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Friedrich August Wolf is a German Classical Scholar who argued in his 1795 "Prolegomena ad Homerum" that there might be no single author. Gottfried Herrman see
by vlz 5y ago
Friedrich August Wolf is a German Classical Scholar who argued in his 1795 "Prolegomena ad Homerum" that there might be no single author.
Gottfried Herrman seems to have argued the same just from the textual structure of the works in 1840.
Source is the german version of this english Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeric_Question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeric_Question
The english version mentions Wolf in a sentence but then concludes
> This perspective, however, did not receive mainstream recognition until after the seminal work of Milman Parry
Which might be a fair assessment.
The german part on Wolf's work is here: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homerische_Frage#Die_Forschung_seit_Friedrich_August_Wolf_(1759%E2%80%931824) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homerische_Frage#Die_Forschung...
- dtbx 5y agoThey had to destroy Homer because he was not german but greek. Had Homer been german, they would never have questioned a national hero.
- groby_b 5y agoMinor point of contention: There was no "Germany" to have "national heroes" in 1795. F.A. Wolf was Prussian. Prussia, in turn, was very much in love with classicism (like pretty much everybody at the time), which pretty much amounts to worshipping Hellenic and Roman culture.