genuinely new results. Something narrower and duller would be preferable: "For your general formation [Bildung] choose the hardest and most attractive problems, but for the purpose of a dissertation a modest little out-of-the-way corner, nothing more."³

The relationship seems typical of its moment and milieu. Two young German students consider embracing scholarship as a profession. Both men encounter the Greek classics, in the original, at the newly rigorous gymnasium of the mid nineteenth century. They are charmed by simple, late poems, which appeal to their adolescent sentimentality with their idealized Fragonard imagery of lovers in a classical landscape. Both learn to read a far wider range of texts, and to do so methodically, at university,* thanks to the equally new and even more rigorous research seminars which required them not only to master a range of scholarly tools and materials but also to use these to produce original arguments. Both are invited by their teachers to grasp the goals and ideals of that proudest and newest of nineteenth-century sciences, Altertumswissenschaft, the rigorous and comprehensive study of the ancient world. This interdisciplinary enterprise, designed by Heyne, Wolf and Böckh, sought both to establish the texts of all works of Greek literature critically and to understand them historically, as their authors themselves had, in the light of the context in which they were first produced and read. And both are forced by their situation to confront the process of professionalization that characterized the practice of this science by the middle of the nineteenth century.

To be a professional student of Greek, a true philologist, one had to "produce" original interpretations; and to find texts from which one could produce them one might have to move from classical to late texts, from the literary to the technical, from the interesting to the unrewarding. The philologist's picture of classical Greece, in short, might show little of that noble simplicity which had inspired the Hellenic revival of the end of the eighteenth century; might, indeed, reveal nothing but a cliffface of disparate data, loci difficiliores and conflicting traditions to be scaled competitively by young men in search of jobs rather than enlightenment. So much for the effort to provide Bildung (education) through Wissenschaft (science) that had inspired Wolf and Humboldt to reform the German universities by example and regulation. So much also for the enterprise of understanding the great ancient writers not anachronistically, as the philosophes had read them, but historically, in the light of the full matrix of social, personal, institutional and literary factors within which their works took shape. The modern hunt for a subject boring enough to lack an existing literature had begun; and the older boy explained its rules to the younger one with skill and zest. One apprentice initiated another into the most characteristic intellectual craft of post-revolutionary Europe: the philology that provided a new career for many sons of pastors and a safely unpolitical general education for the broad new group of Gebildete (educated). The tyranny of Germany over Greece seems well established, comfortable, safe.

In fact, however, there is a good deal wrong with this picture. The younger, hesitant partner in these discussions was Paul Deussen, who eventually became a famous and productive Indologist. The older, confident one, the professional philologist smoothly ascending the ladder until he won a chair while in his twenties, was Friedrich Nietzsche—whose later career would see the smooth upward arc of his early professional success sharply broken off, and whose later writing would include many denunciations of the smugly limited aspirations he had urged his friend to accept at the conditio sine qua non of the study of antiquity.⁴ In eavesdropping on their intercourse we certainly do not overhear two normal young upwardly mobile philologists.

Even more surprising is the picture of a German classical training that emerges from the records they left. Normal histories of German classical scholarship in the nineteenth century insist that one great set of fighting issues clove the profession as a whole into warring camps: textual critics bent on clarifying and emending works of literature and cultural historians bent on evoking the life of Greece as a whole. The great quarrel that drove Ritschl from Bonn was inspired by this division. He was the leading younger proponent of the textualist school of Hermann, and his opponents at Bonn repeatedly ridiculed his obsession with petty textual details and his students' disdain for and ignorance of wider issues:

He keeps his students busy exclusively with the formal exercises of philological criticism. Knowledge of the real life of antiquity, its history, its conditions, its literature, is on so low a level as it is here at no other German university. No semester passes without the promotion multa cum laude of some philologist who knows nothing of the existence of Thucydides, confuses Ammianus with Appian, makes conjectures on Livy but doesn't know the content of the chapters in question. . . .⁵

Jahn, his opponent, stood by contrast for a far wider and more engaged concept of classical studies, for the direct study of ancient art as well as the correction of ancient texts and for the drawing of political lessons from the past. So much the adult participants in these quarrels knew.

At the time, however, things looked entirely different and far less clear-cut to the student pygmies who stood amazed as their gigantic professors built and broke their theoretical Valhallas. Nietzsche saw his teacher's brand of philology as relevant to far more than textual criticism. In summer 1871, instructing his Basle students about the study of the classics in general, Nietzsche defined the field as springing from the "the wish to understand a classical Dasein".⁶ He found it perfectly reasonable to insist that a rigorous training in source-criticism and textual emendation made the best of preparations for what sounds like a holistic, intuitive enterprise. For all classical scholarship rested on the systematic philological criticism that Ritschl had inherited, ultimately, from Richard Bentley, with its firm injunction "to test every fact and every passage with mistrust." And though Nietzsche prophesied the arrival of an "age of synthesis" in scholarship, he warned his students that they could not synthesize until they had shown themselves worthy of the existing "age of analysis". Though trained by the great textual critic, Nietzsche assumed that philology was a historical and interpretative enterprise—a thesis his teacher sometimes downplayed and sometimes attacked. Deussen saw even less difference than Nietzsche did between Ritschl and Jahn. Both had proved excruciating bores in the classroom, the one obsessed with variants and the other with bibliography. The rigorous philology of the professionals seemed to Deussen to obscure, not illuminate, the classical texts they were supposed to interpret: "their manner . . . alienated me, with my soul full as it was with the splendour of classical antiquity, more and more from classical philology".⁷ Evidently, then as now, the experience of study in a school or university could differ sharply in its texture not only from one cohort, but also from one student to the next—far more so than one could possibly suspect from a distance. That limitation must be borne in mind throughout this chapter.⁸

