 In the years following the Studium essay, Schlegel moved not only to a distinction between the classical and the romantic, as opposed to that between the ancient and modern, but moreover began distinctly to privilege the romantic. What Schlegel meant by the term “romantic” (romantisch) and its apparent cognate Roman (usually translated as “novel,” but having among the Romantics a much wider sense) has long been disputed. Perhaps under the influence of Herder (see Eichner 1956), Schlegel saw the historical origins of “the romantic” in the wide mixture of forms and genres that characterized medieval literature and took it as the point of departure for a genre-transcending notion that allows even Shakespeare’s plays or Dante’s Commedia to be classified as Romane. Seen from this historical perspective, the Roman becomes the central dividing line between ancient literature and the literature of the current age: Greek poetry, he claimed in 1800, “began with and finally again converged in epic; our poetry began with and finally again will converge in the Roman.”