All Scholars

Bormann attended Schulpforte, the famous gymnasium in Berlin that produced Gottfried Hermann, Nietzsche, Dissen, Bonitz, and Wilamowitz, to name a few. At Bonn he studied under Otto Jahn (1813-69) and Friedrich Ritschl (1806-76) and in Berlin August Boeckh (1785-1867), the archaeologist Eduard Gerhard (1795-1867), and especially Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903), who interested Bormann in the study of epigraphy and employed him to work on his pet project, the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. After several years in Italy, he was drafted into military service in 1870 and badly wounded.  he spent several academic years in Italy. Called up for military service in 1870 in the Franco-Prussian War, he was badly wounded. Upon his return he was hired by Hermann Bonitz (1814-88) to teach classical languages at the famed Graues Kloster in Berlin. After a decade, he was named professor at Marburg and in 1885 he moved to Vienna, where he developed the archaeological-epigraphic seminar founded by O. Hirschfeld (1843-1922) and Alexander Conze (1831-1914) in 1876 and turned it into an international leader in Latin epigraphy. Bormann devoted the bulk of his scholarly endeavor to the CIL volumes, meticulously edited and annotated, especially the inscription material from Italy and the Roman Limes in Austria (Carnuntum, Lauriacum). All of his work is informed by his deep knowledge of language and history. Of particular note are the historical-topographical introductions to the individual sections in the volume XI. The 1902 volume of Wiener Studien was dedicated to Bormann on his 60^th birthday.