Mastering the Greeks

It is possible, to be sure, to describe some aspects of the nineteenth century vision of the Greek past with an appearance of rigour. To begin, in period fashion, with what are usually taken as the facts: this was the second great age of discovery and consolidation of the Greek heritage, one of scholarly achievements more astounding in scale and more sweeping in effect than any since the sixteenth century. In Germany the Humboldtian programme for university reform, which insisted that independent research into the classical past was the best form of mental discipline and should become the central occupation of both professors (selbständig Forschende) and students (geleitet Forschende), had profound, if equivocal, effects. Humboldt, Niebuhr and others convinced university administrators and state ministers to offer scholars and students financial support for travel, collection of information, and publication of results.⁹ Some of this support took traditional forms. The Berlin Academy of Sciences, long a centre of debate about important philological issues, continued to propose prize essay topics for debate and to reward the winners with bursaries and publication of their essays. But it also began to offer support for large-scale, long-term enterprises. In 1815 it provided a first grant of 6,000 talers for a corpus of Greek inscriptions, to be supervised by a committee headed by Böckh and including Bekker, Buttmann, Niebuhr and Schleiermacher. The first, enormous volume appeared in 1828; the fourth and last in 1877.¹⁰ This vast array of texts and commentaries represented a first effort at what became one characteristic form of German philology: large-scale scholarly enterprises resembling the new corporations of the day in their substantial capital foundations, large boards of directors, long-term planning, and spectacular creative energies. The results were dramatic: this new Corpus displaced the standard one produced more than two centuries before by two great late Renaissance scholars, Joseph Scaliger and Janus Gruter. The new Corpus was specialized where the old had included both Greek and Latin. The new one exploited the sources intensively, subjecting them to intense philological dissection, where the old had printed bare texts with only a small number of text-critical remarks. And the new one paid special attention to questions of authenticity, rejecting many reported texts as Renaissance and later fakes, where the old one had exiled only a few pages' worth of "spuria" to an isolation ward at the end of the book, and had admitted such evidently problematic texts as the Greek epitaph of one Chyndonax the Druid, found in Dijon just before 1600. Professional philology, with its dedication to pruning the record of late and faked evidence, thus visibly replaced an older humanism. And this process repeated itself in field after field, as editions of Greek texts ceased to include the Latin translations on facing pages that had made them familiar and accessible since the mid sixteenth century, and as histories of ancient Greece came to deal with strange issues, alien to the humanist tradition, such as the silver mines that had supported what Böckh reconstructed as The Public Economy of Athens. The Greek world stood forth far more clearly than ever before, in three dimensions and with many shadows; and in some lights it resembled a Daumier print more than The School of Athens.

The German scholars attacked the data in a variety of ways. Sometimes they went in for a sort of philological booty capitalism, amassing new resources in vast quantity but not processing them with equal subtlety. Immanuel Bekker, for sixty years Ordinarius in Greek at Berlin, proved the great exponent of this style of work. He showed himself dazzlingly adept at avoiding the necessity to lecture and obtaining travel funds from the Prussian government, and profited from this ability to explore libraries everywhere in Europe, collating hundreds of manuscripts and producing vastly improved texts of more than 100 Greek and Latin authors not by the sophistication of his critical method but by the new richness of his materials—though his improved Aristotle would have been an admirable life's work in itself for an ordinary scholar.¹¹ The sedentary scholars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had understood as clearly as Bekker that all texts should be established only after intensive study of the manuscript tradition. Some grasped that this process should result in the elimination of most witnesses as derivative witnesses; Wolf's famous Prolegomena to Homer began with a brilliant demonstration of precisely this point. But they had been harnessed to teaching posts that required as many as twenty hours of lectures a week, hampered by low salaries, and often required to supplement their salaries by writing enormous numbers of reviews or large works of reference. They could never have amassed materials as Bekker did—or as his Bavarian contemporary Friedrich Thiersch amassed them for analysis and partial publication in the Acta Philologorum Monacensium, with which he introduced the new methods to the southern areas of the German-speaking lands, or as the far less accurate and honest, but incredibly diligent Wilhelm Dindorf did with his Bonn corpus of Byzantine historians. As Germany gradually became industrialized, moreover, classical publishers shared the new prosperity, expanding in scale and ambition to match the efforts of the scholars. As early as 1825 Ludwig Dindorf founded that most expansive and enduring of all enterprises in publishing the classics, the Bibliotheca Teubneriana, which gradually replaced the traditional, neo-classically elegant eighteenth-century Greek texts with their austere modern counterparts, more solid of apparatus if devoid of helpful Latin translations. The Berlin houses of Weidmann and Calvary were equally indispensable parts of the material base of the new Geisteswissenschaften.

Often the new scholarship rose from primitive accumulation to sophisticated exploitation. Hellenists had known since the Renaissance that one could not trace the history of any Greek literary genre, from lyric poetry to philosophy, except by reconstructing lost texts by the patient tracing and reassembly of their fragments. By the late eighteenth century, again, all Hellenists knew that sort of work was vitally needed, and the more ambitious of them assigned the collection of the fragments of one author to their best students as an appropriate dissertation topic. The enterprise had many advantages. It forced the young man who undertook it to work through the whole range of Greek literary texts, and many other, less appealing works as well: the scholiasts, lexicographers, and compilers whose tedious (and sometimes unedited) works were marbled with the richest veins of quotation, and whom any philologist had to know if he really hoped to be a Hellenist. Heyne's son-in-law Heeren described this process vividly: "I went about it with the enthusiasm of youth. I read and excerpted all the grammarians and scholiasts in print, without exception (afterwards also some in manuscript at the Royal Library in Paris . . . ) until, half-blind, I could shut my Eustathius. The fruit of this was a—perhaps fairly complete—collection of the fragments of the Greek lyric poets," which never reached print because of Heeren's ineptitude at metrics.¹² Heyne had a more gifted pupil to edit Stesichorus, and Wolf another to edit Antimachus of Colophon. Many prose authors received similar treatment in the transitional years around 1800. Schleiermacher helped to begin the first great modern philological journal, the Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, with an elaborate treatment of "The fragments of Heraclitus the obscure", and Gottfried Bernhardy, moving from poetry to prose and literature to science, began his distinguished career as a literary historian of Greece with a systematic collection of Eratosthenica (1824).

