Karl Lehrs
Karl Lehrs (
June 2,
1802 -
June 9,
1878),
German classical scholar, was born at
K�nigsberg.
He was of Jewish extraction, but in 1822 he embraced Christianity. In 1845 he was appointed professor of ancient Greek philology in K�nigsberg 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 Friedl�nder 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).