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Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker (1784–1868) was one of the most engaging and creative of German philologists during the formative period of modern classical scholarship; 'one of the heroes', Wilamowitz called him. Art, poetry and religion were to him all the same object of study, and a key to the world of Greek imagination and feeling. His attempt to grasp the meaning of all Greek mythology gave impetus to a still vigorous tradition. This work (in two volumes, first published 1835 and 1849) is his effort to recover the lost epics of the archaic period, and the conditions of their performance and transmission. If his adventurous reconstructions, here and in his companion work on Greek tragedy, do not always command assent, they offer many brilliant observations and insights. His influence has been as diffuse as it is unacknowledged; again and again one finds on reading him that Welcker said it first.
The philologist Georg Friedrich Grotefend (1775–1853) combined his career as a senior master at schools in Frankfurt and Hannover with the publication of school textbooks on German and Latin, and academic research in ancient history and languages. He was a co-founder of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica series of historical sources, still widely consulted today, and is also remembered for his role in deciphering Old Persian cuneiform. During his lifetime he was best known for his study of the geography and history of pre-Roman Italy (published 1840–2 and also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection) and his analyses of the fragmentary evidence for the Umbrian and Oscan languages, published in Latin in 1835–9 and now reissued in this volume. Inscriptions from buildings, tablets, coins and vessels allow Grotefend to reconstruct significant portions of the grammars of these early languages belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European family.
Originally published in 1791, this work by classical scholar and connoisseur Richard Payne Knight (1751–1824) attempts to reconstruct the original pronunciation of ancient Greek. Emphasising the importance of knowing what the various ancient dialects sounded like in order to better appreciate surviving works of ancient literature, Knight engages in textual criticism of certain notable writings, including the poetry of Homer and Hesiod and the plays of Sophocles. Representing a learned contribution to classical philology, the essay also goes some way towards analysing the ways in which Greek sounds were distorted by their inclusion in other languages. Several plates at the end of the text reproduce a selection of ancient inscriptions on stone, coins and ceramics. Knight's Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (1805) and Inquiry into the Symbolical Language of Ancient Art and Mythology (1818) are also reissued in this series.
Henry John Roby (1830–1915) was a Cambridge-educated classicist whose influential career included periods as a schoolmaster, professor of Roman law, businessman, educational reformer and Member of Parliament. His two-volume Grammar of the Latin Language went through seven editions during his lifetime. It provides in-depth analysis of Latin phonetics, noun and verb construction, and syntax and morphology, taking a descriptive approach. Drawing examples from the corpus of classical writings dating from circa 200 BCE. to 120 CE, this first volume (1872) discusses sounds and syllable quantities, noun and verb inflexions, and the basic elements of word formation, organized according to noun and verb stems. Appendices include pronoun tables, lists of weights and measures, and a chronological compilation of inscriptions from the republican era. A work of remarkable breadth and depth, Roby's book remains an essential resource for both historical linguistics and the study of Latin grammar.
This volume provides a unique overview of the broad historical, geographical and social range of Latin and Greek as second languages. It elucidates the techniques of Latin and Greek instruction across time and place, and the contrasting socio-political circumstances that contributed to and resulted from this remarkably enduring field of study. Providing a counterweight to previous studies that have focused only on the experience of elite learners, the chapters explore dialogues between center and periphery, between pedagogical conservatism and societal change, between government and the governed. In addition, a number of chapters address the experience of female learners, who have often been excluded from or marginalized by earlier scholarship.