Gregor Wilhelm Nitzsch

Who was Gregor Wilhelm Nitzsch?

Gregor Wilhelm Nitzsch was a German classical scholar known chiefly for his writings on Homeric epic.

Brother of Karl Immanuel Nitzsch, he was born at Wittenberg. In 1827, he was appointed professor of ancient literature at Kiel but, in 1852, was dismissed by the Danish government for his German sympathies. In the same year, he accepted a similar post at Leipzig, which he held until his death.

In opposition to F. A. Wolf and Karl Lachmann, Nitzsch maintained that the Iliad and Odyssey were not an aggregate of single, short poems but long and complete ones, composed by the same single author according to a uniform plan with a central dramatic idea. His writings were broad, dealing with every side of the controversy. In the earlier part of his Metetemata, he took up the question of written or unwritten literature, on which Wolf's entire argument turned, and showed that the art of writing must be anterior to Peisistratos. In the later part of the same series of discussions, and in his chief work, he investigated the structure of the Homeric poems, and their relation to the other epics of the Trojan cycle.