No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
The Latin Studies of Hermann and Wilamowitz
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2012
Extract
A century ago, on the last day of 1848, there died Gottfried Hermann, the greatest classical scholar of his time. As a small token of homage to his memory some brief remarks on his contribution to the study of early Latin poetry may not be out of place here.
Hermann, who owes his fame to his work on Greek poetry, had a knowledge of the language of Rome and an instinctive sense of its potentialities such as few scholars possessed. He spoke and wrote Latin with lucidity, ease, and grace: it was to him the natural medium for the expression of his thought. A keen interest in Plautus had been roused in him at an early stage by his teacher Reiz, who was the first after an interval of darkness to rekindle Bentley's torch. Late in life, looking back over more than fifty years, Hermann said: ‘Plautum praeceptor meus Reizius pro sponsa mihi esse voluit.’ When Reiz was engaged in correcting the proofs of his edition of the Rudens he used the young Hermann as his amanuensis. Hermann (Elementa doctrinae metricae p. xiii) has left us a delightful picture of this collaboration: on the one side the elderly professor, all kindliness and modesty, distrustful of himself, relying on painstaking care and meticulous circumspection; on the other the impetuous youngster, impatient of tiresome hesitation and confident that his divination and his strong rhythmical instinct were enough to recover the metre and the true reading of a controversial passage.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Eduard Fraenkel 1948. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies
References
1 cf. the preface to his edition of Plautus' Bacchides.
2 This ‘Zuschrift an Gottfried Hermann’ is reprinted in Ritschl, F., Opuscula ii, 166 ffGoogle Scholar. On the success of Hermann's method in dealing with the cantica cf. Ritschl's ‘Prolegomena’ (in his edition of the Trinummus, 1849), p. ccxciv f. For a balanced view of the merits and the inevitable shortcomings of those early attempts see Leo, F., Rhein. Mus. xl, 1885, 161Google Scholar.
3 Wilamowitz, Erinnerungen 62 (my references throughout are to the 2nd edition), protests against this hybrid form, but this is the name under which the place is generally known, and which it bears on the maps and in the title of Goethe's little poem.
4 cf. Wilamowitz, Erinnerungen 92; Usener und Wilamowitz, Ein Briefwechsel (1934), 6 f. (Usener's reply is a marvel of wisdom and magnanimity).
5 Erinnerungen 87 f.; cf. Wilamowitz's letter to Usener, op. cit. 36.
6 cf. Mommsen und Wilamowitz, Briefwechsel 13.
7 cf. his Römische Geschichte v, 655.
8 cf. Theodor Mommsen im Kreise der Seinen, Erinnerungen seiner Tochter Adelheid Mommsen (Berlin, 1936), 71Google Scholar.
9 cf. Briefwechsel 192 ff., and Wilamowitz, Erinnerungen 182.
10 The reader who wants to form some idea of what Wilamowitz had to say on that head should study, e.g., the relevant sections of his Griechisches Lesebuch, his article ‘Der Rhetor Aristeides’ in Sitzgsber. Preuss. Akad., 1925, 333 ff., the essay ‘Hellenismus und Rom’ in his Reden und Vorträge, ii, 4th ed. (1926), 148 ff.Google Scholar, and the last, unfinished, chapter of vol. ii of Der Glaube der Hellenen.
11 Its real nature (only part of it is old and valuable) was first recognized by Wilamowitz, whose pupil Tank successfully worked out the details.
12 He has not, however, convinced either the editor of the Teubner text (1923) or the author of the article ‘Nux’ in P-W. Hermann Fränkel, on the other hand, is not swept away by the ‘conservative’ tide: see his Ovid (University of California Press, 1945), 253Google ScholarPubMed n. 14.
13 ‘Nebengedanken bei dem Jubiläum Vergils’ Süddeutsche Monatshefte xxviii, Heft 1, 43 ff.
14 I have to thank Wilamowitz's daughter, Baroness Hiller von Gaertringen, who long ago made it possible for me to read part of the relevant correspondence. These letters confirmed the inferences about Wilamowitz's share in the work which I had drawn, not from his own hint, Erinnerungen 191 (an understatement), but from the internal evidence in Kiessling's commentary.
15 The address is reprinted in Mommsen's Reden und Aufsätze 168 ff.
16 See Mommsen und Wilamowitz, Briefwechsel, no. 276, p. 357; cf. also the following letters.
17 cf. e.g. W. Warde Fowler, Roman Essays and Interpretations 218 f.; Syme, R., JRS xxxiv, 1944, 101Google Scholar.
18 For the importance of this point cf. my article ‘Das Pindargedicht des Horaz’, Sitzgsb. Heidelb. Akad., 1932–1933, Abh., 2, 22Google Scholar.
19 I think he lectured on Catullus only once, in the summer of 1923.
20 ‘Der Landmann des Menandros,’ Neue Jahrb. f.d. klass. Altert. 3 (1899), i, 513 ff.Google Scholar (= Kleine Schriften i, 224 ff.).
21 cf. especially his Menander, Das Schiedsgericht (1925), 119 ff.
22 ‘Des Mädchens Klage,’ Nachr. Gött. Ges. d. Wiss. 1896, 209 ff.
23 cf. Reden und Vorträge, 4th ed. (1926), 179 f., where he speaks admiringly of Cicero, De legibus 1, 59 ff.Google Scholar, and points out that it is not enough to trace the substance of those reflections back to some Hellenistic philosopher, but that we ought to recognize how much such noble ideas mean to Cicero himself and how genuine is his enthusiasm.
23a This was written before the publication of R. G. Austin's commentary on Quintilian, Book XII, where (see especially pp. 162 ff.) justice is done to Wilamowitz's article.
24 For Mommsen's and Wilamowitz's joint translation of Carducci's Odi barbare see their Briefwechsel 78 ff.