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SYLLECTA CLASSICA 20 (2009): 171–213
BLOOD FOR THE GHOSTS: WILAMOWITZ IN OXFORD
Robert L. Fowler
Abstract: This essay offers thoughts on the scholarship and legacy

of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848–1931) on the cen-
tenary of his two lectures in Oxford, “Greek Historical Writing”
and “Apollo.” The circumstances of the visit are reviewed, and the
lectures are analysed in the light of the rest of his oeuvre. The strong
tension between Wilamowitz’s historicism and classicism refutes his
popular image as an arch-positivist. The reasons why he continues
to arouse strong reactions both positive and negative are explored,
and his place in the history of scholarship is assessed.*
On 3 and 4 June 1908, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff

(1848–1931) gave two lectures at Oxford. It was an extraordinary
event. Visits by foreign scholars, though not rare, were hardly as com-
mon as they are today; and this visit was far from ordinary.1 At a time
* A version of this paper was delivered in Oxford on 12 June 2008 to mark the
centenary of Wilamowitz’s visit. I am most grateful to Michael Konaris and Robert
Parker for the invitation and their comments on the written version, and to an indulgent
audience for their kind reception on the occasion. I thank also Jan Bremmer and
Bonnie Honig for their valuable comments and corrections.
1 Wilamowitz’s father-in-law Theodor Mommsen visited Oxford in 1885 and 1889.

Local lore has it that he was disappointed to discover that the Bodleian did not open
at 7:00 a.m., and declared in exasperation at the closed doors “nur eine Luststadt,”
“just a resort town.” The second part of this would seem to be a roving anecdote, as
Wilamowitz is supposed to have said the same thing when gazing on the city from the
top of Magdalen Tower: see Green 165, quoted at Bierl 79 n. 337 (where the speculation
about what he really said is otiose—unless one claims that Mommsen really said it,
Wilamowitz knew about it, and said it again on his visit!). Wilamowitz was certainly
impressed by the beauty of Oxford: a year later, he referred to the “honour and great
pleasure” of lecturing “an der ehrwürdigsten und schönsten Stätte, doch wohl beides,
die es für die Studien auf dieser Erde gibt” (quoted from a lecture published in the
Mitteilungen des Vereins der Freunde des humanistischen Gymnasiums in Wien 8 1909
172 SYLLECTA CLASSICA 20 (2009)
when Classics enjoyed supremacy in European culture, and Germany

enjoyed supremacy in Classical studies, Wilamowitz was regarded by
many judges as the greatest of the German Hellenists. He was professor2
at the Humboldt University of Berlin since 1897, the institution that
typified the modern scientific university.3 His publications had revo-
lutionised Classics, and he was at the proverbial height of his powers.
He had been elected Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in
1907, and was honoured by both Oxford and Cambridge with honorary
doctorates on this visit in 1908. There could hardly have been a more
obvious recipient, and the visit was much anticipated in a country where
he had many admirers.4 The whole occasion showcased the best of the
respublica litterarum.
A hundred years on, Classical philology is under threat even in
Germany. Anglo-American classical scholarship has struck out in new
directions, and western, non-continental European scholars are increas-
ingly monoglot. An event of comparable significance today could not
possibly involve a classicist; more likely a philosopher, a cultural critic, or
a theoretical physicist. The previous hundred years had not seen anything
like such a change. The reasons for it are many and varied, and one may
regard it as good, bad, both, or neither. To discuss such ambitious top-
ics is not the purpose of this article, but rather more modestly to offer
some reflections about the scholar and the scholarship involved in it on
the hundredth anniversary of a symbolic event.
One might first of all ask why the event continues to have reso-
nance at all, and should not rather be relegated to, at best, a footnote
by Rudolf Kassel in his review of Calder 1985, 569 n. 70). I owe the Mommsen story
to Robert Parker; for Mommsen’s visits, see Croke; Jackson 52–53; Wickert 125–37;
W. Fowler 250–68 (at 252 he records Mommsen’s disappointment about the library
hours; nothing about a Luststadt). For Wilamowitz and Mommsen, see Calder (2003).
2 Not actually the ordinarius for Greek philology, but technically of rhetoric as
successor of Ernst Curtius (1814–1896); the former post was occupied by Adolf
Kirchhoff (1826–1908). Friedrich Althoff (1839–1908), Vortragender Rat in the
Prussian Ministry of Culture and responsible for universities, engineered his transfer
to Berlin from Göttingen. For Althoff and his management of university appointments
in the great age, see Brocke (1980), Calder (1989), Domaschke, Rüegg 135.
3 See Ruegg 47–53, 57–60 for both myth and reality.
4 See Huxley 538–57; Calder (2002) 125–43.

FOWLER: WILAMOWITZ IN OXFORD 173
in the most detailed history of the period. There are several reasons. Of
course Wilamowitz was a very great scholar, and one would hope that
any serious practitioner would wish to read his works and contemplate
the circumstances in which they were written, both for their intrinsic
interest and instruction, and as a way of reflecting on one’s own scholarly
environment. But this is only part of the story. From the standpoint of
the early twenty-first century one would say that Wilamowitz is not like,
say, Casaubon or Scaliger, Heyne or Welcker. He is a watershed in the
history of classical scholarship; however much fashion has changed, there
is little doubt that his all-embracing and (as we would say) multi- and
interdisciplinary approach to the study of antiquity, itself an inheritance
from Boeckh and especially Welcker,5 but realised on a scale far beyond
anything seen before, fundamentally shaped the course of Classics in
the twentieth century. One can identify several critical junctures in the
history of our studies: the Peripatos, and its descendants in Alexandria
and Pergamon; Byzantine encyclopaedism; the Italian Renaissance; the
Enlightenment and its nineteenth-century avatars. Wilamowitz is clearly
one of the latter; but it is not so much the application of nineteenth-
century scientific method that distinguishes him, but the joining up
of history, philology, archaeology, art, religion, etc., to attain a richly
textured and fully rounded understanding of ancient life and culture;
the whole animated by passion, enlivened by the keenest historical vi-
sion, and embodied in a truly enormous output. As is often pointed
out,6 he reunified and revitalised a tradition whose separate streams were
running into the sand. Any book would illustrate his procedures, but if
one had to pick a single work it would probably be the commentary on
Euripides’ Herakles, whose impact upon its appearance was electrifying.
Almost without exception, all subsequent commentaries on tragedy and
comedy work along the same lines, whereas those preceding it come
from a different world of variae lectiones and grammatical notes. That
historical roundedness—thick awareness, to adapt a phrase—is probably
his most lasting legacy; it represents a cognitive shift.
On the other hand, one must add to the list of sea-changes the
mid twentieth-century revolution in humanities, in which approaches
5 For Welcker, see Calder, Köhnken, Kullmann, and Pflug (1986), (1981) 34–51.
Welcker is the first scholar mentioned in the list of formative influences; he is preceded
by Lessing, Plato, and Goethe.
6 Most memorably by Fraenkel in Leo xxviii; cf. Aeschylus Agamemnon 60.

