 Schlegel attended the universities of Göttingen and Leipzig, originally to study law, but his intellectual interests began to widen, centering especially on classical literature, and he turned after 1793 to a life of literary freelancing. In the succeeding couple of years, he wrote several early essays on Greek literature amid plans for a history of classical poetry. Only one volume of the intended larger study was published, in 1798, as Geschichte der Poesie der Griechen und Römer, but the essay “On the Study of Greek Poetry” (Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie, finished 1795, but not published until January 1797), with its sharp distinction between ancient and modern modes of literature, is taken to be representative of this early, “classicist” phase of Schlegel’s intellectual life.