Wolf, Friedrich August
A great Homeric scholar, born in Hainrode, in Germany, on February 15th, 1759. He was
educated in the University of Göttingen, where he also gave private lessons; and in
1779 removed to Ilfeld, where he became the teacher of a school. In 1782 he was made rector of
the public school at Osterode, and in 1783 Professor of Philosophy at the University of Halle,
where he remained until the university was closed in 1806, when he removed to Berlin and took
an active part in the foundation of the new university in that city, being employed by the
Minister of Public Instruction. Wolf had already won a commanding position among the scholars
of Germany by his epoch-making
Prolegomena in Homerum, prefixed to the second
edition of his
Homeri et Homeridarum Opera, which appeared in 1795. In it he
set forth the so-called Wolfian theory of the origin of the Homeric poems, claiming that the
Iliad is made up of a number of ballads and songs which at first existed
separately in the verses of different rhapsodists, by whom they were handed down from
generation to generation until they were united by Pisistratus in the singer's epic that was
afterwards ascribed to Homer. This theory he based upon his assertion that writing was not
known at the time of the composition of the poems, and also upon the contradictions and
inconsistencies to be detected in the poems themselves. (See
Homerus;
Rhapsodus.) The
Wolfian hypothesis was not original with Wolf himself, having been advanced before his time by
other scholars (Casaubon, Vico, Bentley, Hedelin, Perrault, and Wood); but Wolf was the
first to present the arguments with sufficient acuteness, logic, and impressiveness to make a
profound impression upon the scholarship of the day.
Other valuable works of Wolf are his
Demosthenis Leptinea, with a most
learned introduction
(1789); editions of Plato's
Symposium; of
Hesiod's
Theogony; of Cicero's
Tusculanae; of several of the
Ciceronian Orations (
Post Reditum in Senatu, Ad Quirites de Domo Sua, De Haruspicum
Responsis, and the
Oratio pro Marcello, which Wolf regarded as
spurious); of the
Clouds of Aristophanes; and of Casaubon's Suetonius. His
Kleine Schriften, edited by G. Bernhardy, appeared in 2 vols. in 1869. Wolf
died at Marseilles, August 8th, 1824. See Körte,
Leben und Studien F. A.
Wolf's, 2 vols.
(Essen, 1833);
Arnoldt, Wolf in seinem
Verhältnisse zum Schulwesen und zur Pädagogik, 2 vols. (Brunswick,
1861-62);
Bursian, Geschichte der class. Philologie (Munich,
1883); and
Jebb's Homer (Glasgow, 1877). Cf. the article
Textual Criticism.
