All Scholars

P.H. Damsté was the last of C.G. Cobet’s (1813-89) students to hold a chair in Classical Philology. Another influence was J.J. Hartman (1851-1924), who was Damsté’s teacher at the Leiden Gymnasium, and later in vain pushed for him to become his successor of the chair of Latin in Leiden. Damsté took over the working methods of both his teachers: textual criticism was the main focus of his scholarly work. The results of his studies could be found in his short textual notes, most of them found in Mnemosyne. 

Textual criticism for Damsté meant first of all the application of reason. After all, ‘very few types of manuscript errors are hidden so deeply that someone’s shrewdness could not uncover and solve them’ (Damsté 1899, 5). Modern scholars often see Damsté’s shrewdness as too much of a good thing, calling it ‘misplaced ingenuity’, ‘Dutch hypercriticism’, and ‘the worst sort of radical textual criticism’ (Briscoe 2008/2012 on Livy 39.9.5; 41.12.5; 43.6.12 respectively). Some of his conjectures, however, have stood the test of time: the critical apparatus of Delz’ 1987 Silius Italicus Teubner, for instance, mentions Damsté about 30 times. 

Damsté did not participate in the gradual move towards a broader Altertumswissenschaft (including ancient history, archeology, etc.) that happened in his lifetime, and so became part of a dying breed. He explicitly reflected on his liminal status a number of times in his career. In 1899, still a school teacher, in a Latin article published in the programme of the Leiden gymnasium, he starts by noting that ‘In these last years, scholars of Greek and Roman Antiquity have opened new pathways for themselves. […] What lover of the humanities is not struck with great joy when he sees that the field of the world of Letters is expanding?’ But he also notes that this widening of the field of Classics has caused scholars to distance themselves from textual criticism. He sides with a colleague against ‘those who believe that the noble youth should be steered away from the art of criticism and the emendation of texts, as if it were entirely ungrateful and futile to spend further effort and labor in this field after the enormous amount of work done by exceptionally brilliant men over nearly four centuries. […] Even in the most studied authors, there is still much to be improved.’ (Damsté 1899, 3-4). His tone was more bitter at the end of his career. In a 1932 letter he writes, with reference to textual critics C.G. Cobet and S.A. Naber: ‘How remarkable it is, that men whom we regarded as great and esteemed in our young years are now almost branded as villains by the current generations of classical philologists’.

Damsté marks the end of another tradition as well: he was the last Dutchman to publish Latin poetry on a regular basis. His poems, collected in three volumes (Damsté 1915; 1927; 1940), are noteworthy because of the ease with which he manages to discuss modern phenomena such as cigars and football. He won the annual Certamen Hoeufftianum, the most prestigious Latin poetry contest of that time, both in 1901 and 1903.

Damsté’s general views were conservative. In his 1917 rectoral address he claimed that the university was not the right place for women. Around the same period he helped found a Utrecht/Leiden Classics society of which women were not allowed to become a member. His conservatism is also apparent in his Latin poetry, which criticizes new technological and socio-cultural innovations such as the radio and Esperanto.

Some of Damsté’s descendants went on to become classicists too: his son Onno Damsté (1896-1973) acquired renown as a translator of classical texts; his granddaughter Machtelt Bolkestein (1944-2001) was Professor of Latin Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam.