It is never much of a surprise when modern writers engage in petty fights. The insults exchanged between Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner have become cliché; the sub-tweet is almost a literary form of its own. But we expect better from the writers of the past, especially those of the eighteenth century. They were “Great Men”, too busy reintroducing Europe to the splendors of rationalism and the Classics to bother with all of that.

And yet, in 1797, two stars of German Romanticism, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), published the Xenions, one of the most elaborate works of literary insult ever written.

Inspired by the Roman epigrammatist Martial (40–103), who ironically titled a collection of poems, directed against his enemies, after the Greek word for host-gift, Goethe and Schiller decided to team up to respond to their critics. Published in Schiller’s Musen-Almanach in 1797, they set out their mission at the start:

OUR PURPOSE
These brisk verses, revering the good, will annoy the philistine,
Ridicule bigots, and smite hypocrites, as they deserve.

The subsequent 675 distichs — a classical form that alternates dactylic hexameter and pentameter — take aim at a whole host of enemies, some addressed in the abstract, some coyly indicated by initials, others with their full names. (The English edition featured here, translated a century later by the German-American publisher Paul Carus, is only a selection, out of which he has pruned those “Xenions [that] are of mere transitory importance”.) Others, however, are sincere reflections on the artistic and moral challenges of Romanticism:

FICTION
“What is the purpose of Poetry? Say!” — By and by I shall tell you.
First: of the real, my friend, tell me the purpose and use.

More memorable, it turned out, were the insults. A particular target of Goethe and Schiller’s ire was the writer and bookseller Christoph Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811). As editor of the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, Nicolai was a furious defender of the Enlightenment against the luxurious excesses of Romanticism. Even worse, in 1775, he had written a satire of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. Nicolai gets invoked by name:

NICOLAI’S BOOK ON THE SOURCE OF THE DANUBE
Nothing he likes is great; for that reason, O glorious Danube,
Nicola traces thy course till thou art shallow and flat.

NICOLAI’S MOTTO
Truth I am preaching. ’Tis truth; and ’tis nothing but truth — understand me.
My truth, of course! For I know none to exist but my own.

Some of the other distichs are more playful than catty. Regarding the philosophy of subjectivity by the German Idealist Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), they wrote:

FICHTE
I am I, and I posit myself; but in case I don't posit
Me as myself — very well: then the not-I is produced.

(When Goethe wrote to Schiller to pitch him on the idea for the project, the Fichte parody was one of his proofs of concept. “What a wealth of material is offered by . . . the metaphysical world with its Me’s and Not-Me’s”, Schiller chortled in his letter of response.)

Their enemies responded in kind. Over the subsequent months there was a flurry of counter-Xenions. Some of them, like that by the classicist Johann Heinrich Voss (1751–1826), only gently mocked the Xenions’ sometimes-imperfect grasp of meter. Others were more cutting (“rude, malicious and mean”, Carus opines in his introduction). The Halberstadt professor and theologian Gottlob Nathanael Fischer (1748–1800) thus wrote, alongside some specific critiques of Schiller’s translations of Ovid and the Aeneid:

THE CRITIC’S DUTY
Pure are the halls of glory! With unwashed feet
go neither Schiller’s, nor Goethe’s, into the temple.

Not that the backlash had come so much as a surprise. “After the bold venture of the Xenions, we must confine our labors strictly to great and worthy works of art”, Goethe wrote to Schiller, piously, in November 1796, just before the storm broke. “We must shame our adversaries by transmuting our Protean nature henceforth into noble and good forms”. Both took the call seriously: 1797 is known as the Balladenjahr, the year when the two poets produced many of their most famous ballads. Still, in 1806, Goethe got one last dig in: Faust includes a thinly-veiled parody of Nicolai called the “Proktophantasmist”. This roughly translates as “Ass-Phantom Seer”.