Daniel Casper (25 January 1635 in Nimptsch, Niederschlesien – 28 April 1683 in Breslau, Niederschlesien), also spelled Daniel Caspar, and referred to from 1670 as Daniel Casper von Lohenstein, was a Baroque Silesian playwright, lawyer, diplomat, poet, and chief representative of the . Family The Casper and/or Caspar () family came from the Brieg principality, first well known as poet and diplomats. Daniel Casper was the son of the imperial customs-officer, Akzisefälle-Einnehmers and Biergefälle-Einnehmers named Johann (Hans) Casper (c.1600-after 1670), alderman and city constable of Nimptsch, and Susanna Schedel of Greiffenstein (1612–1652). His father Hans in 1642 received a Wappenbrief and was raised on 17 July 1670 to a hereditary imperial peerage, with the name of "von Lohenstein". Life Youth Daniel Casper was born 1635 in the princely Schloss Nimptsch, to which his parents had withdrawn during the Thirty Years' War. After initial private instruction in Nimptsch, his father sent him to Breslau where Caspar from 1642 to 1651 attended the Magdalenen-School, that had been upgraded in 1643 into a secondary school (Maria-Magdalenen-Gymnasium). In the midpoint of his philological and rhetorical education there, he already as eleven-year-old student carried out disputations with antique examples over what qualified one to be a peer. At 15 he composed his first tragedy, "Ibrahim". Lohenstein was friendly with Heinrich Mühlpfort. After finishing secondary school, Casper had to leave Breslau because there was as yet no university in the town. At the University of Leipzig he studied under Benedikt Carpzov (1595–1666), the founder of the German criminal justice system, and at the University of Tübingen with Wolfgang Adam Lauterbach (1618–1678), where on 6 June 1655 he produced his Disputation ("Disputation Jurudica de Voluntate"). After finishing his studies, the (at that time usual) Grand Tour which he joined led him first of all to the sovereign courts of Germany, then to Switzerland, Leiden, Utrecht and Vienna (but not Italy, due to the plague then raging there). With Italy ruled out, he spent some time in Hungary, coming into contact with the Turkish-Oriental cultural circles there. Recalled by his father, he came home by ship, through a strong thunderstorm he remembered his whole life, in which he saw the sinking of 13 ships. After his homecoming, he established himself as a lawyer in Breslau and on 30 October 1657, at 22, in Breslau, he married Elisabeth Herrmann (died 1708 in Zettritz, Landkreis Landsberg (Warthe) ), Mark Brandenburg),