adapted from social sciences and philosophy produced a flood of entirely

new work beyond the dreams (or nightmares, doubtless) of a Wilamow-
itz. From this perspective he represents a bygone age. The change has
proceeded pari passu with the relentless marginalisation of Classics
(which contributed very little to the revolution—the deficit of trade has
been massive), from the centre of school and university curricula and
national cultures to the status of a minority and endangered subject,
even if hordes of undergraduates still take the surveys in mythology and
civilisation, and mass entertainers churn out a succession of blockbusters
based on ancient history or legend. In respect of status enjoyed by the
subject, the bygone era seems a Golden Age, with Wilamowitz as its
Saturn. Perhaps this is a reason not to read him: yesterday’s man, obsolete,
occasionally to be consulted for this or that conjecture or suggestion
(like, say, Casaubon or Heyne), but in most cases safely ignored. But
this underestimates the impact, scope, and reach of the contribution
identified in the last paragraph, and the power of his overall approach,
visionary and inspirational as those of Gibbon, Grote, or Mommsen. So
we are dealing, paradoxically, both with continuing basic relevance and,
for many scholars and the questions they put to the texts, irrelevance.
It is a strange situation, but not one that betokens obsolescence. The
fact that “Wilamowitz continues to provoke extreme responses, from
hagiography to iconoclasm” reveals the anxiety of influence (Revermann
8 n. 1). Nobody gets worked up any more about Gottfried Hermann.
Nietzsche is in the mix here. Many of the philosophically-oriented
strands of twentieth-century criticism avow his influence, and he was
the lodestar for many members of the younger generation who found
Wilamowitz old-fashioned already in the 1920s, and who turned their
backs on his historicism.7 Wilamowitz famously attacked Nietzsche’s
Birth of Tragedy in two vitriolic pamphlets, which he later regret-
ted (though remaining utterly out of sympathy with their author’s
philosophy).8 Many people now know of Wilamowitz only in this
context. In popular imagination he symbolises opposition to everything
that Nietzsche stands for and that modern or postmodern critics hold
dear, especially the critique of the Enlightenment. If the quarrel had not
7 Several essays in Flashar 1995 are relevant: Landfester 11–40, Latacz 41–64, Hölscher
65–87, Cancik 381–402, Henrichs 423–57 (further references at his n. 64).
8 See Gründer; Wilamowitz (1929) 128–30; Silk and Stern 95–109; Calder (1983a);
Goldsmith, esp. 583–87; Mansfeld.
happened, those who know the name only by this route would indeed
not know it at all. But the quarrel is ultimately only an interesting co-
incidence, adding spice to the underlying issues. People get worked up
about Descartes, even if they detest him, because he still matters. The
twentieth century did not quite succeed in killing European rational-
ism or the Enlightenment; yet though they will not easily regain their
throne, and probably should not, a third way is not obvious, and is
complicated by the religious element in contemporary global politics.
For classicists, Wilamowitz (or for those who have not read him, what
they think he stands for) still matters; but the difference between clas-
sicists and Wilamowitz on the one hand and philosophers and Descartes
on the other is that philosophers are not worried about the survival of
their discipline.
Then there is scholarship, culture, and politics. In the same academic
session as Wilamowitz was honoured, Oxford bestowed a degree on Kai-
ser Wilhelm II.9 Europe was soon to tear itself apart in hideous conflict.
We cannot, from our viewpoint, help but consider events of this decade
in the light of the ensuing catastrophe. It is hard to make allowances
due to the ethos of the time for the strong nationalism in Wilamowitz’s
writings. It is harder still to retain a guiltless pride in the achievements of
European and Western civilisation which is historically the descendant
of classical antiquity. No one in Wilamowitz’s day doubted the essential
(in a strong sense) link between Classics and Europe. If insiders cannot
identify their own myths, this particular one, the myth of a European
(superior) essence, did not become fully apparent to Europeans until
much more recently than the end of WWI, so deeply rooted was it. But
the Great War began the work of deconstruction and disillusion. Before
the war, Wilamowitz’s German patriotism is on display most obviously
in Aus Kydathen,10 but he was not overtly involved in politics until 1914.
He then became very outspoken, advocating a strongly conservative line
on war policy. He was Rector Magnificus of the University of Berlin
in 1916. In his speeches he defended German militarism—which he
claimed was not at odds with German scholarship—and protested Ger-
many’s innocence; he believed that total victory was the only response to
9 It was conferred at a ceremony 15 November 1907 at Windsor Castle, rather than
in June at the Encaenia in Oxford; see Pogge von Strandmann 87.
10 He was a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War 1870–71; see Wilamowitz (1929)
105–26.
a naked attempt to destroy his country and the freedom of its citizens.
He was a signatory to the infamous Aufruf an die Kulturwelt signed by
93 German professors; though he foolishly gave his name without see-
ing the outrageous final version, which he and many others regretted
afterwards, he never disavowed the substance and wrote a similar, if
milder, statement for all Hochschullehrer, which was signed by more
than 4000 teachers of higher education—that is to say, nearly every last
one of them in 53 institutions.11
Given his time and place, Wilamowitz’s actions bring the issues
around scholarship and politics into acute focus. On the one hand, by
contemporary standards he was no chauvinist; like everybody else, he
thought in terms of essential national characters, and certainly believed
in German excellence if not superiority, but often spoke warmly of the
virtues of other nations and did not think Germany had a right to con-
quest. On the other hand, he spoke rather too much and too passionately
about these essential differences between nations and their necessary
connection with culture and universities, such that his argument for
unity-in-difference in the international republic is self-deconstructing,
and as we would see it, symptomatic of the whole problem. The locus
classicus in his works is the speech delivered to an international gathering
at the centenary of the Humboldt University in 1910, and reprinted at
the end of his Erinnerungen, which were written in 1928, in vain hope
and in spite of the lessons of the Great War (which, to be sure, few if
any had yet learned). The speech vacillates sentence by sentence between
the unity of scholarship in the service of Truth, and talk of national es-
sences and differences, by implication each with their own Truth: who
has the real Truth, and to what lengths would one go to defend it? One
expects such nationalism in the writings of the period, and one can just
about accept it by realising that no other way of thinking could even be
imagined; but it is not easy. In a similar way, the anti-Semitism in the
discussion of the Jews in the Erinnerungen (38–41), painfully clear to a
holocaust refugee of my acquaintance who could bring himself to read
no further, merely reflected the attitude of many contemporaries (not
only in Germany, and not necessarily worst there), and in Wilamowitz’s
11 For a superb discussion of these issues, see vom Brocke (1985); for “more than
4000,” see esp. 651. Vom Brocke reprints both documents, which can also be found
in Böhme 47–50; see also von Ungern-Sternberg. Some of Wilamowitz’s speeches
were published in instalments as Reden aus der Kriegszeit (1915–16); for a full list, see
Armstrong for the years 1914–19.
case did not translate into actions against individual Jews. Far from it:
he despised this kind of anti-Semitism, and furthered the careers of
Jews in German universities (where there was such anti-Semitism), just
as after the war he did more than some others to restore international
relations among scholars. Nevertheless, from our point of view, when
Wilamowitz defends the militarism of German society and the Prussian
ethos, or when he speaks like that about Jews, it is very hard not to feel,
at the very least, uneasy; some will be simply revolted.
Yet of all possible reactions, smug complacency is surely out of place.
None of us can know what stance we might have taken had we lived
then, or what stance we might in all earnestness and conviction of truth
adopt in the future, despite the lessons of history. It is a particularly rep-
rehensible form of this smugness to dismiss Wilamowitz as a proto-Nazi.
There is for a start no evidence for this preposterous but persistent idea;
rather some evidence to the contrary.12 Hitler capitalised on anger about
Versailles, but not all those angry about Versailles supported Hitler. There
is a world of difference between fascism and Wilamowitz’s aristocratic
view of the proper place of democracy. In the 1920s he largely withdrew
from public engagement. There is something more than disinterested
judgement going on in this hostile attack, which curiously has spared
12 See vom Brocke (1985) 714 ff. (including cases where Wilamowitz supported
liberal politicians), and the extract from a 1929 letter to Adolf Erman published by
Goldsmith 612: Erman had written “Among my ancestors are three Frenchmen and
a Jew, so I cannot claim to be a pure German nor even a ‘pure Aryan’. Naturally I am
wicked enough not to believe in these advantages of the ‘pure race”’; Wilamowitz replies,
“Your family history is a truly rare advantage, not only because it is a splendid rebuff
to the race hounds.” “In the historical forecourt of Nazism there have been gathered
in the course of time Luther, old Fritz and Bismarck, Wilhelm Busch, Struwwelpeter
and Grimms’ Fairy Tales: why not try it with Wilamowitz?” writes Kassel in his review
of Calder (1985) 542, in response to Luciano Canfora’s essay “Wilamowitz: ‘Politik’
in der Wissenschaft.” Wilamowitz’s opinion of Hitler is not recorded, but Lloyd-Jones
is right that he would have regarded him as a “socialist and a guttersnipe” (1990,
400). Latest to try is Flaig, arguing (for instance) that when Wilamowitz diagnoses
a monotheistic tendency in Greek religion he is anti-Semitic because his real aim is
to deny credit to the (of course unmentioned) Jews. Wilamowitz was hardly alone
in this idea; what is going on here is a desire by those raised in the Judaeo-Christian
tradition to graft the Greek tradition on to it, and assimilate the latter to the former,
rather than cut the former out. Nietzsche’s ridicule of the practice as Christian hits
the mark (see Henrichs 1986, 203 f.). Anti-Semitism would be more justly diagnosed
in Gladstone’s work on Homer’s religion, for which see Lloyd-Jones (1982) 110–25.
other scholars who had documented relations with National Socialism.

Rather it is an evasion of the issues, both scholarly and political; a facile
and self-comforting dismissal of a scholar disliked on other grounds.
Were more of his works available in English, some of the worst
misconceptions might be dispelled. The favourable reception of the
History of Classical Scholarship is a case in point: a very lively book, full
of memorable vignettes, bons mots, and astute judgements; a pleasant
surprise to many readers.13 It is impossible not to be impressed by the
sheer mental power (as usual, Wilamowitz wrote mostly from memory).
Despite the welter of facts, the focus and flow are never lost. The style
is engaging and the author’s personality shines through. So do his likes
and dislikes; in Pfeiffer’s words, this “quite individual and brilliant
survey…is a very subjective review of classical scholars made by a great
master who calls up the dead heroes of the past from the other world
and praises or blames them” (1968, ix). If you find this habit offensive,
you are unlikely to warm to Wilamowitz. The charge of arrogance was
often justified, particularly when he was young. He was a supremely
gifted Prussian aristocrat; humility would not have come naturally.
Apart from the History and his memoirs,14 the two Oxford lectures,
“Greek Historical Writing” and “Apollo,”15 are practically the only writ-
ings of Wilamowitz to have been translated into English. It is probably
not coincidental that the History and the lectures contain similar remarks
on the purpose of classical scholarship and how it is to be prosecuted.
They arise naturally given the subject of the History, and in Oxford
Wilamowitz was conscious of representing his country and its scientific
traditions. On the other hand similar remarks are found in many of his
works, especially in prooemia and perorations. These leading motifs will
naturally occupy our attention; but first some information about the
circumstances of the visit might be of interest.16
The invitation came from Sir (Thomas) Herbert Warren (1853–
1930), President of Magdalen from 1885 to 1928, and Vice-Chancellor
13 Translated by A. Harris in 1982; originally Geschichte der Philologie (1921).
14 Translated by G. C. Richards as My Recollections (1930). E. C. Marchant also
translated excerpts from the Griechisches Lesebuch (Oxford 1905–6); and in addition
to parts of letters in his various editions, W. M. Calder III has translated Wilamowitz’s
essay on Virgil’s 2000th birthday at Vergilius 34 (1988) 112–27.
15 Wilamowitz 1908.
16 For full details see Bierl 71–81, supplemented here in one or two points.
of Oxford 1906–10. Warren had sent an essay on Sophocles to Wilamo-

witz and received a warmly appreciative reply in a still-surviving letter.17
Gilbert Murray doubtless also had something to do with the invita-
tion. A lifelong admirer of Wilamowitz, he had recently returned to an
academic post as a fellow of New College (his elevation to the Regius
Chair occurred soon after the visit, in October).18 There was a question
whether the lectures should be delivered in English or German; Warren
thought German would reduce the audience, and English was agreed.
Wilamowitz sent his scripts to Murray, who translated them. He was
diffident about his ability to lecture in English,19 so he obtained the
translations in advance in order to practise. Murray found the lectures
difficult to translate, and in a mischievous moment penned this parody
in a letter to his wife of 3 April:
Struth only first for-yesterday is one, and struth the second of the
Williamsonian Forreadings, struth in your name but still none-
theless on that account to my house directed, to me come. The
therewith however accompanyingly enclosed letter stated, another
Forreading, and struth the by rights first one, namely Apollo,
be already begun, will however only first after onetwo weeks be
postally offsent. Struth already the history writing one is well good
six hours in Delivery to occupy likely, and all whatsoever even
only moderately intelligible englishing strongestly resists. The your
devotedest G.M.20
Cuts were duly made.21 In the same letter, Murray expresses the sur-
prising view that he thought the lectures not up to Wilamowitz’s usual
17 See Calder (1979).
18 For Gilbert Murray (1866–1957) see Wilson; R. L. Fowler (1990); Bierl.
19 “Murray wird für mich zwei Vorträge übersetzen, die ich Anfang Juni in Oxford
halten soll, von der Universität ganz officiell eingeladen, wo ich denn nicht ablehnen
durfte, so schwer es mich belastet, zumal ich englisch gar nicht reden kann” (Tièche 20).
20 New Bodleian Library, Murray MS 459 12, quoted by Wilson 129, who is doubtless
right that “struth” represents “zwar.”
21 A longer version of the “history writing one” appeared in the fourth edition of
Wilamowitz’s Reden und Vorträge 216–46 as “Griechische Geschichtsschreibung,” but
it is clearly not Murray’s original.
standards. One can only speculate on the grounds. Regarding “Apollo”

he might have known that an essay expounding the same thesis ap-
peared in Hermes for 1903, and if so might have been disappointed
that Wilamowitz did not prepare a fresh piece. The English lecture does
present some differences of emphasis, and the peroration is new; it also
knocks very firmly on the head the thesis that Apollo was originally a
sun-god: perhaps Wilamowitz thought this heresy still had adherents
in England. L. R. Farnell shared Murray’s disappointment, finding the
lectures “unscientific.”22 Michael Konaris, to whom I owe the reference to
Farnell’s memoirs, suggests that Wilamowitz’s neglect of anthropology in
“Apollo” would not have recommended the essay to him. Farnell doubt-
less also found the passionate, confessional passages unscientific,23 and he
might understandably have resented Wilamowitz’s apparent neglect of
the 258 pages on Apollo he had published only the year before.24 As for
22 “I think about 1910 [sic], the Curators of the Common Fund invited von
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff to give three [sic] lectures in Oxford. He was then at the
height of his European reputation as our leading Hellenic scholar. I was disappointed
in his lectures (on the origin of Apollo), which did not suggest a thoroughly scientific
mind. I met him at a dinner given by the Anglo-German club, and found him of the true
Junker-type, strong and daring but arrogant and contemptuous of others. I have tried
to formulate my opinion of his excellences and defects as a scholar in my commentary
on Pindar” (Farnell 1934, 277). In The Works of Pindar he writes: “There is much in
von Wilamowitz’ book from which a thoughtful scholar may differ; but as he has the
rare advantage of being a man of letters as well as a great savant he has done more
for the full appreciation of Pindar’s poetry than any preceding writer or scholar. His
interpretations would have been still more authoritative if his logical power of tracking
out truth through a maze of difficulties were as tense and enduring as his intuitional
insight is happy and penetrating” (1932, xxviii). One might unkindly understand
“scientific” in this assessment to be another word for “dull.” For Farnell (1856–1934)
see Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) xix 74–75; Henderson.
23 “It has been my object to restrict myself as far as possible to the statement of the
facts, and not to wander too far into the region of hypothesis and controversy. One’s
work thus incurs the risk of dryness and coldness of tone; and the risk is all the greater
because, while Greek mythology was passionate and picturesque, Greek religion was,
on the whole, sober and sane. An exposition of it may be of great value for the purposes
of literature; but for the purposes of science it is best to exhibit the facts, as far as
possible, in a dry light,” Farnell (1896) x, quoted by Henderson 217.
24 CGS iv (1907) 98–355. Farnell dismisses Wilamowitz’s thesis as expressed in the
Hermes article at the outset of this discussion by saying “his statement is too slight to
the historiographical piece, Paul Shorey at any rate wrote a rave review
in Classical Philology,25 stressing its stimulating insights; it is hard to see
why Murray found it wanting.
Some contemporary impressions of the visit survive. There is first
of all a report in The Times of 8 June, p. 11D:
Dr. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, who recently received

the honorary degree of D.Litt., delivered two lectures before the
University this week, the first on “Greek Historical Writing,” and
the second on “Apollo.”
In introducing the lecture, the Vice-Chancellor, the President of
Magdalen, expressed the satisfaction of the University to the pre-
eminent Greek scholar, now, they were glad to think, wearing the
robe of a doctor of Oxford, who had come from Berlin to address
them on subjects which were so vital a part of their studies, and
of which he was so consummate and recognized a master. A great
Chancellor of the University used to say that he spoke French “avec
beaucoup de courage,” but the courage of Dr. von Wilamowitz-
Möllendorff exceeded even that of the Duke of Wellington. He was
going to give his lectures in English. For many of them that would
no doubt be an advantage, but they would also like to hear how
German sounded in the mouth of so practised a speaker and so great
a scholar, and he had encouraged Dr. von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff
to prelude his lecture by a few words in his native language. They
had a common fatherland, the land of Hellas. In the name of Hellas,
then, he greeted Dr. von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, as in the name
of Rome they greeted the accomplished and distinguished lady, his
wife, the daughter of Theodor Mommsen. The Vice-Chancellor
quoted two lines of Goethe which he thought might express their
feeling at the present moment:
Vor den Wissenden sich stellen
Sicher ist’s in allen Fällen!26
Dr. von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff then spoke for a few minutes
in German and afterwards proceeded to give his lecture on “Greek
Historical Writing” in English.
be considered a serious ethnographic discussion” (99 n. c). Farnell’s Apollo is Aryan;

he is clear that the sun-god hypothesis is wrong.
25 CP 4 (1909) 328–29.
26 Goethe, West-östlicher Divan, Buch der Betrachtungen: “To the knowing shouldst
repair / Then canst thou never err.” It is one of Goethe’s better-known quotations, used
also by George Eliot as the inscription to Ch. 39 of Daniel Deronda.
There follows a good short summary of the lectures; it is of interest that

the writer does not comment on the stirring perorations, in particular
the famous “blood for the ghosts” passage of “Greek Historical Writing.”
Others comment on his voice, and the contrast between English
and German. Here is Murray himself:
His accent was practically perfect in English, but he spoke with

a scrupulous care which made almost the effect of timidity. He
was a different man when his great voice rolled out its easy and
eloquent delivery in his own language. I think he enjoyed his visit;
he certainly made a great impression here by his personality as well
as his learning (1954, 11).
Another impression, immediately after the event, comes from P. S. Allen,

editor of Erasmus’ correspondence:
We have been celebrating Wilamowitz-Moellendorff—we being this

University—: giving him a D. Litt. and hearing him lecture. He is
a fine looking man, and smiles most charmingly whenever he has
anything agreeable to say—indeed for long passages at a time he
quite beamed on his audience. Last night again he was at a meeting
of the Philological Society, where Hunt read a paper on the new
fragments of the Hypsipyle of Euripides discovered at Oxyrhynchus.
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff lectured in English, and was fairly intel-
ligible: but in speaking both before and after the lecture and at the
Society he used German, which—so far as I could follow—was full
of interest (77 [5 June]).
Those who know Wilamowitz’s appearance only from the photographs in

the Erinnerungen or the grim portait in Die Antike for 1929 might have
difficulty thinking of him as beaming on any audience, but his lectures
were very animated, and the gallery of photographs recently published
by Wilt Aden Schröder contains not a few smiles—a quite jolly total,
really, given that hardly anybody smiled in photographs in those days.
The meeting of the Philological Society was reported in The Oxford
Magazine of 11 June:
From his second lecture at the [Examination] Schools he pro-

ceeded almost straight to the dinner arranged in his honour by
the Philological Society; this enjoyable gathering was followed by
a big meeting of the Society in Queen’s College Hall, at which Dr.
Hunt27 read a most interesting paper on the newly discovered frag-

ments of the Hypsipyle of Euripides, the most important dramatic
find of this generation. The discussion was opened by Mr. Gilbert
Murray, who gave a dramatic interpretation of one of the scenes
of the play in a manner described by the next speaker as einfach
glänzend. The same epithet might have been as aptly applied to its
user’s own contribution. He began by dissenting from the precision
of some of Dr. Hunt’s conclusions, and pleaded for the leaving open
of some of the disputed questions of the play. We must not exag-
gerate the extent of our discovery. It was clear from a comparison
with other plays of the same period of Euripides’ activity that we
did not possess a complete list of the dramatis personae; various
hypotheses were suggested as to how the gap should be filled in, but
no definitive conclusion was arrived at. But the criticism was the
criticism of a master, and for those who enjoyed hearing him wield
his native German it was more enjoyable even than the afternoon
lectures. Altogether it will be long before the Philological Society
can provide another such συμπόσιον.
Murray later recalled:
An incident which I remember with pleasure from the discussion

in the Philological Society on the Hypsipyle was his approval of an
interpretation which I gave of Eurydice’s extreme confusion when
addressed by Amphiaraus. It was not a ridiculous shyness or prudery
at being spoken to by a strange man, but a natural shame at being
discovered in the midst of a cruel and violent action by one who was
recognised as a sage and a ‘man of God’. ‘Das,’ he said emphatically,
‘ist die richtige Deutung’ (1954, 11).
Of the visit Wilamowitz had this to say in his Erinnerungen:
I count it as one of the greatest possible honours that I was able to

give two lectures in Oxford, which Gilbert Murray, no less, trans-
lated for me. To see Oxford in the smiling spring, to be a guest of
the Vice-Chancellor, the President of Magdalen, to sleep in the beds
27 Arthur Hunt (1871–1934): ODNB xxviii 835–36; Bierl, index s.v.; Huxley
543–44. With B. P. Grenfell (1869–1926; ODNB xxiii 706–07; Wilcken 557–60)
Hunt published the text as POxy 852; their notes incorporate the comments of various
scholars including Wilamowitz. The definitive text is by Richard Kannicht in TrGF
V; commentary by M. J. Cropp in Collard, Cropp, and Gibert’s Euripides: Selected
Fragmentary Plays. See also Collard and Cropp’s Euripides: Fragments, vol. 2.
where once the founder of the College, Henry VIII,28 and Anna
[sic] Boleyn had slept, to go up to Grenfell and Hunt at Queen’s
College and cast an eye on their papyrus treasures (though to be sure
there was no Ibscher)29—all of this was in its way as enchanting as
a long drive at Windsor amid blooming rhododendra as high as a
man, or to be present at a regatta at Cambridge.30
Of the Windsor excursion, a remark of Murray’s survives:
When he was in England, at the time he got his degree at Oxford,

he took a lodging in Windsor. We were puzzled at this, until it
occurred to us that he had expected that King Edward—Edward
the Seventh—would invite him to the castle. We were inclined to
smile at this. But after all if a distinguished English scholar had
gone to Germany the Kaiser would have sent for him. Our Royal
Family is so ill-educated.31
Concerning Cambridge, apart from J. E. Sandys’ brief and formulaic ora-

tion (213)32 we have only this comment from Montague Rhodes James:
28 Henry VIII completed Christ Church; Magdalen was founded in 1448 by William
of Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester.
29 Hugo Ibscher (1874–1943), the founder of papyrus conservation; see Sinz; Gundel.
As Oliver Primavesi points out to me, Wilamowitz’s point is not that Grenfell and
Hunt were inferior to Ibscher, but that the Oxford team in these early days lacked his
kind of specialist contribution. See Wilamowitz (1903) 3 for Ibscher’s work on this
papyrus. Sinz tells a story of Wilamowitz presenting Ibscher to the Kaiser when the
conserved papyrus was handed over to the Royal Museums.
30 312. There follows an anecdote about a visit to Westminster Abbey, including a

somewhat surprising (in view of his royalism) appreciation of Cromwell. While in
London he attended a meeting of the Hellenic Society.
31 (1960) 591. Like other arcana quoted in The Prussian and the Poet, this reference
is owed to P. G. Naiditch.
32 For Sandys see Hammond. The Oxford degree was not conferred at Encaenia (24
June 1908) by which time Wilamowitz was back in Berlin: Oxford University Gazette
no. 1243, vol. XXXVIII, 824. It was decreed by Convocation on 2 June (OU Gazette.
no. 1240, vol. XXXVIII, 702); I have not located the text of any oration that would
have been given by A. D. Godley (ODNB xxii 581) who, though not elected Orator
Wilamowitz was the greatest foreign classic whom I had the honour
of receiving, in 1908, when he too came for an honorary degree,
and may have been a good deal puzzled by the May races to which
I took him, introducing him to Walter Headlam there. It was but a
few days later [18 June 1908] that Headlam died, and Wilamowitz
sent me some beautiful Greek elegiacs in memory of him.33
The May Bumps are not so very difficult to understand, after all, except
in name (they come at the end of the May term, in June); at any rate,
Wilamowitz appreciated their spirit, which he recalled years later in
commenting on the first stanza of Pindar’s fifth Isthmian.34
The two lectures may be briefly summarised. “Greek Historical
Writing” advances the thesis that the Greeks “were even further from a
genuine science of history than from a genuine science of nature” (4).
It opens with a comparison of Gibbon35 and Plutarch, who, in spite of
differences in temperament, were neither of them researchers in the strict
sense, discovering no new facts: they worked from available sources,
and added their interpretations. Similarly Livy “accepted the tradition
as he found it” and shaped it in the spirit of the rhetor and in the tone
of Augustan romanticism, “not only without research but without any
feeling for what we call historical truth” (4). Modern scientific history is
scarcely more than a century old. Yet just as modern research on natural
science rests on Greek foundations, so does modern historiography. A
brief survey of other ancient and medieval traditions (Indian, Egyptian,
until 1910, acted for W. W. Merry while the latter was Vice-Chancellor, and for some
time beyond; see Merry 95. Possibly a text lurks among Godley’s papers in the Bodleian.
33 204f. The elegiacs were published in CR 22 (1908) 63 = Wilamowitz (1938) 30.
34 “Vermutlich versteht es unmittelbar, wer die Aufregungen sportlicher Konkurrenzen

erfahren hat: mir kam die Strophe in den Sinn, als ich die Boote der Colleges von
Cambridge auf dem Cam unter der Junisonne dahinschießen sah und Ruderer und
Zuschauer gleichermaßen von den Leidenschaften des Spieles erglühten.” “Anyone
who has experienced the excitement of sporting competitions will probably understand
it directly: the strophe came into my mind as I watched the boats of the Cambridge
colleges shoot away on the Cam under a June sun, and rowers and spectators alike
glowed with the enthusiasm of the sport” (1922, 202).
35 In this lecture to an English audience Wilamowitz contrives to work in Gibbon,

Shakespeare, Byron, Scott, and Carlyle.
Mesopotamian, Hebrew, Arab) reveals only historical narratives, but no

historian. Hence Herodotus is the father of history, for he conducted
independent inquiries. But he was too subjective. Thucydides exceeded
him in rigour, and comes closest to the ideal of scientific history; his
purpose, however, was by no means purely historical, but rather politi-
cal instruction; comparison with Machiavelli is often tempting (8). The
influence of these two exemplars is then traced in the leading names
of subsequent centuries, with brief comments on their character as
historians: Xenophon, Theopompus, Ephorus, Timaeus, the Alexander
historians, Aristotle, a variety of Alexandrians, Polybius. Of Theopom-
pus, about whom we know more “thanks to the Dioscuri of Queen’s
College,”36 he has a favourable opinion, but the aim of the work was
“too vast”: Theopompus wished “to unite the fullness of the story-writer
Herodotus with the severity of the statesman Thucydides, and at the
same time to give speech to his own thoughts, both in broad critical
argumentation and in the play of inventive fancy” (10). Such a work
is without parallel in literature; whatever it is, it is “no longer history.”
Of Ephorus, on the other hand, he is contemptuous: “He ‘pragmatized’
history, as they call it; that is, he took care that everything should run on
such lines as an enlightened Philistine can at a pinch imagine. He also
took care that the moral and patriotic feelings of the public should in
the end receive the satisfaction which they expect in the fifth act of a bad
tragedy” (10–11). The Alexandrians are on the whole a disappointment;
one finds good things here and there, but not “what we call historical
criticism” which “was not only not attained, but not so much as sought
after” (14). “Imagine an even tolerably educated modern historian put
to work in the library of Alexandria: what a history of ancient Greece
he could put together, merely out of the books!” (14). Polybius too for
all his bluster is held in low regard.
The reasons for this failure to achieve the telos are canvassed. Such
impetus as might have arisen from Ionian logos, Platonic philosophy, and
Aristotelian researches ultimately had a different tendency; even Aristotle
made his great collections to “afford material for his political and ethical
theories,” and the Constitution of Athens reveals that he was “no historian”
(18). The Athenian democracy created the necessary precondition for the
36 Grenfell and Hunt (above, n. 27); the reference is to POxy 842 = FGrHist 66, the
Hellenica Oxyrhynchia; it is idle to speculate if Wilamowitz would change his view of
Theopompus if he did not accept his authorship of the papyrus.
flourishing of history, but the “empire collapsed; the democracy showed

itself incapable of founding the national state; and on the ruins there
arose that phantom growth of rhetoric and sophistic which renounced
the search after truth and honesty, and which brought to shipwreck
first the learning and then the whole civilisation of antiquity” (18).
Moreover, the Greeks lacked the capacity to think themselves into the
minds of others, to “transport [themselves] into the souls of men passed
away” (19). They “never tried to think on the model of foreign peoples”
and “show themselves little sensitive to the individuality of others. The
psychology of the Socratic school, and above all that of the Stoa and
of Epicurus, begins and ends with the normal man. Woman and child
are to them merely imperfect man.” Their biography deals in types and
ideals; glimpses of individuals such as the poet Menander shows us are
as rare as they are delightful.
In sum one can expect little original research from the ancients.
But “in mere justice” we should consider the matter from another side
(20). Greek historical writing from the beginning had “a much wider
range than that to which Thucydides the Athenian statesman wished to
confine it. It embraced what we call romance and the Novel” (20–21).
It is noteworthy that when a theory of history is developed, it considers
history, like poetry, a species of rhetoric (22). These basic insights were
illustrated with various examples including Duris of Samos, who wrote
“history in the style of Sir Walter Scott” (22); not necessarily worse for
it by any means, but we must recognise what kind of production it is.
Ctesias receives proper appreciation only when you consider him in this
light. Yet even in these writers one sees the difference. “An industry such
as Flaubert spent, I might almost say squandered, upon Salammbô, is
even at the present time an exception, but at least the principle will be
admitted by all, that the choice of an historical subject demands the
greatest possible truth and colour, both local and historical. That is a
point of which the ancient romance-writers never thought. Who could
demand it, when even the most serious historians are scarcely more
conscientious?” (23).
Tacitus and Posidonius are the last writers to be summoned before
this court, and once again are found wanting in respect of research into
facts and scrutiny of tradition. Like Gibbon, they wrote as poets and
artists, not as true historians. It is the “curse of ancient historical writing”
that they ignored Mr. Dryasdust,37 the tedious collector of facts, who
“is no very agreeable companion, but he is indispensable” (25). Then
the peroration, whose point comes as a complete surprise:
Yet let us be honest. We ourselves, when once Dryasdust has done

his work within us, and we advance to the shaping of our scientific
results—from that time forth we do just the same, we use our free
formative imagination. The tradition yields us only ruins. The
more closely we test and examine them, the more clearly we see
how ruinous they are; and out of ruins no whole can be built. The
tradition is dead; our task is to revivify life that has passed away. We
know that ghosts cannot speak until they have drunk blood; and the
spirits which we evoke demand the blood of our hearts. We give it
to them gladly; but if they then abide our question, something from
us has entered them; something alien, that must be cast out, cast
out in the name of truth! For Truth is a stern goddess; she knows no
respect of persons, and her handmaid, Science, strides ever onward,
beyond Posidonius and Tacitus, beyond Gibbon and Mommsen,
even though, so far as art has ennobled them, these men’s works may
endure. Because we have over the Greeks the advantage of possess-
ing a science of history, the greatest of us can no longer claim the
sort of authority which belonged for centuries even to a man like
Livy. But he who is worthy to serve the immortal goddess resigns
himself gladly to the transitory life of his works. And he has also
the comfort that in Science there is no defeat, if only his torch is
handed on still burning to his successor.
τοιοίδε τοί μοι λαμπαδηφόρων δρόμοι,
νικᾶι δ’ ὁ πρῶτος καὶ τελευταῖος δραμών.38
“Apollo” begins with the god’s image in modern European imagi-

nation (continental, that is: the first sentence is “How the great public
37 The Rev. Jonas Dryasdust, fictional antiquarian in Scott’s The Antiquary, and the
dedicatee of Ivanhoe; but just as famous from Carlyle’s “Anti-Dryasdust,” his remarkable
Introduction to Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches. “Sei nie zu vornehm wie
Carlyles Mr. Dryas Dust zu arbeiten” is half of one of the antitheses in Wilamowitz’s
philological catechism, Erinnerungen (1929) 104; he mentions Carlyle also in his Latin
autobiography (Calder, 1981) 160. Silk and Stern shrewdly guess that Nietzsche is
one of the “very famous persons” who according to Wilamowitz have ignored Mr.
Dryasdust to their detriment in modern times.
38 “Greek Historical Writing,” 25. Aesch. Ag. 312, 314, with δρόμοι mistakenly
quoted from memory for νόμοι.
in England conceives of Apollo, I will not venture to surmise”), viz. as

heavenly fiddler; the image is much conditioned by art. “If we carry
our question to those who profess some higher culture, the common-
est answer we shall receive will be that Apollo is the Sun” (28). That
idea is derived from Roman poetry, and no doubt is much older; “but
unfortunately it is a theological explanation; and, though a theological
explanation may always indicate something of importance for the real
religious idea, it is never authoritative and is only too often misleading.
For theology does not arise until men find it necessary to justify their
religious feelings at the bar of their reason” (28). “We will follow our
own historical method, and address our question to the Greeks them-
selves, who believed in Apollo not because he was a personification, but
because he was a person and a God” (28). He quickly states the facts
about the terrifying god of the Iliad, and quotes 1.47: “he walked like
unto the night.” “Our northern lands do not understand the phrase.
But any one who has felt the descent of Night on the Aegean sea, sud-
den, irresistible, unearthly, may form some idea of how the terrible god
came down to execute judgement. The being who was like this Night
can scarcely have been a sun-god” (29).
In what follows Wilamowitz expounds the evidence for his well-
known thesis that Apollo is Asiatic in origin. He describes the assimi-
lation of this god to the Greek pantheon, first on Delos and then at
Delphi; like everyone else until recently he reads the myth of the slaying
of Python historically as the supersession of the Earth Mother.39 He then
devotes several pages to Delphic morality, and the oracle as a force in
Greek life and history. This is more than cult; it is “something which
deserves the name of religion in a higher sense, a community of faith
which even passes beyond the boundaries of the nation; a faith which
often determines the action both of individuals and of states; and which,
though, like every real religion, morality is neither its cause nor its aim,
ends nevertheless by exerting a conscious moral influence” (36).
This religion, however, is only one side of Greek religious feeling. “To
many it seems to cover all that is characteristically Hellenic. They fail to
note that it is as alien to Homer as it is to the great Athenians, with the
single exception of Sophocles” (41). Müller went so far as to argue that
39 The symbolic rather than historic character of the myth is established by C.

Sourvinou‑Inwood.
Apollo was Dorian,40 but in fact Apollo is attached to no particular race.

His is a religion of reason and of all humanity. It is not a religion of the
other life or “strictly speaking” of supernaturalism. “It renounces the
whole domain of mysticism; for its god has no direct communion with
humanity” (42). His antithesis was Dionysus (shades of Nietzsche!); the
doctrine of life and punishment after death had already arisen among
Orphic communities of the sixth century BC, and ultimately this kind
of religion banished the Apolline, though the god went on for centuries
giving his oracles and presiding over his festivals. A rapid look at his later
fortunes brings us back to the modern Sun-god, and to the peroration:
At last came our own scientific history. Slowly and laboriously it
has learnt to distinguish this god of metaphor and fiction, or even
of theology, from that other Apollo to whom the Greeks prayed in
the days of living faith. But for too long a time Science was seeking
for a formula which should express the whole being of the god—if
possible through the etymology of his name. Historical reflection
has taught us a different lesson. The gods, too, have their history.
Inasmuch as they live only in man’s emotions, with those emotions
they shift and change; and it is these that our historical research
must follow. We have to understand not one Apollo, but many
and diverse Apollos, living and changing in the ritual and belief of
diverse places and periods.…And when all is said and done, this is
but a preparatory stage.…For religious emotions and intellectual
perception are incommensurables. We must go further. That emo-
tion which inspired the hearts of men long dead must live again in
our hearts. We must feel with them that awe and that rapture whose
source they worshipped in their gods. We must learn to believe as
they believed. Be it in the quiet of our chamber, when we read the
verses of some religious poet, be it on the floor of some ancient
temple which to the historical sense still preserves its sanctity, we
must feel in our own lives the epiphany of the god.
ὡπόλλων οὐ παντὶ φαείνεται, ἀλλ’ ὅτις ἐσθλός·
ὅς μιν ἴδηι, μέγας οὗτος· ὃς οὐκ ἴδε, λιτὸς ἐκεῖνος·
ὀψόμεθ’, ὦ Ἑκάεργε, καὶ ἐσσόμεθ’ οὔποτε λιτοί.41
To take “Apollo” first: the question of origins is now of marginal

interest to most students of Greek religion, but for those who do consider
40 See Müller vol. 1, 219–448 esp. 219 ff. On Müller (1797–1840) see Momigliano;
Burkert (1980) 159; Unte and Rohlfing with Schröder’s review at Gött. Anz. 253
(2001) 265–76; Calder and Schlesier (1998); Calder et al. (2002).
41 “Greek Historical Writing,” 45. Callim. Hymn 2 9–11.

it, Apollo remains an unsolved problem. Against the Asiatic thesis, for
which Wilamowitz marshalled a strong case, powerful objections have
been raised (but it still finds its champions); the favourite alternative is
Burkert’s updated arguments for Müller’s Dorian god,42 which has more
adherents but cannot be said to have won the day. If we are dealing with
the syncretism of several similar deities, Greek and pre-Greek, the process
lies deep in pre-history, and cannot be unpicked on current evidence.
Wilamowitz of course knew nothing of Linear B and regarded Homer
as close to the beginning of Greek history. His hope that further knowl-
edge of Lycian might contribute to a solution is, however, apposite (32):
not long after he died a god Ap(p)aliunas turned up in a 13th-century
treaty, not in Lycian but in Hittite, between Alakšandu of Wilusa and
the Great King Muwattalli II, which at the very least supports some
kind of Anatolian connection.43
The general outlook on religion is of greater interest.44 Wilamowitz’s
historical analysis of the god is to be expected. In the wake of Welcker
and especially of Müller, and reacting to nineteenth-century symbolic
approaches to Greek religion, in which gods could be reduced to abstrac-
tions or ciphers for the weather, he aimed at detailed reconstruction of the
historical circumstances of the lived religion, and imaginative recovery
of the feelings of the believers. A particular bugbear for him was the
practice of etymologising, pseudo-history if ever there was, undeserving
of any credence; the immediate target of his jibe was Hermann Usener’s
Götternamen (1896).45
Set against the historical analysis, however, are some powerful preju-
dices about true religion, which render the analysis more schematic and
42 Burkert (1975); cf. Graf in Brill’s New Pauly Vol. 1, 851, and at length in Graf
130–42, 184.
43 The facts are accessible in Latacz (2004) 40 with n. 47, 103–12; see also Graf 136.
44 Indispensable is Henrichs’ superb essay, “‘Der Glaube der Hellenen’:

Religionsgeschichte als Glaubensbekenntnis und Kulturkritik”; see also his “Welckers
Götterlehre.”
45 Henrichs (1985) 278–90. On Usener, see also the perceptive assessment of
Landfester (1979) 160 ff., and particularly Bremmer. Ironically enough, Welcker was
sympathetic to symbolic interpretation, and Müller had a somewhat complicated
relation to it; on the latter, see Blok.
less fine-grained than would satisfy today’s historian, and at bottom are
thoroughly subjective. For Wilamowitz true religion is a matter of faith
not cult, and the best religion is that of the great artists and thinkers.
The title of his last book, The Faith of the Greeks, from the start attracted
adverse comment if it did not raise a smile. Though on the one hand
he recognises the existence of many Apollos, on the other he constructs
a single Apollo from the writings of the elite, so as to be in a position
to say that this Apollo represents only one side of Greek religion. The
whole vision and the best of Greek faith was for Wilamowitz represented
by Plato, who provided him quite literally with his own religion: fidem
profiteor Platonicam, Eduard Norden reports him saying, and he meant
it in all seriousness (668).46 He characterises Apollo as rationalist, not
otherworldly or mystical.47 Being a god whose message is neither other-
worldly nor supernatural, he cannot be Platonic. Reason is only a part
of Plato’s scheme; necessary too is the fire of emotion, specifically Eros.
The Hellenic vision is rational and emotional in due measure, eyes fixed
on the other world but with no unGreek mysticism. True religion, we
infer, is otherworldly but not mystical, a distinction that must be difficult
to preserve in many real-life situations. It is a necessary distinction if
Wilamowitz, having accepted Nietzsche’s dichotomy, is to avoid rush-
ing from the rejected Apollo into the arms of the mystical Dionysus.
We infer too that true religion lacks theology, at least of the hard
kind; Wilamowitz being an unphilosophical sort of person, this view
is unsurprising. Of all philosophers Plato is most apt to appeal to the
unphilosophical reader. The idea that his is the truest Hellenic religion
is not, however, a view shared by every modern scholar. A line of inter-
pretation descending from Schiller and Goethe through Nietzsche and
Erwin Rohde to Walter F. Otto, E.R. Dodds, and Hugh Lloyd-Jones
draws a very different picture of the nature of Greek divinity and its
relations with mankind, stressing as the most fundamental point that
gods are immortal and humans are not; whereas for Plato and his master
46 The same sentiment repeatedly occurs also in the Latin autobiography (Calder,
1981). At his 60th birthday celebrations he declared Platonicum me esse profiteor:
Reinhardt (1966b) 365. See further below.
47 Michael Konaris points out per litt. that this comes from Müller vol. 4, 399 (cf.
Müller 1979, vol. 2, 289–90). Also from Müller is the rejection of the solar theory (vol.
2, 284 ff.). But Müller is one of those for whom Apollo is the most Greek of gods; so
too Curtius 48. Curtius like Wilamowitz stresses the role of Delphi.
Socrates, the soul is immortal and joins the gods after death, and our
purpose in life is to discover what god thinks is right and best and to
make our behaviour conform to these notions.48 Orphic influence is
obvious in Plato, and to the extent that we adhere to a dichotomy of
mainstream (polis) religion vs. subterranean streams such as Orphism,
we will deny Plato a central place (if we even enter into the game of
constructing the “truest” Hellenic religion). We have more evidence for
Orphism and similar mysteries than Wilamowitz did, and the dichotomy
has come under pressure, but it is still easy to maintain that Plato’s ap-
proach is not at all typical of ordinary Greeks. Curiously Wilamowitz
does acknowledge the early existence of Orphism, but obviously would
not wish to consider it the decisive influence on Plato, given that ac-
cording to him it contributed to the disintegration of Greek culture. His
idea is rather that Plato, out of his own genius, took to sublime heights
the best aspects of Greek gods as objects of faith as represented in the
best writers such as Pindar or Aeschylus.49 Of this complete Greek faith
Apollo could only represent a part, if a noble part. Dionysus remains
irredeemably foreign; in this Wilamowitz rejects Nietzsche, wrongly as
we would now think; he is right, however, to reject Nietzsche’s aberrant
idea that Apollo is a god of illusion (as is acknowledged by his followers
mentioned above).
The statement that the Apolline religion is not at all typical of
Greeks of the great period, Sophocles excepted, is the kind of paradox
Wilamowitz enjoyed perpetrating. Most of his contemporaries would
have regarded the white-marble, ethereal, perfectly beautiful statues of
Apollo as quintessentially Greek. Wilamowitz found idealising classicism
repellent—an “abomination,” even50—and antithetical to true histori-
48 Burkert (1985) 1 notes the modern tradition, most easily accessed via Lloyd-Jones
(1983); cf. “Ancient Greek Religion and Modern Ethics,” in Lloyd-Jones (2005) 415–32.
49 On Pindar and Aeschylus see Wilamowitz (1932) 129–38 (126–36 in the 1955
reprint); on Plato, 246–60 (244–57). See also Wilamowitz (1920) 193 ff., 251
n. 1 on Orpheus. Henrichs (1985) 304–05 documents Wilamowitz’s hardening
skepticism about early Orphism in the course of his career. For his loathing of
mysticism cf. Wilamowitz (1932) 205 (1955, 202): “Die Hellenen, welche den Perser
zurückgeschlagen hatten, konnten für weltflüchtige Gefühle nicht empfanglich sein”
(“The Greeks who beat back the Persian were not receptive to world-renouncing
feelings”).
50 Letter to W. Schadewaldt published by Calder (1983b) 257–63; cf. Schadewaldt.
cal understanding. His earliest writings, on the degenerate Euripides

and neglected Hellenistic writers, already instantiate his anti-classical
programme. His favourite tragedian was the rough-hewn Aeschylus,
whose religion he particularly admired.51 “Nothing distorts the picture
of a man more than his apotheosis, and nothing appears more remote
from the contingencies of existence than a classical work of art” (1912,
3). Wilamowitz typically seized on the irregularities and oddities in
the record as the surest signs of life. His works owe their appeal to the
extraordinary vivacity with which he envisaged the ancient world. One
often has the impression of being taken on a guided tour by a resident,
if one with a strangely Wilhelmine aura about him. “Wieder leben-
dig zu machen,” to restore to life, was the simple aim of all his work.
Though too prone to draw facile equations between modern and ancient
life—Sappho the schoolmistress is the egregious example52—he had a
marvellous eye for detail, and parallels that leave one shaking the head
are outweighed by hundreds that start one thinking.
His relentless historicism is well known. Yet the ideal of describing
the past “as it actually was,” a detached, objective reporting of reality,
sits ill at ease with the value-laden ideological thrust of his Platonism.
The desire to find what is “truest” and “best” in Greek religion is bound
to lead to the kind of schematising we have detected in “Apollo.” In
his approach to Greek religion Wilamowitz was notoriously averse to
exploration of the ritual undergrowth though this too was part of the
historical reality. In a letter to Murray he stated frankly that “in matters
of religion I am and remain old-fashioned. The whole modern tendency
seems to me to be to explain the grown man from the life of the embryo.
I am little interested in what Hekabe’s grandmother felt; nor yet Plato’s.
She was only an old woman, and her belief was γραῶδες” (Bierl, no. 55).
Murray in his turn followed Jane Harrison in his study of anthropol-
ogy, and was disappointed that Wilamowitz did not share this interest;
but like Wilamowitz, and unlike Harrison, he was ultimately interested
in the “higher” and purer forms of the Hellenic genius, studying the
51 See particularly the peroration of Aischylos: Interpretationen (1914) 252. On
Wilamowitz and tragedy see most recently Dubischar.
52 In Sappho und Simonides. Not such a non-starter as is sometimes thought—there

was an educational aspect to what she did—but Wilamowitz’s rising to “the defence
of a great lady” exposed him to ridicule. For discussion, see Lardinois; Bennett; Stehle,
ch. 6. On Wilamowitz’s technique, see Hölscher (1965) 17.
anthropology precisely in order to reveal how the best of Greeks had

freed themselves from the “primeval slime.”53 Paradoxically, Wilamowitz’s
historicism was ultimately placed at the service of classicism. Consider
the following quotations:
[The classicising view of Greek history is a] sentimental heroic novel,

a heap of moralising or poignant anecdotes. One might be tempted
to preserve this pretty fable convenue, from the heroic struggles of
the Messenians to the noble greatness of Demosthenes, just like
the fable convenue of Biblical history. But of course that would be
to give up all hope of being taken seriously, to admit that scholarly
study could produce no results, or leave nothing really worthwhile
behind. But this is not the case. Only those afraid that their trea-
sure is not real fear or avoid examination; gold only comes purer
and more brilliant from the fire, and ejecting dross is itself a gain
(Wilamowitz 1923, 2).
The task of scholarship is to bring that dead world to life by the

power of science—to recreate the poet’s song, the thought of the
philosopher and the lawgiver, the sanctity of the temple and the
feelings of believers and unbelievers, the bustling life of market and
port, the physical appearance of land and sea, mankind at work
and play. In this as in every department of knowledge…a feeling
of wonder in the presence of something we do not understand is
the starting-point, the goal was pure, beatific contemplation of
something we have come to understand in all its truth and beauty
(Wilamowitz 1921, tr. by Harris 1982, 1).
Then you are shot of classicism: but then you are in a position all the
more to recognise what is truly classic and therefore incomparable
and eternal (Wilamowitz 1929, 203).
Other quotations in a similar vein draw the link with Platonism:
Contemplation of eternal nature and all the splendours of art is not

only a pleasure but a revelation of the divine (Wilamowitz 1929, 7).
The ultimate task of philological-historical science is, through the

power of imagination schooled by scholarship, to make past life,
feeling, thought, belief live again, so that everything that had vital
power in that past can continue to exert its influence on the present
53 Cf. R. L. Fowler (1991); Parker; Schlesier.

and future. For that one needs a cool head, but a heart burning
with love. Only Eros leads to the vision of truth, and the eternally
living (Wilamowitz 1929, 104).

And finally, others reveal the link with deep personal conviction:
There under a beech on a sunny autumn day reclines a boy reading

the Symposium. His cheeks burn, his eyes shine, for at Diotima’s
words Eros rises up and with a kiss awakens his soul. “Upward,
striving ever upward; the clouds float down, they bend down to
yearning love.”54 Thus Socrates and Plato won a disciple, who now
knows why he is on earth. That is Plato’s living influence: it is more
than all of history. (Wilamowitz 1920, 602).

[In post WWI Germany nothing is left for an old man of Prussian
honour but to die away.] But the realm of the eternal Forms which
Plato revealed to us is indestructible: the miasmas of corrupt exis-
tence do not penetrate its pure aether; hatred and envy too must
also abide ἔξω θείου χοροῦ. I will fight under the sign of Plato so
long as I draw breath. What the boy promised as he left mother
Pforte, that promise will he keep:
οὐ παύσομαι τὰς Χάριτας
Μούσαις συγκαταμειγνύς
ἁδίσταν συζυγίαν.
ἔτι τοι γέρων ἀοιδὸς
κελαδεῖ Μναμοσύναν
22 XII 191855
“Two souls struggled perpetually in his breast,” wrote Jaeger; “the

historian, who only wants to know what happened, and the humanist
and philologist, who wants to worship and proclaim the great and eter-
nal” (219).56 We find the same struggle in “Greek Historical Writing.”
54 From Goethe’s Ganymed.
55 Preface to Platon, dated to his seventieth birthday. The tragedy of the war, in which
he lost his son Tycho, and the treason (as he saw it) of Versailles, left him profoundly
disillusioned. The verses from Eur. HF 674–9 were his motto, quoted in his Pforte
valedictory at the end of the autobiography (Calder 1981, 25) and in the dedication
to Pforte of Euripides Herakles (1889).
56 Jaeger alludes to Goethe Faust I 1112–17. Reinhardt (1966a) makes a similar
point in his typically brilliant essay, “Die klassische Philologie und das Klassische”;
also Schadewaldt; Pfeiffer (1960) 19 f.; Hölscher (1965) 22; cf. Henrichs (1995) 436.
The central thesis, that the Greeks had no scientific history, is not one
that would seem very helpful to scholars today. The result is a foregone
conclusion, given the definition of history. The Greeks cannot win at this
game (neither can Gibbon). Yet at the same time, Wilamowitz wants to
rate the Greek achievement higher than anybody else’s in antiquity. He
arrives at this estimate by making a distinction, surely futile, between
Greeks and other nations who had only historical narratives, but no
historians. Thus the Greeks got started on the path to scientific history,
and nearly got there with Thucydides, but for one reason or another
were baffled in their progress. Every one of the numerous historians sum-
moned for examination fails in respect either of the rigour of research
or of the purpose to which the research was applied. The paradox that
the Greeks had on the one hand the first historians but on the other no
history is one which Wilamowitz frankly acknowledges in the longer,
German version of this lecture, without realising the damage it does to
his thesis.57 The apparent failure to question his key concept of scientific
history would have seemed disappointing, if not jejune, to philosophers
of history even of his day, and might be damningly criticised as itself a
failure of historical imagination.
Yet—and this happens all the time with Wilamowitz—while espous-
ing a thesis we would today regard as a non-starter, he delivers himself
of remarks in passing that strike one as just, as worth following up, or
as anticipating later work: the comment about what modern historians
would do in the Alexandrian library, for instance (and wouldn’t we think
we could do more?), or the remark that ancient psychology regarded
woman or child as imperfect man, or the observation that history was not
one of the seven liberal arts but was a species of rhetoric, or (in “Apollo”)
the comment that “the being who was like this Night can scarcely have
been a sun-god,” or that the god “is not permanently in his temple, but
comes there, invited and welcomed by his special communities or the
choir of dancers which represents them” (33).58 The comparison with
historical novels anticipates a large body of twentieth-century theoretical
work; with respect to Ctesias, a recent article advises readers to appreciate
57 Above, n. 21. Similar views are expressed also in the 1917 address
“Geschichtsschreibung” (1972d).
58 This anticipates Otto’s description of Apollo as “Gott der Ferne” (53). The sun-god
hypothesis has been revived by Moreau.
him in precisely this light.59 And typically too when his passion carries
him away Wilamowitz produces one of those magnificent contradic-
tions that rescue the whole enterprise. Had he stopped before he turns
“in mere justice” to consider another side, the lecture would have been
irredeemably naive. Until that point we have (bons mots apart) nothing
but unproblematised objectivity vs. subjectivity, modern science vs.
ancient bellettrism; thereafter come much more interesting nuances,
and a confessio fidei. Wilamowitz would clearly never be willing to col-
lapse utterly the distinction between history and historical novels, as the
Flaubert example shows,60 but he is willing to let the ancients have their
way if they choose to call Ctesias an historian. This opens the door a tiny
crack on the possibility of a different paradigm. Then the peroration
takes us in entirely new directions: no longer the detached observer of
given phenomena, the historian, it seems, must animate the phenomena
before they can be received.
The “blood for the ghosts” line is famous.61 I suppose one’s first
assessment of it is that it is a poetic and memorable way of saying that
the scholar most have the utmost intensity of commitment. But the
implications run much deeper. Wilamowitz’s claim is that the ghosts
will not even speak if we do not thus feed them. Without such sacrifice
the tradition is silent, and you will not even get it to yield answers to
your questions, much less true ones. The reward for the sacrifice of one’s
59 Stronk who overlooks Wilamowitz’s lecture; he does however cite Die griechische
Literatur des Altertums (1912) 98: “Ktesias hat den ersten historischen Roman
geschrieben.”
60 In “Geschichtsschreibung” 141 f. he has slightly more to say about historical novels,
the best of which he views in a very positive light.
61 Gilbert Murray cited it in his inaugural lecture, “The Interpretation of Ancient
Greek Literature” (“As was said in this room last year by the great leader of contemporary
Greek scholars…” 1909, 19); another Regius Professor, Hugh Lloyd-Jones, borrowed
it for the title of a book. Silk and Stern have spotted that Wilamowitz was not the first;
none other than Nietzsche could be the unacknowledged source: “These works can
only survive through our giving them our soul, and our blood alone enables them to
talk to us. Real ‘historical’ discourse would talk ghostly speech to ghosts. We honour
the great artists less by that barren timidity that leaves every word, every note as it is
than by energetic endeavours to aid them continually to a new life” (Nietzsche 126).
One wonders if there is a common source in the German classics, or a scholar like
Welcker; I have yet to find it.
lifeblood is a glimpse of eternal Truth. The image of sacrifice is not a

metaphor. This is scholarship as religion. Consider the following passage:
One almost hesitates even to speak of the inadequacy of the indi-

vidual to grasp and learn over against the enormity of the object:
for what concern has Philology for philologists? Should eternity
accommodate itself to the mortal?…When the philologist in his
daily toil opens his eye to the majesty of scholarship, it feels to him
like the holy peace of a brilliant, starry night. The feeling of the
splendour, the infinity and the unity of the All courses through his
soul. Humbly he must say to himself: “Thou poor child of Man,
what art thou? what canst thou?” But when the ringing new day
is born, it calls unto him: “Arise, thou child of Man, arise and do
what thy day demands of thee, whereto God hath put in thy soul
the living power of creation: earn through thy work a share of
unending Eternity.”62
This sermon is part of an address delivered at a prize-giving ceremony

in 1892. Wilamowitz is not just telling a crowd of bourgeois what they
want to hear; the passage is of a piece with the preface to Plato quoted
above, and others scattered throughout his oeuvre. The tone becomes
more hieratic in public addresses, to be sure, but the message is consistent
in all periods and genres of his output. This is his conviction. Scholar-
ship puts us in touch with the Platonic world of Forms; it is our sacred
duty to seek the vision of their Truth.
Wilamowitz shows himself aware in many places of the inherent
tension in his position between value-free historicism and eternal-
verity classicism, but thought he could reconcile the two. The problem
is confronted most directly in several addresses and essays reprinted
in the sixth volume of his Kleine Schriften.63 In brief, his argument is
that the scientific history of the nineteenth century first exposed the
impossibility of the classicist view of the past, and rendered obsolete
its idealisation of antiquity on either aesthetic or moral grounds. But
this same historical science led to deeper and deeper understanding of
62 (1913a) 98–119, esp. 108f. The text is quoted at Braun 40. Braun’s essay collects
and astutely comments on many other pertinent quotations.
63 “Der griechische Unterricht auf dem Gymnasium,” 77–89; “Der Unterricht
im Griechischen,” 90–114; “Die Geltung des klassischen Altertums im Wandel der
Zeiten,” 144–53.
the Greeks, so that their greatness was appreciated for much sounder
reasons. These researches also made us realise more and more just how
like us the Greeks were (“Die Geltung des klassischen Altertums,” 151).
This is another article of faith, that the Greeks are Menschen wie du und
ich; and it is another article that separates Wilamowitz from his suc-
cessors, for whom the alienness of the Greeks is established doctrine,
springing from the anthropology with which Wilamowitz was out of
sympathy. Though modern anthropology is in spite of some disclaimers
a universalising discipline, its starting point is difference; one studies
other human societies as an outsider. A classicising view of the past
makes its objects not so much different as unreal, of a different order:
demigods, not people. Wilamowitz wanted the Greeks to be understood
in real terms, so that we could see just how good they really were. He
acknowledges that one could study any past society and derive valuable
lessons, but argues for the primacy of Greece in education first on the
grounds that every aspect of European civilisation is imbricated with the
Hellenic heritage, which is indispensable for its understanding (ibid.).64
But that is a matter only of relative values; ultimately, we have the great
works of art, the great thoughts, the great men. It is these that have
again and again revitalised civilisation. A classicist understanding of the
past cannot explain this power; it is the contact with historical reality,
not idealised abstracts, that fires the soul. What makes these artworks,
thoughts, and men great is their contact with the Platonic forms; they
impart a glimpse of eternal truth.
One can almost follow this: if you accept that there is a realm of
eternal truth opposed to worldly half-truths and falsehoods—and many
people do—then maybe you can accept that some societies, like some
individuals, collectively arrive at a better understanding of that realm
than other societies. They are simply better, and thus more worthy of
our study and imitation. But it must be admitted that this is strange
talk for an historicist, and not much different in the end than the talk
of the classicist, especially when linked to absolute, eternal values, of
which the Greeks happen to possess more than anybody else (“more than
all of history”). Moreover, when Wilamowitz descends from this lofty
level of generalisation to give some indication of the specific content
of this eternal Truth, it turns out to be the kind of thing seized upon
by generations of classical schoolmasters as the wisdom of the ancients:
patriotism, piety, duty, and so on.
64 He makes similar point in the Vorrede to the Griechisches Lesebuch v–vi.
Another tension which is obvious to us in the “blood for the ghosts”

line, but one which Wilamowitz confronted less directly (if at all), is
between the extreme subjectivity implied by the notion of pouring
one’s lifeblood into an enterprise and the pursuit of Truth. How exactly
Wilamowitz imagines this process working is mysterious. The inter-
preter’s passionate engagement is a prerequisite to making the ancients
speak at all. There is more than a hint of high Romantic yearning in this
passage, which appears to be suggesting a symbiosis, a surrendering of
self. “Gefühl ist alles” (Dieterich and Hiller 56).65 Somehow using our
inner vision we see their world through their eyes; we think ourselves
into their souls. Modern comparisons (like Sappho the schoolmistress),
so far from being unavoidable, are in this method actively to be sought
(Landfester 1979, 177). Yet Wilamowitz thinks we can “cast out” any
interference from modern perceptual filters: though it is our lifeblood,
we somehow annihilate ourselves in this operation. Indeed we must
do so as soon as they begin to speak: our lifeblood makes them speak
in the first place, but as soon as they open their mouths we are meant
to expel the alien element from what they say.66 Inspiriting demands
simultaneous exorcism.67 Citizens of a postmodern world cannot but
think of furious debates around the creation of meaning and read this
as an implicit recognition of, and vain attempt to deny, that everyone is
implicated in their own interpretations. Obviously Wilamowitz would
not go there, but it looks as if he has spotted where his argument was
tending. Since he must retain allegiance to objectivity, his notion, insofar
as it is thought out, seems to be that one gives one’s lifeblood to gain
admission to the cinema, so to speak, then sits back and receives the
images passively, without interference. More simply we are dealing with
65
Cf. e.g., Wilamowitz (1889) 257, (1929) 104. See Henrichs (1985) 289; see also
Henrichs (1986) 225.
66 “Wenn sie uns dann Rede stehen” is the original of Murray’s “if they then abide
our question” as it appears in the 1925 version (Wilamowitz 1925).
67 I owe this striking formulation to Professor Bonnie Honig of the American Bar
Foundation and Northwestern University, whom I thank for stimulating comments.
She writes: “The historian demotes the god by giving him a history, but the classicist
gets the satisfaction of reverence that godliness grants. That is, the choice of subject
is vexed…but it is also a way for the Wilamowitz to give voice to this fundamental
tension—to perform it.”
a proud and, as we would see it, naïve belief that he could actually think
himself into the mind of the past and see it for what it really was. He
does at least recognise that history is an ongoing dialogue between past
and present, and that every age reinterprets the past for itself. Like most
scholars then, however—and probably now, in spite of the rhetoric—he
still wants to maintain that truth is the object, and that somehow we
must cast out the subjective elements, even if our mortal condition, as
Socrates realised, condemns us to having no other way to undertake
our task but with tools compromised by subjectivity. Partial though our
successes can ever be, and condemned to be superseded, nevertheless it
is our duty to seek Truth.
It is the rhetoric of objectivity and truth that has led to the common
view of Wilamowitz as an arch-positivist. If one googles “Wilamowitz”
and “positivism” it takes little time to compile a list of representative
quotations. This is a rather nice example of presentism. Every age likes to
conceive of itself as more sophisticated than its predecessor, so a rhetorical
construct exists in which the previous age is “positivist” as opposed to
our “postmodern” times, the former naively believing in Truth and the
latter knowing better. Wilamowitz having the reputation of the greatest
scholar of the former Age, and predisposed like everybody else then to
believe in objective truth, is made into the straw man of stereotypical
positivism. This is only true in the flabby sense of “positivism” prevailing
nowadays. But it must be obvious from everything that has been said
up to now that Wilamowitz was no positivist. Positivism is the enemy
of metaphysics and therefore of Hellenism as he understood it.68 He
knew perfectly well that his scholarship was shot through and through
with values, which created a very difficult tension between objectivity
and subjectivity, at its starkest in the “blood for the ghosts” passage, in
which successive sentences state the opposite poles of the dilemma. As
further witness of his anti-positivism one may cite this passage from the
early work Aus Kydathen, which refers to the archetypal application of
Comte’s original positivism, botany:
The history of a people is not a piece of modern geography, in which

according to the unchanging, iron laws of a cold, unGoethian,69
68 “Positivismus und Materialismus” are “dem Hellenentume feind” (1972a 80). Cf.
Landfester (1979) 177.
69 My former Bristol colleague Alexander Košenina, Professor of German and
Wilamowitz-Kenner, comments in response to my query about the unusual adjective
ungodly nature, man, mistakenly dubbed an animal, develops like

animals and plants: mechanically, boringly, the same tomorrow as
today. No: just as the vegetation and animal world of a particular
time and region are by no means determined exclusively by nature,
but, like man, have shaped nature in the course of a thousand-year
labour, so too the human spirit and will, a daemon which stands in
contrast to all that has no soul, and forces it to walk in the paths
which it thinks and wills. History is the story of the struggle of
this daemon against matter; and for that reason Athens remains
the holiest of sites, for here in the morning freshness of world his-
tory the victory was most completely won, and the breath of the
fresh Athenian spirit cools our brow in the heat of that day which
is ours to live (212).
Whatever this is, it is not positivist; rather an avatar of Hegelian ideal-

ism. The idea is once again that a specially favoured race in a particular
historical context came closer than any other to winning, if it did not
quite win, the eternal spiritual battle. Again one can follow this, and
grant its coherence, however uncongenial or unnatural the premises are to
our own time. (Without some sympathy for the ethos of the nineteenth
century, it is hard to get started with Wilamowitz.) A harsher judge-
ment is possible of course. In what the victory consists is not specified,
and just as well, for it is apt to be banal, tautological, or chauvinistic:
the victory is at bottom no more than an impressive record of cultural
achievement; it is an inference derived from the passion that informs
the passage in the first place, and which only the converted will share;
and the values would look like what the author would regard as the best
of late nineteenth-century Prussian society. And the obvious classicism
(“holiest of sites”), if it does not contradict the historicism, must pose
a threat to it when it comes to judging this or that historical situation.
In both “Apollo” and “Greek Historical Writing,” it is noteworthy that,
ungoethisch: “Ohne jeden Zweifel ist Goethe gemeint. Und das paßt auch inhaltlich,
denn Goethe ist dem (Neu)Platonismus nahe verwandt. Er ist überzeugter Pantheist
und Spinozist, glaubt an die allbeseelte Natur, en kai pan, an die Great Chain of Being,
‘ungoethisch’ und ‘ungöttlich’ sind in diesem Sinne also klare Synonyme. Der ‘kalte’
Positivismus würde diese ‘warme’, harmonische Naturphilosophie unterminieren,
so scheint mir Wilamowitz’ Argument zu lauten.” Goethe and Plato were the two
foundations of Wilamowitz’s formation: see the Latin autobiography (Calder 1981);
Wilamowitz (1929) 65; Dubischar.
at the very moment the contribution of modern scientific history is as-

sessed, the religious vision finds expression.70
Yet there is much in these passages to stir the soul. If Wilamowitz
here pretends that classicism and historicism are at one, in other works
as we have seen he confronts their inherent enmity. This is a problem no
one has ever solved, and probably no one ever will. He is at least honest
in recognising that this tension is unavoidable, and in that respect rather
modern after all.71 The Greeks do inspire the most ardent admiration,
and are therefore worthy of a lifetime of intense study. They are our
cultural ancestors in the West; one does not have to be a chauvinist or an
Orientalist to be proud of this heritage, and think that it gives meaning
to life, whether metaphysically conceived or not.
At the end of these reflections I find myself wondering if that much
has changed after all. Wilamowitz’s belief that he could see the world
as Greeks saw it is obviously problematic, but I cannot think I proceed
so very differently in my own work. The contradiction in his ideas is
irreducible; yet so it is in most people. And tensions can be as creative
as they are destructive; considered another way, the classicist/historicist
oscillation is not to be deplored but actively embraced; it enables as much
as it constrains. As far as the broader perspective of history is concerned,
the revolution of the twentieth century has perhaps changed less than
people think. The question Wilamowitz’s immediate successors asked,
“what next?,” still hangs in the air in many ways.
Wilamowitz had the advantage of knowing more about the Greeks
than I shall ever pretend to know. There is hardly a problem he did not
treat, and treat with such insight and verve that one never fails to learn
from him. Der Glaube der Hellenen, however wanting we may find its
paradigm of religion, is an inexhaustible and indispensable book, rang-
ing far beyond its stated subject. Wilamowitz’s legacy lies mainly in such
treatments; he was never a thinker and will not be remembered as one.
But his legacy also consists in the conjunction of a towering passion for
70 Professor Honig offers the interesting thought that “Apollo” should be read against
“Greek Historical Writing” as an object lesson in the methods espoused. The choice of
a god as subject sets the lecturer up “to both fulfil and betray the historicist mission.”
71 It is worth noting that the enmity, though inherent, became acute only as
nineteenth-century historicism became ever more scientific; eighteenth-century
classicism was decidedly historicist as compared to early modern appreciations of the
Classics, as Hölscher (1995) points out, following Reinhardt (1966a).
Hellenism, a consuming commitment, and a rare brilliance of mind.

Serendipitously from an historical point of view, he presided over the
Golden Age of classical philology, which was contemporaneous with
the birth of modernity. The whole period sprang a lethal surprise of
contingency on eternal certainties, and left conventional classicists adrift
without bearings or compass. Few scholars bring into sharper focus the
issues surrounding the place of Classics in the modern world, a discipline
constantly feeling the need to justify itself. To close on a purely personal
note, the thought that for me keeps despair at bay is that the Greeks
have the power, proven over and over again, to speak directly to every
generation, and amaze them. I remember the precise moment when as
a boy I was first captivated. It is this power, more than what they did
in antiquity, that is the real Greek miracle. Perhaps the ghosts do not
need blood to speak after all; but no doubt they need nourishment to
continue the conversation.
Department of Classics and Ancient History

University of Bristol
11 Woodland Road
Clifton, Bristol BS8 1TB
robert.fowler@bristol.ac.uk
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BLOOD FOR THE GHOSTS: WILAMOWITZ IN OXFORD

Abstract: This essay offers thoughts on the scholarship and legacy

On 3 and 4 June 1908, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff

1 Wilamowitz’s father-in-law Theodor Mommsen visited Oxford in 1885 and 1889.

when Classics enjoyed supremacy in European culture, and Germany

3 See Ruegg 47–53, 57–60 for both myth and reality.

4 See Huxley 538–57; Calder (2002) 125–43.

6 Most memorably by Fraenkel in Leo xxviii; cf. Aeschylus Agamemnon 60.

adapted from social sciences and philosophy produced a ﬂood of entirely

other scholars who had documented relations with National Socialism.

of Oxford 1906–10. Warren had sent an essay on Sophocles to Wilamo-

standards. One can only speculate on the grounds. Regarding “Apollo”

Dr. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, who recently received

be considered a serious ethnographic discussion” (99 n. c). Farnell’s Apollo is Aryan;

There follows a good short summary of the lectures; it is of interest that

His accent was practically perfect in English, but he spoke with

Another impression, immediately after the event, comes from P. S. Allen,

We have been celebrating Wilamowitz-Moellendorff—we being this

Those who know Wilamowitz’s appearance only from the photographs in

From his second lecture at the [Examination] Schools he pro-

Hunt27 read a most interesting paper on the newly discovered frag-

Murray later recalled:

An incident which I remember with pleasure from the discussion

Of the visit Wilamowitz had this to say in his Erinnerungen:

I count it as one of the greatest possible honours that I was able to

Of the Windsor excursion, a remark of Murray’s survives:

When he was in England, at the time he got his degree at Oxford,

Concerning Cambridge, apart from J. E. Sandys’ brief and formulaic ora-

30 312. There follows an anecdote about a visit to Westminster Abbey, including a

34 “Vermutlich versteht es unmittelbar, wer die Aufregungen sportlicher Konkurrenzen

35 In this lecture to an English audience Wilamowitz contrives to work in Gibbon,

Mesopotamian, Hebrew, Arab) reveals only historical narratives, but no

ﬂourishing of history, but the “empire collapsed; the democracy showed

Yet let us be honest. We ourselves, when once Dryasdust has done

“Apollo” begins with the god’s image in modern European imagi-

in England conceives of Apollo, I will not venture to surmise”), viz. as

39 The symbolic rather than historic character of the myth is established by C.

Apollo was Dorian,40 but in fact Apollo is attached to no particular race.

To take “Apollo” ﬁrst: the question of origins is now of marginal

41 “Greek Historical Writing,” 45. Callim. Hymn 2 9–11.

44 Indispensable is Henrichs’ superb essay, “‘Der Glaube der Hellenen’:

cal understanding. His earliest writings, on the degenerate Euripides

52 In Sappho und Simonides. Not such a non-starter as is sometimes thought—there

anthropology precisely in order to reveal how the best of Greeks had

[The classicising view of Greek history is a] sentimental heroic novel,

The task of scholarship is to bring that dead world to life by the

Other quotations in a similar vein draw the link with Platonism:

Contemplation of eternal nature and all the splendours of art is not

The ultimate task of philological-historical science is, through the

53 Cf. R. L. Fowler (1991); Parker; Schlesier.

There under a beech on a sunny autumn day reclines a boy reading

“Two souls struggled perpetually in his breast,” wrote Jaeger; “the

lifeblood is a glimpse of eternal Truth. The image of sacriﬁce is not a

One almost hesitates even to speak of the inadequacy of the indi-

This sermon is part of an address delivered at a prize-giving ceremony

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