In the course of the nineteenth century, however, the enterprise of fragment-hunting underwent a change of state. Scholars now set out on safaris instead of butterfly-hunts: they assemble not a hundred pages of bits and pieces by one writer but the entire records of whole genres. Between the 1830s and the 1850s Theodor Bergk edited the Poetae lyrici Graeci (1834), August Meineke the five volumes of the Fragmenta Comicorum Graecorum, and "Charles" Müller (a political exile supported by his publishers, the Didot, rather than by government subsidy) the four volumes of Fragmenta historicorum Graecorum (1841-51). In the second half of the century Hermann Diels would reorient the early history of philosophy with his Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. As the century ended, new projects arose in which the zeal to discover new material and the effort to interpret it in depth intersected fruitfully. The Inscriptiones Graecae offered a sprawling home for the wide range of new texts turned up by systematic investigation of Greek sites; and even the vast technical works of the Empire and later ones still, such as the works of the commentators on Aristotle, began to be attacked, explored, and edited. A third wave of new editions began to replace some of what now seemed the traditional, even humanistic, and uncritical editions of the early nineteenth century—an effort necessarily partial but vastly impressive, as when the Corpus medicorum Graecorum finally began to supplant the handy but often flawed tomes of Kühn's Galen, with its unsatisfactory (and sometimes forged) texts and old-fashioned (and often problematic) Latin translations.

The rest of the West early recognized German supremacy in the production of large-scale scholarship based on solid research. As early as 1809, the Edinburgh Review remarked of the Clarendon Press that "though this learned body have occasionally availed themselves of the sagacity and erudition of Ruhnken, Wyttenbach, Heyné and other foreign professors, they have, of late, added nothing of their own, except what they derived from the superior skill of British Manufacturers, and the superior wealth of their establishment; namely, whiter paper, blacker ink, and neater types." The reports of Charles Villers and Mme de Stael drove home the point that—as the Eclectic Review put it in the 1830s—"philology itself" had become a "science" not in Oxford but "in the hands of the inquisitive Germans."¹³ Americans, for political as well as cultural reasons, saw as early as the beginning of the century that their own classical curriculum could not be nourished except from German sources, and intrepid pioneers from both countries visited German universities, learned the German language, and reported back on their findings. Short-lived but learned journals, the Museum Criticum and the Philological Museum, reported on the doings of the German literati (even if, being English rather than German, they juxtaposed their articles on Hermann and Aeschylus with Walter Savage Landor's imaginary dialogues of the ancients in Latin). And some members of the elite in both countries showed considered willingness to combine the grammatical and literary skills they had mastered at home with the wider historical interests of the Germans.

The American George Bancroft, later an influential historian and diplomat, went as a student to Göttingen in the second decade of the century. There he read the classic, founding text of German scholarship, "Wolf & yet Wolf & yet Wolf."¹⁴ He took elaborate notes on Dissen's lectures at Göttingen on the entire encyclopaedia of classical studies, from chronology to mythology and art to metrics. His notes, which survive, show that his teacher's course combined elaborate lists of references to Literatur with capsule judgments on every disputed problem imaginable—which may explain why Bancroft found them as emotionally depressing to sit through as they were intellectually absorbing.¹⁵ None the less he would translate and expand on Böckh for an American audience in the North American Review. And, if fewer Britons took German degrees, British publishers did more than Americans to bring some results of German scholarship to their readers: the works of Otfried Müller on tragedy and mythology, the history of the Dorians and the development of Greek literature were all translated into English—the last, indeed was even written at the request of a British publisher.

On the other hand, few scholars in America or Britain could hope to do the sort of original research that German scholars practised on their own account. The Americans lacked adequate libraries; the English if not the Scots lacked any system of rewards, since professorships were almost non-existent, and college fellowships existed to support young bachelors until they received the offer of a good living and could marry and retire to the country. And both countries harboured many scoffers at the impiety, pedantry or both that seemed the dark side of German learning. As late as the 1870s, only a few Britons shared Mark Pattison's understanding of and admiration for German skills in source criticism and dedication to research—though, to be sure, the opening of the first deposits of papyri in Egypt would enable the British to make their own particular contribution to the stock of Greek learning, with such startling new texts as The Constitution of Athens to be edited and such skilled—if sometimes eccentric—Hellenists as Jebb and Mahaffy to correct and print them.¹⁶

France played an intermediary position. The university system remained deeply conservative, committed to Latin humanism and scholastic philosophy. But individual scholars mastered the language and method of Altertumswissenschaft—above all Ernest Renan, who greeted the revolution of 1848 with blazing enthusiasm and urged his countrymen to reform their intellectual as well as their social world by remodelling it on the basis of German philology, which he took to be the characteristic, liberating science of the nineteenth century.¹⁷ Translators made much German work available, and the great French periodicals—above all the Revue des deux mondes—discussed Homeric criticism and scientific mythology in long but accessible articles. And German classicists of a liberal bent, like so many other Germans, found Paris their safe harbour in times of repression at home. Karl-Benedikt Hase, that engaging figure who wandered the slums, encountering prostitutes two at a time and recording what he did with them in a diary kept in Greek, and "Charles" Müller, among others, supported themselves working for the firm of Didot, reworking the great sixteenth-century Greek Thesaurus of Henri Estienne to meet modern needs, as it still more or less does, and editing many Greek texts (at least one of which, a Byzantine account of Russia, Hase forged).¹⁸

As German scholarship drove deeper, wider, and generally firmer foundations under its historical reconstructions of Greek society, literature, and thought, German education created a wider and wider basis for classical studies by ensuring that far larger numbers of young men than ever before could actually read Greek with ease and comfort. Greek had always been taught in the Latin schools and universities, to be sure. But the level of competence most students attained was hardly high. As late as 1811, when Wolf was shown Süvern's plan for the reform of the Prussian Gymnasien, with its suggested requirement that "In Greek, Attic prose and Homer must be understood at sight and a tragic chorus with the help of a dictionary" he reacted with scorn: "Given the want of time, Sophocles, Euripides and their consorts are really read in only a tiny number of gymnasien. It's hardly possible for anyone to hear three prose authors and a good piece of Homer. A tragic chorus! The whole proposal makes an indescribable impression on anyone who knows the world as it really is."¹⁹ After all, Wolf argued, few teachers could read the harder sections of Greek tragedy or prose; one should hardly expect their pupils to do what they could not.

