political and intellectual, and took keen delight in tracing its
progress. On the other hand, play-writing had its disadvantages. Thus
far it had brought him more of notoriety than of solid fame, and his
income was so small that he was dependent on Körner's generosity. To
escape from this irksome position he decided to try his fortune in
Thuringia. Going over to Weimar, in the summer of 1787, he was well
received by Herder and Wieland--Goethe was just then in Italy--and
presently he settled down to write a history of the Dutch Rebellion.
His plan looked forward to six volumes, but only one was ever written.
It was published in 1788 under the title of _The Defection of the
Netherlands_ and led to its author's appointment as unsalaried
professor of history at the University of Jena. He began to lecture in
the spring of 1789.

Meanwhile he had taken up the study of the Greek poets and found them
very edifying and sanative--just the influence that he needed to
clarify his judgment and correct his earlier vagaries of taste. He was
fascinated by the _Odyssey_ and in a mood of fleeting enthusiasm he
resolved to read nothing but the ancients for the next two years.
He translated the _Iphigenia in Aulis_ of Euripides and a part of _The
Phenician Women_. Out of this newborn ardor grew two important poems,
_The Gods of Greece_ and _The Artists_; the former an elegy on the
decay of Greek polytheism conceived as a loss of beauty to the world,
the latter a philosophic retrospect of human history wherein the
evolutionary function of art is glorified. At the same time he revived
the dormant _Thalia_ and used its columns for the continued
publication of _The Ghost-seer_, a pot-boiling novel which he had
begun at Dresden. It is Schiller's one serious attempt at prose
fiction. His initial purpose was to describe an elaborate and
fine-spun intrigue, devised by mysterious agents of the Church of