The German Genius

nineteenth-century philologist put it—properly commences with Wolf. Wolf from the beginning rejected any prospect of theological training and was determined to rid classical studies of any clerical control. He was not the first modern philologist, but his rigorous methods of source criticism shaped and promoted philology as the new queen of disciplines. His 1795 study of Homer has been described by Anthony Grafton as “the charter of classical scholarship as an independent discipline.” 45
    Born in 1759, the son of a schoolteacher, Wolf could read some Greek at the age of six, and rather more Latin and French. At Göttingen, although he kept his distance from the most famous classicist there, Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812), he nonetheless emulated the older man’s dedication: like Heyne, he slept for just two nights a week for six months, so as to immerse himself in his beloved classical authors as quickly as possible, keeping himself awake by sitting with his feet in a bowl of cold water. He would bind up one eye with a bandage to rest it, while he used the other. His dedication was reminiscent of Winckelmann and the block of wood he attached to his foot.
    Wolf’s devotion paid off. In 1783, at the age of twenty-four, he was offered the position of professor of pedagogy and philosophy at the University of Halle. 46 At Halle, the original home of the seminar, he introduced his own, aimed at turning out specialist classical scholars. He succeeded so well that his seminar became the model for the new German universities of the nineteenth century. Wolf, says Suzanne Marchand, was haughtily convinced of the power of philological study “to instil self-discipline, idealism, and nobility of character,” a conviction that spread throughout the civil service and professions as the nineteenth century wore on.
    His best-known works, the Prolegomena ad Homerum ( Prolegomena to Homer ; 1795), and the Darstellung der Altertumswissenschaft ( Classical Scholarship: A Summary ; 1807), were not especially original but his painstaking textual interpretations, combined with some sharp common-sense thinking on Homer and his times, placed philological expertise above the philosophical. “[Wolf] was the first to show that access to the Greek mind was to proceed by means of strict attention to linguistic, grammatical and orthographical detail.” 47
    In order to support his argument that Homer’s poems were written down only in the mid-sixth century B.C., when Pisistratus was tyrant of Athens, Wolf used the fact that linguistics varied in the past to show how, in the earliest manuscripts, entire sections had been interpolated; and, by studying what was missing (“the argument from silence”), he deduced further conclusions—for example, classical commentators found no mention of writing in the Homeric poems. In the process, Wolf was open about his methods, admitting the difference between what he knew and what he merely conjectured, identifying which authorities he trusted and which he did not. 48
    In the Darstellung , he distinguished between Greeks and Romans on the one hand, and Egyptians, Israelites, and Persians on the other. He said unequivocally that only the Greeks and Romans possessed “a higher Geistescultur (intellectual culture).” The “Orientals,” as he described the rest, had merely reached the level of “ bürgerliche Policirung oder Civilisation [policed civility or civilisation].” He thought cultures need “security, order and leisure” so as to evolve “noble perceptions and knowledge” and this had not happened in antiquity outside Greece and Rome. Literature in particular was vital for a culture—it was the free, untrammeled product of a nation. For Wolf, therefore, Greek and Roman civilization alone constituted Altertum (antiquity). Egyptians, Israelites and the rest were “Barbari.” 49 In his full-fledged scheme, Altertumswissenschaft , for Wolf, comprised no fewer than twenty-four disciplines—from grammar to epigraphy to numismatics to geography, all being needed for full access to a text.
    As a scholar, Wolf’s reputation was supreme. Goethe attended his lectures, and in 1796 Wolf was offered the chair at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, then the summit in classics. He turned it down and for the next decade continued at Halle until the French occupation of the city in 1806 changed everything. It might have been a disaster, but only three years later he was offered