Martin Ostwald

Martin Ostwald (born January 15, 1922 in Dortmund , † April 10, 2010 in Swarthmore , Pennsylvania ) was a German-American classical philologist . Until his retirement in 1992, he taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Swarthmore College . His research interests were in the political structure of ancient Greece.

Life

The son of a Jewish lawyer grew up in Dortmund, where he attended the Archigymnasium and originally planned to become a rabbi . After the Night of the Reichspogrom , Ostwald and his father and younger brother were arrested by the Gestapo . While his parents stayed in Germany and were later deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp , Ostwald and his brother were able to flee to England via the Netherlands. There, however, like numerous other Germans, he was arrested as a supposed spy and taken to an internment camp in Canada, where he made the acquaintance of Thomas G. Rosenmeyer , who had also fled from Germany .

After his release, Ostwald began studying classical antiquity at the University of Toronto , from which he graduated in 1946 with a bachelor's degree. Two years later he did his Masters at the University of Chicago . He then began his doctoral studies under Kurt von Fritz at Columbia University in New York, which he completed in 1952 with a thesis on “The unwritten laws and the ancestral constitution of ancient Athens” .

As early as 1950 he received a teaching position from Wesleyan University , and a year later from Columbia University. In 1958 he finally moved to Swarthmore College, where he stayed until 1992. He also taught regularly at the University of Pennsylvania from 1968. He also held visiting professorships at Princeton University , Balliol College in Oxford, the University of California, Berkeley and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

In 1991 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and two years later to the American Philosophical Society . In 2001 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Dortmund .

He died of a heart attack on April 10, 2010.

Work (selection)

Ostwald was co-editor of Cambridge Ancient History between 1976 and 1992. He also published numerous works on Greek constitutional history.

• The unwritten laws and the ancestral constitution of ancient Athens , New York 1953.
• Nomos and the beginnings of the Athenian democracy , Oxford 1969.
• Autonomia. Its genesis and early history (= American Classical Studies Vol. 11), Chico 1982. ISBN 0-89130-572-6
• From popular sovereignty to the sovereignty of law. Law, society, and politics in fifth-century Athens , Berkeley 1986. ISBN 0-520-05426-1
• Anakē in Thucydides (= American Classical Studies Vol. 18), Atlanta 1988. ISBN 1-55540-279-8
• Oligarchia. The development of a constitutional form in ancient Greece (= Historia Einzelschriften Bd. 144), Stuttgart 2000. ISBN 3-515-07680-8

Web links

• Entry on Martin Ostwald in the Database of Classical Scholars (English)
• Literature by and about Martin Ostwald in the catalog of the German National Library
• Portrait in Swarthmore College Bulletin