"The Gods of Greece" ("Die Götter Griechenlandes") is a 1788 poem by the German writer Friedrich Schiller. It was first published in Wieland's Der Teutsche Merkur, with a second, shorter version (with much of its controversial content removed) published by Schiller himself in 1800. Schiller's poem proved influential in light of German Philhellenism and seems to have influenced later German thinkers' views on history, Paganism and myth, possibly including Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Max Weber.

Friedrich Schiller had already argued in 1795 that it was precisely in play that we find the origins of self-consciousness, and hence freedom, and hence morality. “Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man,” Schiller wrote in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man, “and he is only wholly a Man when he is playing.”

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