Tugend, Kraft und die Wonnen des Lebens. Semantischer Klassizismus und Visionen energischer Lebensführung in der Literatur der Spätaufklärung

The paper sets out to analyse occurrences of semantic classicism within the moral and literary debates concerning ‘virtue’, chiefly in German late Enlightenment. It offers snapshots of how ancient visions of virtue gained new cognitive shape in a range of modern texts and media: notably a series of moral weeklies circulated in Leipzig and Halle around 1750, but also treatises devoted to anthropology and aesthetics published by Friedrich Schiller, Gottlob Benedict von Schirach and Friedrich Hugo von Dalberg around 1780-1790, as well as political essays and fragments written by Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich Schlegel in the 1790s. Specific topoi borrowed from Greek and Roman traditions – such as the ‘sparkle of virtue’ and its ‘energy’ – are shown to structure enlightened visions of virtuous ways of living at the end of the 18th century. Close readings of selected passages will help uncover intertextual allusions to ancient sources – mainly Horace, Lucretius and Cicero – and single out the fleeting junctures in which the semantic negotiations of virtue crossed, at once, the cautionary tales of civic philosophy and the silent expectations affecting individual lifestyles.