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Christoph Martin Wieland: „The Story of Agathon“
Latin
translation of the first book of Christoph Martin Wieland’s
(1733-1813) novel „The story of Agathon“. Wieland is the
great poet of Roccoco age and a masterful translator of Greek and Roman
classical authors like Lukianos and Horace.
„The
Story of Agathon“ is the first great novel of educational
development in the German literature, first published in 1766, finished
1794, and is said to be the forerunner of the modern psychological
novel. Wieland describes the growing up of Agathon, a beautiful young
man of Athens, to a ripe man. The young Agathon is an enthusiast
believing in ideals which according to Wieland do not exist. The author
shows how Agathon gradually by disillusions and disappointments attains
a more realistic, more promising and more happy conception of life.
First Agathon experiences the hypocrisy and treachery of the priests of
Delphi, then the Athenians disappoint him by their envy and political
inconstancy, after that the sophist Hippias deceives Agathon’s
ideal of the true spiritual love. Finally he comes to the court
of the tyrant of Syracuse and must experience by the example of Plato,
that noble philosophical ideals cannot be translated into political
practice. On this stage Agathon runs the risk to become such a
misanthrope as Hippias. But then he is saved by happy circumstances: In
Tarentum, he finds Archytas as the right teacher for practical wisdom
of life and world, who guides him to the kalokagathia – that is
to a harmonic compensation of virtue, reason, sense and esthetic
feeling.
This first Agathon-CD contains the Latin translation of the first book. We plan to translate the complete novel.
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