How does a tradition end? Sometimes, like a language, a tradition dies with the last person who embodies it. After Samuel Johnson read James Boswell's Latin thesis for the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh, he remarked with characteristic bluntness, “Ruddiman is dead.” Thomas Ruddiman, printer, publisher, Latinist, and librarian of the Faculty, had corrected the Latin of the young advocates' works before they were formally submitted. Now he was gone – and with him the tradition of precise Latin scholarship that had inspired Ruddiman's edition of the works of George Buchanan. Scottish Neo-Latin died with Ruddiman.

The crowd-pleasing death scene of the ars historica, by contrast, seems impossible to identify with that of a single individual or even the publication of a single deadly critical book. It is not hard to provide a terminus ante quem. On 22 December 1766, the Prorector and Senate of the University of Göttingen celebrated the opening of a Historical Institute, under the directorship of Johann Christian Gatterer, professor ordinarius of history. This institute promised the young scholars and aristocrats who flocked to the university the most up-to-date historical training in Europe – a training that Friedrich August Wolf applied to the creation of Altertumswissenschaft, and Wilhelm von Humboldt to the invention of that sublime product of German administrative ingenuity, the researchcentred University of Berlin. The great classical scholar Christian Gottlob Heyne celebrated the institute's creation in a powerful address.