 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.The poem describes Schiller's conception of life and nature in antiquity, characterized as a happy and harmonious age, and in turn describes the Christian age as a stage of loss, joylessness, alienation and divisiveness.For Schiller, the reason for this is the replacement of the diversity of the ancient world of gods, which had worked through nature and human life, with a single, comparatively abstract and distant Christian god.