Gradually, however, conditions altered for the better in many individual cases.²⁰ When E. Poppo, student of Hermann and editor of Thucydides, headed the gymnasium at Frankfurt am Oder, he saw to it that pupils had eight and a half years of Greek, that they read comedy and bucolic as well as epic, and wound up with perhaps the most difficult of all Greek authors, Aeschylus and Pindar. Substantial amounts of time were devoted to prose and verse composition, prepared and extemporaneous, as well. And even less ambitious teachers managed to establish, first in Prussia and then in other kingdoms and in some of the old free cities, impressive regimens of Greek study. Ministerial regulations determined the curriculum year by year; the state-administered test, the Abitur, ensured that the quality of instruction was more uniform. The time needed to finish a gymnasium course rose as the demands it made increased; by the 1860s most graduates were over twenty years old. And as one might expect, the newly rigorous course proved far more socially exclusive than the old and lenient humanistic one. It thus neatly matched the desires of those who sent their sons to wear the uniforms and fill the benches of the classical gymnasium: the merchants, noblemen and officials whose children would become, by virtue of their shared eight years before the classical mast, equally cultured people despite their unequal birth and upbringing, the Bildungsbürgertum (educated bourgeoisie). By mid-century the classical gymnasium had established itself as the school for well-born young men, excluding the barefoot poor boys who had once starved their way through the Latin schools to become pastors. The new scholarship and new education, working together, had produced what amounted to a new society defined by its common ability to read Greek: one of 'Homer-reading lawyers and Sophocles-quoting merchants'.²¹ Facility in Latin remained the central, testable result of classical schooling, and Greek accordingly never received nearly as much space as Latin in the curriculum. But the universities had an adequate supply of young men ready and able to penetrate the mysteries of the new many-volumed fragment collections that threatened to overwhelm the canonical curriculum authors on the shelves of seminar libraries. The most diverse of nineteenth-century German-speaking intellectuals, moreover, from Marx to Freud and Nietzsche to Lagarde, used the terms and images familiar from their classical educations to describe what they saw as their own deepest insights into the human condition. Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, for example, seems to transgress every imaginable canon of nineteenth-century good taste in its ascription of unimaginable desires to ordinary children and of explanatory weight to dreams. Yet it is deeply conventional in one basic respect: Freud's certainty that Oedipus Rex moves a modern audience no less than it did the contemporary Greek one, because it embodied a myth with "profound and universal power to move".²² Even this greatest of revolutionaries, the man who tore the fabric of Viennese good taste into shreds—even Freud retained his culture's reverence for Greek wisdom and art, as his terrifyingly cluttered consulting room, with its classical fragments and relief of Gradiva, clearly shows.²³

In Britain, too, a rigorous education in Greek became the mark of membership in an elite which had once been indifferent to the refinements of scholarship and far more concerned with Latin literature and precedent than with Greek. The examination systems that came into effect in both Oxford and Cambridge in the first half of the nineteenth century imposed a higher standard of linguistic knowledge on those who hoped for fellowships, and the public and grammar schools responded by emphasizing the reading and composition of Greek, above all Greek verse, at a level not previously institutionalized. By mid-century ancient history and philosophy had also entered the Oxford curriculum, as Greats took on its canonical form.²⁴ But the emphasis lay always on texts, not contexts; false quantities were penalized while the anachronistic belief that the Athenian empire could serve as a model for the British was rewarded, and the most influential of Oxford Greek professors, Jowett, translated and explicated Plato as a liberal Anglican who had happened to write Greek.²⁵ It thus seems only reasonable that even those Britons who studied the classics with the greatest intensity at university and found the deepest and most problematic personal lessons in ancient texts did not fully connect the two activities. Gilbert Murray's translations of Euripides, not the Oxford Classical Texts he studied for Mods, gave Julian Grenfell the terms with which he tried to decipher his intense and difficult relations with his mother.²⁶ Still, the British schools and universities did produce vast flocks of young men who could translate leaders from the Scotsman into the Greek of Xenophon, record the activities of the wetbobs at Eton in that of Thucydides, or even imagine Herodotus reporting on the London Zoo—even if it never became proper to quote untranslated Greek in the House of Commons.

Conflicts and Fissures

Yet this apparently solid, factual record of territories conquered by individual scholars and cultivated by teams of docile pupils makes no accurate map of the always uneven, sometimes tragic history of the Greek heritage. The smooth lists of manuscripts collated, fragments unearthed and editions published obscure a deeper, problematic history, a matter of fragments and fissures rather than continuous forward motion. The very nature of Hellenic scholarship and education—as well as the turbulent context of German history in which both were conducted—seemed far more complex and questionable to those who created them than we are liable to suspect as we look back in admiration to the patient and meticulous skills of the nineteenth century.

