Karl Lehrs
Karl Lehrs (
June 2,
1802 -
June 9,
1878),
German classical scholar, was born at
Königsberg.
He was of Jewish extraction, but in 1822 he embraced Christianity. In 1845 he was appointed professor of ancient Greek philology in Königsberg University, which post he held till his death.
His most important works are:
- De Aristarchi Studiis Homericis (1833, 2nd ed. by A Ludwich, 1882), which laid a new foundation for Homeric exegesis (on the Aristarchean lines of explaining Homer from the text itself) and textual criticism
- Quaestiones Epicae (1837)
- ''De Asclepiade Myrleano'\' (1845)
- Herodiani Scripta Tria emendatiora (1848)
- Populare Aufsatze aus dem Altertum (1856, 2nd much enlarged ed., 1875), his best known work
- Horatius Flaccus (1869), in which, on aesthetic grounds, he rejected many of the odes as spurious
- Die Pindarscholien (1873).
Lehrs was a man of very decided opinions, one of the most masculine of German scholars; his enthusiasm for everything Greek led him to adhere firmly to the undivided authorship of the
Iliad; comparative mythology and the symbolical interpretation of myths he regarded as a species of sacrilege.
See the exhaustive article by L Friedländer in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, xviii.; F Rammer in Conrad Bursian's Jahresbericht (1879); A Jung, Zur Erinnerung an Karl Lehrs (progr. Meseritz, 1880); A Ludwich edited Lehr's select correspondence (1894) and his Kleine Schriften (1902).
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