“Seeking the land of the Greeks in my soul”: Ancient Greece in German Culture around 1800

Presented by Basic Program instructors and open to all, these lectures also complement the texts and ideas from our curriculum and always include a Q&A session.

This First Friday Lecture is supported by the Class Gift given by the 2023 graduates of the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults.

In his 1787 drama Iphigenia in Tauris, based on Euripides’ tragedy of the same name, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe has the stranded Greek princess Iphigenia recount how she wandered the foreign shores of Tauris, “seeking the land of the Greeks in my soul.” This scene can be read as emblematic of the emphatic turn to ancient Greece in German culture at the end of the nineteenth century. This lecture will explore some of the major artistic and intellectual achievements of this turn, arguing that, far from a nostalgic longing for an idealized past, German writers found in the cultural achievements of ancient Greece a means of reimagining the possibilities of their present moment – using many of the texts on the Basic Program’s reading list.

Lecturer Bio: Simon Friedland joined the Basic Program instructional staff in 2023. He received his Ph.D. in 2021 from the University of Chicago in German Studies, with a dissertation entitled, “The Pulse of Prosody: Versification and Antiquity in the Age of Weimar Classicism.” From 2021-23, Simon was a Humanities Teaching Fellow at UChicago.  Simon is a graduate of Reed College. While a student, Simon spent one year in Berlin at the Freie Universität.