The basic thesis of this book is that each opera in Richard Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung (Der Ring des Nibelungen) represents a particular phase in the cultural evolution of a mythic world modeled in part upon the ancient Greek world. This thesis is immediately supported by two claims that Wagner made about the Ring in a letter to his friend, August Röckel, on August 23, 1856. The first is that in the Ring Wagner claims he intended to construct “a Hellenistically optimistic world [eine hellenistisch-optimistische Welt] for myself which I held to be entirely realizable if only people wished it to exist.” This world he says he constructed by relying upon his intellectual “conceptions.” Wagner's second claim is that, “instead of a single phase in the world's evolution, what I had glimpsed [in the Ring] was the essence of the world itself in all its conceivable phases.” Wagner attributes this second claim not to his intellectual conceptions but his artistic “intuitions.” Thus we have the notion of a Greek model in the first claim and cultural evolution in the second. But because Wagner attributes the second claim to intuition more than intellect, he favors that one. And yet, upon closer examination, it appears that the only real difference between the two claims is chronological. The intellectual idea is one Wagner intended to carry out before he completed the Ring, and the artistic idea is one he began to see only after he had been working on the Ring and began to see where it was going.