Gustav Löwe (philologist)

Carl Gustav Löwe (born February 18, 1852 in Grimma , † December 16, 1883 in Göttingen ) was a German classical philologist and librarian .

Life

Gustav Löwe was the son of the high school teacher Carl Hermann Löwe (1815-1884), who until 1876 was the second professor at the Princely School Grimma . Gustav Löwe attended this school from 1865 to 1870 and then studied Classical Philology at the University of Leipzig . Here he closely followed Friedrich Ritschl , who inspired him for the history of Latin language and textual criticism . While still studying, Löwe decided to compile a complete collection of the Latin glossaries . On June 3, 1874, he passed the Rigorosum . The work on his collection dragged on, however. With the first sheet of this work he received his doctorate on September 20, 1875. He then went to Italy in December 1875 on a grant from the Saxon government to collect material for his text-critical work. He also examined various manuscripts for the continuation of Ritschl's Plautus edition, including the Ambrosian Palimpsest . In 1876 Löwe published the first part of his gloss collection under the title Prodromus corporis glossariorum latinorum and dedicated it to Ritschl.

After Ritschl's death in December 1876, Löwe continued his work on the Plautus edition in Rome and Florence in order to complete the work of his teacher. He worked in Rome and Florence until October 1878 and then traveled to Spain and Portugal, where he examined manuscripts for the corpus of the Latin Church Fathers on behalf of the Vienna Academy of Sciences . He also dealt with Visigothic script , of which he and his friend Paul Ewald collected several examples and prepared them for publication. The collection did not appear until years later with the support of the Prussian education administration under the title Exempla scripturae visigoticae 40 tabulis expressa (Heidelberg 1883).

In the fall of 1879, Löwe returned from his research trips to Leipzig, where he was employed as a second adjunct at the Russian Philological Seminar. His position left him little time to evaluate and publish his research results. Since 1878, his fellow students in Leipzig, Georg Goetz and Fritz Schöll, published the Plautus edition, in which Löwe's material was used. Leo himself published a few small essays in which he gave samples of his glossary studies. On April 15, 1880, he moved to Göttingen, where he worked as curator of the university library. During the induction phase, he familiarized himself with all areas of library work: lending registers, journal lists, access directory, alphabetical catalog, bookbinding and local and interlibrary loan. In addition, he took part in the revision of the real catalogs, which was under the supervision of the senior librarian August Wilmanns .

Löwe found his calling in the library service. That is why he even turned down an offer from the University of Kiel to a chair in classical philology, which he received in autumn 1883. A few weeks later he was killed in an accident: on December 14, 1883, he fell into the elevator shaft of the new university library. Two days later he died of the consequences of the accident without first being conscious.

Löwe's unfinished business came to an end after his death: The Plautus edition was completed by Fritz Schöll and Georg Goetz in 1894, and Goetz published the planned glossary corpus in seven volumes from 1888 to 1923 under the title Corpus Glossariorum Latinarum .

literature

• Ivo Bruns : Necrology on Gustav Löwe . In: Archive for Latin lexicography and grammar including older Middle Latin . Volume 1 (1884), pp. 315-318
• Georg Goetz: Gustav Löwe . In: Biographisches Jahrbuch für Alterthumskunde . 6th year (1883), pp. 58–72
• August Wilmanns : Dr. Gustav Löwe: Nekrolog . In: Central Journal for Libraries . Volume 1 (1884), pp. 190-197 (with list of publications) ( online ).

Web links

Wikisource: Gustav Löwe  - Sources and full texts

• Literature by Gustav Löwe in the catalog of the German National Library