Even the stateliest and most objective-seeming products of nineteenth-century scholarship were as much the products of speculation as of erudition—and as much the result of controversy as of contemplation. Consider, for example, the Corpus of Greek inscriptions. This huge and heavy Latin book looks like an objective collection of primary sources—as cool and austere a product as one could imagine of the philologist's basic, uncontentious enterprise. But it begins with a sharply-worded preface by Böckh, in which he sets out to define the nature of philology itself. He begins by insisting that philology is not a mere congeries of unrelated disciplines, connected only by the fact that they deal with the ancient world. Instead, it is a "historical and philosophical understanding of antiquity," one which sought to work out the basic notiones, or "ideas," that expressed themselves within the culture and society of each people.²⁷ In making this argument, Böckh situated his enterprise on a complex map of contemporary debate about classical philology. He showed its independence from that of his teacher, Wolf, whose encyclopaedia had not been defined as a coherent effort to capture the Geist of the Greek nation as a whole. He showed its immunity from the attacks of his Berlin rival, the philosopher Hegel, who argued that philology was a mere "aggregate" rather than a coherent spiritual and intellectual enterprise. And he showed its difference from the editorial enterprises of his contemporary Gottfried Hermann, who saw the establishing of critical Greek texts, rather than the reconstructing of vague Greek "ideas", as the philologist's only real task.²⁸ The Corpus of Greek inscriptions, in short, was anything but what it seemed, a vast but neutral storehouse of building-blocks for some future structure. It was at once the result of, and a move in, widespread existing controversies about the whole basis of Greek studies—which soon blazed up anew as Böckh's own editorial methods came under sharp scrutiny from Hermann and his pupils. And its reader was less likely to receive a panoramic impression of the nature of Greek society than to find his attention caught by technical problems of source criticism and chronology.

The situation of the reader of the Corpus mirrors in little the experience of many of those who tried, as Deussen did, to enter the philologist's hortus conclusus. One came seeking scientific method and exact knowledge: that Wissenschaft of which philology provided the basic model. On arrival, one found learned armies clashing by day. In general, as we have already seen, German scholars saw themselves as divided into two camps, both stemming to some extent from Wolf and Humboldt. One group, headed by Böckh and Karl Otfried Müller, saw Greek studies as holistic and intuitive. They wished less to establish critical texts or historical facts than to evoke the central, ordering themes and rules of Greek culture as a whole. Their enterprise was meant to end less in a set of permanently established readings than in an empathetic evocation of the spirit of an earlier age. Müller, for example, ended his elaborated study of the history and institutions of the Dorians with a bold effort to "furnish a complete and accurate idea of their nature and peculiarities. That this cannot be done in a few words is evident; but that it can be done at all, I consider equally clear; I by no means agree with those who deny that a whole nation, like an individual, can have one character—an error which is perhaps best refuted by consideration of the different tribes of Greece."²⁹ Böckh intended his culminating masterpiece to be the Hellen—a comprehensive evocation of the Greek spirit that expressed itself partially in every aspect of antiquity from social organization and military technology to art and literature.

The other group—headed by Hermann—defined philology as concerned above all with language: establishing the rules of grammar, syntax, metre, and applying these to the criticism and explication of specific texts, line by line and word by word. Only a severely limited Greek philology of this kind, they held, could serve as a mental discipline for students or arrive at rigorous conclusions about the Greeks. And it must eventuate not in the foggy guesses of their opponents but in sharp, shiny new laws about the behaviour of the Greek language.

Two groups who offered such radically different portraits of the Greek world to students and readers could hardly leave one another in peace or let their readers superimpose the two visions on one another. As early as 1833 Müller made the Eumenides of Aeschylus the object of a programmatic commentary, one in which he did not comment line by line but added treatises which set the text as a whole into the literary history of Greek drama and the political history of Athens. He imaginatively reconstructed the original staging of the play, arguing that Aeschylus had treated the Athenians in his audience as the public assembly called to attend the trial of Orestes in the play, thus drawing them into the drama and making them "bear a part in the action".³⁰ And he insisted, in an angry preface, that this approach was characteristic of the historical school to which he belonged and far too sophisticated to be grasped by the followers of Hermann on the other side: "There is a class of scholars who raise questions about the ancient world too profound to be answered by mere word-for-word commentary [Notengelehrsamkeit]; the present work may perhaps give them material for fruitful consideration".³¹ This attempt at a pre-emptive attack only enraged its object, Hermann, who replied in an incendiary review some 207 pages long, and was echoed by his pupil Fritzsche. The controversy raged in Kritik and Anti-Kritik, Anhang and Erklärung, until Müller's early death from sunstroke put an end to it. A generation later, as we have already seen, it would flare up again in Bonn.³²

Debate raged within many fields as well as between the followers of different camps. No subject proved more attractive to explore, none more rife with deadly pitfalls, than classical mythology. Everyone agreed that ancient myth must be treated with more historical sympathy than the mythographers of the eighteenth century had shown; that it must be explained in its own terms, as the product of a habit of mind and speech alien from those of the modern world, not explained away by the methods of Euhemerus or Palaephatus. But the key to Greek mythologies proved evasive. Were they symbols or allegories? Could they be tied to local rituals, and thus set into place as part of the history of the wanderings and the formation of the Greek nations, as Müller held? Or should they be tied to the longer history of Indo-European thought and religion, which glimmered alluringly, or so some thought, in the newly accessible Sanskrit literature of India? Or should one simply follow Lobeck and demolish all these elaborate constructions by the application of a philologist's razor, insisting that they—not the myths they interpreted—rested on errors and confusions of thought? Or should one—as Jane Harrison and others would, towards the end of the century—use the flickering new torch of anthropology to reveal the ritual origins and religious feelings that underlay the transmitted myths? Each version had its exponents, each of whom claimed rigour for his own reconstruction of the gods of Greece and denounced the fantasies of his opponents.³³ And similarly sharp debates clouded the facts—if facts there were—about every point in Greek literary and civil history from the origins of Athens to the historicity of Homer.

Efforts were made to stem this acrid tide of debate. From 1838 onwards, the German philologists held national congresses, in which as many as 436 professors and gymnasium teachers assembled to hear papers and hold banquets. Their proceedings stressed unity and pluralism; they honoured both Müller (posthumously) and Hermann, and sponsored public debates far less vicious in tone than the written ones in the learned journals. But nothing could produce consensus on many of the points at issue, or reconcile those who had been joined by Wahlverwandtschaft (elective affinity) into parties, and plotted vigorously against one another when chairs were to be filled or editorial assignments to be parcelled out.³⁴

Moreover, one basic contradiction stuck like a canker in the very heart of German Greek scholarship: a contradiction between the educational ideals it espoused and the scientific method it applied. The scholars of the nineteenth century normally claimed to use a purely historical approach to Greek antiquity. If analysis showed that the Iliad and Odyssey contained flaws and lacunae, and these in turn revealed the work of more than one author, the scholar might regret his conclusions but must certainly report them. "Our whole investigation," Wolf wrote in the preface to his own Homer edition of 1795, "is historical and critical; it deals not with what we would like to have happened but with what did happen."³⁵ The ability of the scholars to cut the Homeric epics into their original strata seemed the guarantee of the scientific character of their work: Schelling, among others, hoped that a geologist might be found who could analyse the earth as Wolf had analysed Homer.

But when scholars argued for the pre-eminence of Greek in secondary and university education, they rested their case less on the method they applied—which, could, after all, be applied as well to Rome or Israel—than on the object to which they applied it. They argued that Greek culture was more coherent, more original, more orderly, or more free than any other—choosing the epithet that qualified it as their prejudices and the needs of the moment dictated. From Wolf at the beginning of the century to Wilamowitz at the end, influential scholars set out research programmes that called for a rigorous historicism, but insisted on their personal allegiance to the unique superiority of Hellenism. No Greek History was more severely technical and critical, more insistent on the need for philological rigour and more devoid of romance, than that of K. J. Beloch. Yet Beloch, captivated both by his idealized vision of the Greeks and by the anthropology and liguistics of his day, which seemed to him to provide scientific support for his prejudices, began by arguing that only "we Aryans" could have brought forth, even in the magically splendid land of Greece, "a culture in the full sense"—an argument as dependent on dubious historical theses as it was on value-laden terms and vague epithets.³⁶

The problem here was simple. When classical scholars insisted that their own method was historical, they were perfectly sincere. But in so far as they idealized the classics they contradicted themselves; for the past, once idealized, had to be cleansed of any literary work that did not meet the proper aesthetic standards, and any historical fact that did not meet the proper moral ones. Reconstruction and rejection, construction and demolition, were thus dictated not only by solid evidence and rigorous method, but also by assumptions that could not bear historical scrutiny. If F. G. Welcker wished to rehabilitate the fatherly, pure-minded homosexuality of Greek men, their ability to regard their lovers with a "blameless eros", he had to distinguish their relationships and emotions from those that seemed to connect Sappho with her female loved ones. He could do so easily, by ignoring all textual details and variants that told against him and insisting that Sappho's culture could not have tolerated—far less admired—a female homosexual: "no educated Greek would have thought these were beautiful love poems if something monstrous and disgusting had been going on in them".³⁷ If G. F. Schoemann wished to show that Aeschylus had never suggested, even in the Prometheus Bound, that Zeus could be unjust and Prometheus' resistance justified, he had to explain away the apparent evidence of the text before him, which he considered genuine. This was no aporia, however. Schoemann simply reconstructed the lost Prometheus Unbound which had been performed with the extant play, and which showed that Prometheus had been clearly in the wrong. He knew the lost play said this because he knew its author was a religious man, and "all true religious experience is related to Christianity."³⁸ And if Wilamowitz had to explain how the wonderful Greek spirit had been able to produce so bitter and mocking a specimen as Lucian, he could do so more easily still, not by attacking the genuineness of the large corpus of Lucian's writing but by identifying the racial origins of the writer. Lucian, Wilamowitz argued, was not Greek but Asian; only thus could one explain his work—or explain it away.³⁹ The German scholars who advanced and accepted such views of the ancient world did so because they were conservative by temperament, monarchical by politics and racist (to use an anachronistic, but not an inaccurate term) by prejudice, and found statements like these plausible and attractive—not because the evidence and the philological method underpinned them.

Two areas of nineteenth-century classical studies then seemed most glamorous and accessible and now seem most attractive and original: archaeology and anthropology. Both fields became part of institutionalized in scholarship as the great imperialist powers founded schools and supported excavations in Greek soil; anthropology even became part of classical education, at Cambridge and in Paris if not in Oxford or Berlin. And brilliant lecturers—such as Jane Harrison, that glamorous "green beetle" as she seemed to one young hearer—converted many nonspecialists to the belief that the contours of Greek sites and the customs of non-Greeks could shed a vast amount of light on Greek festivals and on the tragedies performed in them.⁴⁰ In the great age of the Gesamtkunstwerk, nineteenth-century opera, Greek tragedy too came to be imagined in three dimensions and many colours. Yet both studies were injured by the reluctance of many members of the classical establishment to come to terms with their more radical conclusions—especially those of Schliemann's digs—and by the sometimes wilful assurance of their proponents that small doses of evidence and large hypotheses could yield certain truths.

Given the contradictions between classicism and historicism, given the tensions and fissures within historicism, it is not surprising that what seems in retrospect a time of dizzying increase in knowledge about Greece seemed to many of those who lived through it a time of dizzying competition between hypotheses, which tended to replace once-solid texts with risky analytical theories, elaborate historical arguments, and—most problematic of all—proliferating secondary literature. And it seems unsurprising, too, that most efforts to produce an acceptable synthesis of a major field drew brickbats rather than bouquets from their reviewers as the century wore one. Böckh's effort to create an up-to-date encyclopaedia, though revised over and over through more than twenty cycles of lectures, fell dead when it appeared in the 1870s, and hardly anyone reviewed it.⁴¹

More independent and more critical reactions were always to be found—especially among the students, always less reverent and often more perceptive than their elders. A young student of history at Berlin, Jacob Burckhardt, was inflamed with admiration for the great Berlin lectures he encountered in 1840: "When I had heard my first lectures from Ranke, Droysen, and Böckh, I opened my eyes wide indeed. I saw that I had previously had the same experience as those knights in Don Quixote with their ladies, I had loved my science by hearsay".²⁴ He eagerly read Herodotus, Greek poetry, even Berosus on Babylon. And he remained deeply impressed all his life by Böckh's lectures on Greek antiquity, from which he took away essential ideals and information. Böckh taught him—as Wolf had taught Böckh —that the ancients drew a clear distinction between narrative history in the style of Thucydides and antiquarian scholarship in the style of Varro that described institutions and customs—a distinction crucial to his whole life's work.⁴³ But the deeper Burckhardt penetrated into the actual fabric of Greek history as the great man and their epigoni had reconstructed it, the more he became convinced that their work could never live up to its holistic ideal: "Is it not a pity", he asked in 1842 "that after three centuries of tyrannical assertions of classical education there is still no reasonable history of Greece? I once asked a reputable philologist about this and received the answer: "Views on myth had not arrived at nearly a sufficient state of clarity".⁴⁴ His own Griechische Kulturgeschichte would attempt to reconstruct the central characteristic of the Greek spirit as the professionals had failed to do, using a few outmoded secondary sources and the original texts to describe the "agonal" men of early Greece with incomparable eloquence. The book was, of course, notoriously a total professional failure when it appeared, declared dead on arrival by Wilamowitz. But it had a deep impact on young students and the reading public nonetheless.⁴⁵ Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy had already had a similar fate; largely ignored by the professionals (except for his fellow graduate of Pforta, Wilamowitz, who lacerated the work in a brilliant pamphlet) the book gradually gathered momentum, inspiring more and more readers, notably Burckhardt, to look for the depths of emotion that neo-classical doctrines about the Greeks had obscured and denied.⁴⁶

More than half a century after Burckhardt's Berlin years, another young student, Ludwig Hatvany, a Hungarian, published his account of his experiences as a young classicist. He did so in a pamphlet that took the form of mock notes on a year's work in classics in Berlin and bore the brilliant title Die Wissenschaft des nicht Wissenswerten (Berlin, 1911)—"The science of what is not worth knowing". With splendid brutality he pilloried his teacher, the infamous "Woepke," who took the passage in the Protagoras where the porter shuts the gate on Socrates and his companions as the pretext for a discourse on "the important and still unsolved question of door-shutting in antiquity". He ransacked the seminar libraries for evidence of the folly of the Philologen, their fruitless and repetitive disputes over the existence of Homer and the analysis of his poems into their original content. And he demanded a reform of classical studies which would somehow enable teachers and students to gain access to the human and emotional content of the ancient texts—a positive recommendation as vague as those of the apostles of the Third Humanism, Jaeger and Spranger, who would try to argue after the First World War that one could somehow combine the philologist's now traditional creed, "even the minutest details are worth knowing", with aesthetic and normative judgements about the value of texts.

Evidently a century's vast progress in knowledge and method, the vast tides of effort and erudition that break on any modern consulter of Pauly-Wissowa's great encyclopaedia of Altertumswissenschaft, had left the classics not only in high honour but also in deep ideological disarray. Scholarship seemed mired in controversy. A purely classical education might seem comprehensive and fulfilling to English schoolboys penned in their monastic establishments, but it seemed frustrating and absurd to young men in Vienna and Paris such as Stefan Zweig or Alfred Jarry. And on all sides competition loomed, as the votaries of "stinks" and science won the right to have their subjects taught in schools and to degree level at universities—to the immense gratification of patrons as different as the business elite of Manchester and the German Kaiser.

No formula can sum up, no summary do justice to the perpetual revolution that was the nineteenth century's contact with the Greeks. Perhaps an image can be more effective. As a young man, Toulouse-Lautrec painted a brilliant but highly uncharacteristic picture, parodying Puvis de Chavannes: a classical panorama of nymphs and satyrs, lawns and temples. Into it comes a procession of bearded men dressed in ugly modern clothing, among them Lautrec himself (who is urinating); a modern world obsessed by and transgressing on an ancient one which it can only imagine as an impossible ideal or recreate in its own up-to-date image. Prosaic though they may have seemed to those who sat through their lectures, the scholars and teachers who attacked the Greek heritage in nineteenth-century Berlin and Paris would also make appropriate figures in Lautrec's panorama of an impossible meeting.

Notes

¹ P. Deussen, Erinnerungen an Friedrich Nietzsche (Leipzig, 1901), p. 3.

² Ibid., pp. 30, 29.

³ Ibid., p. 51; significantly chosen by Rudolf Pfeiffer as the epigraph for his doctoral dissertation.

⁴ See already ibid., pp. 48-9.

⁵ Sybel to Twesten, 13 May 1865, in P. E. Hübinger, 'Heinrich v. Sybel und der Bonner Philologenkrieg', Historisches Jahrbuch 83 (1964), 210.

⁶ F. Nietzsche, Gesammelte Werke (Musarion Ausgabe), II (Munich, 1920), p. 339.

⁷ Deussen, Erinnerungen, p. 25.

⁸ Memoirs and polemics also often misrepresent the lived experience of a long-ago schooling; see M. Landfester, Humanismus und Gesellschaft im 19. Jarhundert (Göttingen, 1988) for the exemplary case of Kaiser Wilhelm.

⁹ R. S. Turner, 'The Prussian Universities and the Concept of Research', Internationales Archiv für Sozial-geschichte der deutschen Literatur 5 (1980), 68-93.

¹⁰ H. Kreissig, 'Einleitung,' Die Altertumswissenschaft an der Berliner Akademie (Darmstadt, 1985), p. 25.

¹¹ S. Timpanaro, La genesi del metodo del Lachmann (repr. of 2nd edn.; Padua, 1985), pp. 35-9.

¹² A. H. L. Heeren, Christian Gottlob Heyne biographisch dargestellt (Göttingen, 1813), pp. 189-90.

¹³ A. Engel, The Emerging Concept of the Academic Profession at Oxford 1800-1854', The University in Society, ed. L. Stone (Princeton, 1974), I, pp. 311, 315.

¹⁴ C. Diehl, Americans and German Scholarship 1770-1870 (New Haven, 1978), p. 71.

¹⁵ Bancroft's notes, in both German and English, are in the Bancroft Collection, New York Public Library. Naturally, other American scholars had far more inspiring experiences: above all B. L. Gildersleeve, for whom see Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve. An American Classicist, ed. W. W. Briggs jr. et al. (Baltimore and London, 1986).

¹⁶ For the work of German and French as well as English pioneers, see E. G. Turner, Greek Papyri: an Introduction (Oxford, 1968), pp. 22-4; for one fascinating case see W. B. Stanford and R. B. McDowell, Mahaffy: A Biography of an Anglo-Irishman (London, 1971), pp. 183-7.

¹⁷ For Renan's engagement with Greece—and his passage from his early view of Athens as a city like Revolutionary Paris, in which political crisis and cultural creativity co-existed, to the idealist racism of his Prayer on the Acropolis—see P. Vidal-Naquet, La démocratie grecque vue d'ailleurs (Paris, 1990), pp. 245-65.

¹⁸ See P. Petitmengin's article in Philologie und Hermeneutik im 19. Jahrhundert, II (Göttingen, 1983).

¹⁹ F. Paulsen, Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts auf den deutschen Schulen und Universitäten (Leipzig, 1885), p. 575.

²⁰ For what follows cf. Paulsen with Landfester, Humanismus (η. 8 above).

²¹ W. Jens, 'The Classical Tradition in Germany: Grandeur and Decay', Upheaval and Continuity: A Century of German History, ed. E. J. Feuchtwanger (London, 1973), p. 69.

²² S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, tr. J. Strachey (New York, 1965), pp. 294-8.

²³ See Berggasse 19 (New York, 1976), for the photographic record made by Edmund Engelman in 1938.

²⁴ See Engel, note 13.

²⁵ For a sensitive account, emphasizing the complexities of Jowett's private and public responses to Plato, see R. Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (London, 1980), ch. 10.

²⁶ N. Mosley, Julian Grenfell (New York, 1976), pp. 120-3.

²⁷Corpus inscriptionum graecarum, I (Berlin, 1828), p. vii ff.

²⁸ See B. Bravo, Philologie, histoire, philosophie d'histoire (repr. Hildesheim, 1988).

²⁹ C. O. Müller, The History and Antiquities of the Dorian Race, tr. Tafnell and Lewis (Oxford, 1930), II, 405. See E. Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford, 1969), pp. 322-4.

³⁰Dissertations on the Eumenides of Aeschylus (London and Cambridge, 1853), pp. 60-1.

³¹Aeschylos Eumeniden (Göttingen, 1833), p. iv.

³² See E. Vogt in Philologie und Hermeneutik im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. H. Flashar (Göttingen, 1979), pp. 103-21.

³³ O. Gruppe, Geschichte der klassischen Mythologie und Religionsgeschichte (Leipzig, 1921); B. Feldman and B. D. Richardson, The Rise of Modern Mythology (Bloomington and London, 1972); A. Henrichs, 'Welckers Götterlehre', Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker. Werk und Wirkung, ed. W. M. Calder III et al. (Stuttgart, 1986), pp. 179-229; W. Burkert, 'Griechische Mythologie und die Geistesgeschichte der Moderne', Les études classiques aux xixe et xxe siècles (Geneva, 1980), pp. 159-99.

³⁴ A. Grafton, 'Polyhistor into Philolog, ' History of Universities 3 (1983 [1984]), 159-92.

³⁵Homeri et Homeridarum opera et reliquiae (Leipzig, 1804), I, p. xxv.

³⁶ R. Drews, The Coming of the Greeks (Princeton, 1988), p. 7.

³⁷ J. DeJean, Fictions of Sappho (Chicago and London, 1989), 208. Welcker's argument was in other respects a masterly piece of historical inference; see the powerful Ehrenrettung by W. M. Calder III, 'F. G. Welckers Sapphobild and its Reception in Wilamowitz,' Welcker: Werk und Wirkung, pp. 131-56.

³⁸ G. F. Schoemann, Opuscula academica, III (Berlin, 1858), p. 136; see E. R. Dodds, 'The Prometheus Vinctus and the progress of Scholarship', The Ancient Concept of Progress (Oxford, 1973), pp. 31-2; H. Lloyd-Jones, 'Zeus in Aeschylus', Journal of Hellenic Studies 76 (1956), 55-67.

³⁹ N. Holzberg, 'Lucian and the Germans', The Uses of Greek and Latin, ed. A. C Dionisotti et al. (London, 1988), pp. 205-9.

⁴⁰ J. E. Harrison, Reminiscences of a Student's Life (London, 1925), p. 59.

⁴¹ J. Whitman, 'Nietzsche in the Magisterial Tradition of German Classical Philology', Journal of the History of Ideas 47 (1986), 453-68.

⁴² J. Burckhardt, Briefe, I (Basel, 1949), p. 131.

⁴³ F. Gilbert, 'Jacob Burckhardt's Student Years,' Journal of the History of Ideas 47 (1986), 249-74.

⁴⁴ Burckhardt, Briefe, I, p. 218. Cf. ibid., IV (Basel, 1961), p. 198.

⁴⁵ A. Momigliano, 'Introduction to the Griechische Kulturgeschichte by Jacob Burckhardt', Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (Oxford, 1977), pp. 295-305; F. Gilbert, History: Politics or Culture (Princeton, 1990), pp. 69-80.

⁴⁶ Opinions on the value of Nietzsche's Birth for classical scholarship remain sharply divided. On the controversy with Wilamowitz see above all W. M. Calder III, 'The Wilamowitz-Nietzsche Struggle: New documents and a reappraisal', Nietzsche-Studien 12 (1983), 214-54. For Nietzsche's vast if subterranean impact see A. Henrichs, 'Loss of Self, Suffering, Violence: The Modern View of Dionysus from Nietzsche to Girard', Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 88 (1984), 205-40.