Education
Schlegel studied law at Göttingen and Leipzig, but ultimately devoted himself entirely to literary studies.
Schlegel studied law at Göttingen and Leipzig, but ultimately devoted himself entirely to literary studies.
He published in 1797 Die Griechen und Römer (The Greeks and Romans), which was followed by Geschichte der Poesie der Griechen und Römer (The History of the Poetry of the Greeks and Romans) (1798). At Jena, where he lectured as a Privatdozent at the university, he co-founded the Athenaeum, contributing to that journal the aphorisms and essays in which the principles of the Romantic school are most definitely stated. Here also he wrote Lucinde (1799), an unfinished romance, which is interesting as an attempt to transfer to practical ethics the Romantic demand for complete individual freedom, and Alarcos, a tragedy (1802) in which, without much success, he combined romantic and classical elements. Lucinde, in which he extolled the union of sensual and spiritual love as an allegory of the divine cosmic Eros, caused a great scandal by its manifest autobiographical character, and contributed to the failure of his academic career in Jena.