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Hermann Dessau received his early education at the municipal grammar school in Frankfurt led by Tycho Mommsen (1819-1900). Recognizing the aptitude of his student, Mommsen referred him to his brother, Theodor (1817-1903), who taught him and directed the research of his Strassbourg dissertation. His career was largely devoted to major contributions to Mommsen’s great project, the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, but he also did major work on the Scriptores Historiae Augustae, prosopography, and Roman imperial history, providing scholars with a multitude of new discoveries for the study of the Roman world. Having come from a rabbinical family (on both his mother’s and father’s side) he refused to deny his religion and so, although he achieved both a doctorate and a habilitation, he was not able to find a professorship because of his religion. He therefore became an assistant to Mommsen, based at the headquarters of the CIL, the Prussian Academy which he served from 1884 to 1929. The two historians were large presences in the Academy for a number of years. Mommsen sent Dessau to Italy and North Africa (1877-82) to gather inscriptions for what would be the 14^th (Latium) and the supplement to the eighth (North Africa) volumes of the CIL. Dessau was second only to Mommsen in the number of contributions to the CIL and was instrumental in maintaining the project after Mommsen’s death. The Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae(known familiarly to scholars as “the Dessau”) contains over 9500 inscriptions. In 1889 he argued that the Scriptores Historiae Augustae was probably written by a single author, not a combination of six authors, in the late 4^th century CE. As A. Glock shows in the Hermann Dessau (1856-1931), his article revised understanding of the work, but brought him into disagreement with Mommsen (and his successor Otto Hirschfeld), but without any breaking of relations. After Mommsen’s death Dessau edited the epigraphic portion of his Kleine Schriften. His ILS was revised after his death by Lothar Wickert (1900-89), Dessau’s only student. Reserved by nature, Dessau gave learned but uninspiring lectures but did not attract a cadre of students.