The fourth chapter follows the ramifications of this investment in a Platonizing imagination of learning and knowledge into the discipline of philology, showing how such a template interacted with the tensions inherent in philology as a practice. If it is the case that the demands of an increasingly specialized scientific philology and the expectation of a fully personal and individualized formation of the self (Bildung) were increasingly drifting apart, I want to show that philology in its self-descriptions still tried to keep those poles together, especially through maintaining a rhetoric of philological feeling. The authors this chapter focuses on are Friedrich Creuzer, Friedrich Thiersch, August Boeckh, Friedrich Ritschl, and Hermann Usener.

The Epilogue considers various ways in which a rhetoric of longing and of overcoming the distance between a modern individual and a personified antiquity could be challenged or modified, giving new valency to notions of historical distance, the neutral, the stranger, and cognitive dissonance.

The second chapter turns to the specific examples of Plato and of Socratic teaching as a template used for formulating an approach to the study of antiquity. It also introduces the institution of the philological seminar as a space for academic sociability modelled on Platonic precedent. Compared to an earlier interest in mainly Socrates (rather than Plato) as a mostly ambivalent figure, I trace a new understanding of Plato as the ostensibly unified author of systematic works centrally concerned with educational progress. My main example in this chapter is Wolf’s directorship of the philological seminar in Halle, together with his edition of Plato’s Symposium. I also look at the Socratic Memorabilia of J. G. Hamann (1759) and finally at some of the programmatic writings of Fichte and Schleiermacher for a new university in Berlin.

The third chapter forcuses on the influential translation project of the Platonic dialogues by Friedrich Schleiermacher and its relation to his own hermeneutics. Schleiermacher’s work and thinking on Plato is not only representative and innovative of Plato scholarship of the time but harnesses assumptions about individuality, development, and understanding to a Platonic model. This model is in evidence in Schleiermacher’s own thinking about education and scholarship and also importantly influenced such figureheads as August Boeckh, professor of classical philology in Berlin for over fifty years, and directions taken in classical scholarship.

The fifth chapter considers the narrative overlap of disciplinary filiation and the biographical. It does so through readings of Carl Justi’s biography of Winckelmann and Wilhelm Dilthey’s biographical work on Schleiermacher. Both were begun in the 1870s within a web of hermeneutic thinking about the biographical that characterized the Geisteswissenschaften and reflected back into the study of ancient biographical materials, too, and rendered scholars and their subject matter coextensive.

The sixth chapter examines, against this background, the claims to biographical possibilities as a key to modern scholarship itself, such as were raised by Wilamowitz in his works on Plato, Plutarch, Greek lyric, tragedy, and Pindar. By juxtaposing Nietzsche’s own work on ancient biography, I allow the similarities of the concerns raised, rather than the difference in answers, to come to the fore.

The first chapter concentrates on the period around 1800, laying the groundwork by examining the concepts of sentimentality, the code of Romantic love, Bildung, interpretation, and the appeal of Greek antiquity as an analogue to the history and formation of the self. Beginning from Winckelmann’s erotic classicism it draws on the writings of Friedrich August Wolf, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Johann Georg Herder, together with insights from recent literary, historical, and sociological work on the discursive codification of emotions and of closeness in that period.

The Introduction lays out the argument about personification as the central strategy of scholarly approaches to antiquity. It argues for the importance of a romantic discourse of love and of Bildung and selfhood that intersects with the professionalization of classical scholarship in Germany, and situates the argument within the study of the history and metaphors of emotions. It introduces the figure of Alcibiades as central. It also provides an outline of the chapters to follow.