Goethe cultivated a special, italianate hand for this portfolio of twenty-four "elegies," so called because he was emulating the elegiasts of Imperial Rome, Tibullus, Propertius, Catullus. The Elegies have never before been published as here, together in the cyclical form of their original conception. Experts even denied that the two priapeia (I & XXIV) were by Goethe at all, although they are in the same hand as the rest. To be sure, these two are not numbered, so that I was long undecided as to just what their proper position might be. At one time I imagined they must belong at the middle of the cycle where at the end of Elegy XIII Priapus' mother summons her son. Obviously Goethe, just returned north from his two years in Italy (1786-88), and alienated from prim, courtly friends (especially since he had taken a girlfriend into his cottage), had no thought of publication when he indited these remembrances of Ancient Rome. But he did show them to close friends, one of whom was the wonderful dramatist Friedrich Schiller. In 1795, Schiller undertook a new periodical, Die Horen. This thoughtful and responsible man initiated the journal with an essay of his own, explaining how forms of entertainment are actually at the same time our primary modes of education. It makes for pretty difficult reading in our present, less interested epoch. But he did break the essay up with diversions solicited from the best minds of his era. For a discussion of all this, see
Professor Worthy's Page
For now, it is enough to say that among Schiller's examples for "aesthetic education," as he called it, were these Elegies by his much admired friend, Wolfgang Goethe. Editor and author made substantial changes for propriety's sake—despite Goethe's having lashed out to the contrary in the first Elegy (which he now suppressed, along with the final one). My attempt has been—for the very first time by the way, in any language—to restore Goethe's cycle to his early conception. Since I have been unwilling to intrude with learned notes, I must apologize for Goethe's many classical allusions, which were as familiar to his own readership as are, in our publications today, the dense references to media celebrities. Modern editors of what they call the "Roman Elegies" bring abundant annotation, and often detail Goethe's own emendations. What I bring here is merely translated from his manuscript in the Goethe-Schiller Archive in Weimar.