Leopold Schmidt (philologist)

Leopold Schmidt (1885)

Leopold Valentin Schmidt (born May 29, 1824 in Berlin ; † March 6, 1892 in Marburg ) was a German classical philologist who had been a professor at the University of Marburg since 1863. He stood out particularly through his comprehensive work Ethics of the Ancient Greeks (Berlin 1882).

Life

Leopold Schmidt was born in 1824 as the only child of the literary scholar Valentin Schmidt . After the early death of his parents, Schmidt was raised from 1831 by his grandfather Valentin Heinrich Schmidt, who was the director of the Köllnisches Gymnasium in Berlin. When he died very old in 1838, Schmidt came to the house of high school professor L. Hartung.

After finishing school, Schmidt studied classical philology in Leipzig from 1842 and listened to Gottfried Hermann and Moriz Haupt in particular . Later he moved to Bonn to Friedrich Ritschl and Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker , who introduced him to Greek literature in particular. In 1844 he became a member of the Fridericia Bonn fraternity . In July 1846 he received his doctorate with a study on the philosophical fragments of the Epicharm . A year later, in 1847, he achieved his habilitation and married. His wife accompanied him on research and educational trips to Italy and Sicily.

Schmidt was appointed associate professor in Bonn in 1857. At that time he was devoting himself to his first major project, a monograph on Pindar , which he had dealt with for the first time in Leipzig at Herrmann's. The book appeared in Bonn in 1862 under the title Pindar's Leben und Dichtung and was specially tailored to the ethical and moral tendencies and development of the poet. In the summer of 1863 Schmidt accepted a position at the University of Marburg . Here he worked until the end of his life as a full professor of classical philology. For a long time he did not publish anything and devoted himself entirely to his second major work, The Ethics of the Ancient Greeks , which appeared in two volumes in 1882 and was last reprinted in 1967.

After he had held the rector's office of the university in the academic year 1882/1883, Schmidt devoted himself to his last major project: A comprehensive history of ethics that should extend from Plato and Aristotle to modern times. However, the work did not get beyond the beginnings, as Schmidt was severely weakened by an influenza attack after just a few years. He was no longer able to keep his promise to Georg Wissowa to contribute articles on the history of Greek literature for the revision of Pauly's Realencyclopedia : he died at the age of 68 before the first volume went to press. His only article in Pauly-Wissowa dealt with the Greek anthology and was revised by Richard Reitzenstein .

literature

• Hermann Cohen : Leopold Schmidt in memory . In: New Yearbooks for Philology and Education . Volume 154 (1896), pp. 473-496 (also separately, Leipzig 1896)
• Theodor Birt :  Schmidt, Leopold . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 54, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1908, pp. 107-110.
• Franz Gundlach: Catalogus professorum academiae Marburgensis 1527-1910 . Marburg 1927, p. 339f.

Web links

Wikisource: Leopold Schmidt  - Sources and full texts

• Literature by Leopold Schmidt in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about Leopold Schmidt  in the German Digital Library

Notes and individual references

1. ↑ see Hessisches Staatsarchiv Marburg (HStAMR), Best. 915 No. 5673, p. 101 ( digitized version ).
2. ^ Franz Richarz: List of members of the Fridericia fraternity in Bonn (February 18, 1843 to autumn 1847) as well as the Arminia fraternity in Bonn (1847 to 1849) and the fraternity association Germania in Bonn (1843 to 1849). Bonn 1894, p. 15.
3. ^ Leopold Schmidt: Anthologia 1 . In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume I, 2, Stuttgart 1894, Col. 2380-2391.