All Scholars

Georg Götz was a student of Friedrich Ritschl (1806-76), one of the few great German scholars of the 19^th century who was a Latinist and the definitive editor of Plautus. To study Plautus is to study the earliest surviving Latin literature. Ritschl attracted a number of students to carry on his work, who experienced the same appeal that his American student, B. L. Gildersleeve, described: “My youthful imagination was captivated by Ritschl the man, no less than by Ritschl, the philologian.” Shortly after graduation, Götz began his study of early Latin with a publication on dittographies in Plautus while serving as private tutor to Nicolai von Tuhr in St. Petersburg, Russia. The work so impressed Ritschl that he invited Götz back to Leipzig, where he achieved his habilitation and taught until 1879, when he moved to Jena where he would teach for the next 44 years. (Toward the end of his career, Götz published a history of the university.) 

Ritschl had long worked with the help of students on a definitive text of Plautus, but his death in 1876 and the sudden death at age 31 of Ritschl’s student and collaborator, Gustav Löwe (1852-83) left the Pautus project to Götz and his coeval Friedrich Schöll (1850-1919), who completed the four-volume text in 1894. This was the first major edition of Plautus. It allowed intensive study of Plautus’s language by W.M. Lindsay, Eduard Fraenkel, and others. The volumes were republished as recently as 2010 by Cambridge University Press.  

Götz’s interest in early Latin led him to edit conservatively but judiciously Varro’s De Lingua Latina and Rerum rusticarum libri tres as well as the earliest lengthy Latin text, Cato the Elder’s De agri cultura. Parsing of the recherché and often idiosyncratic language of these authors can be aided by annotations or “glosses” made by ancient scholars and commentators. Götz became the expert on glosses and published widely on glosses not only from antiquity but through the Medieval period. He is perhaps best remembered for completing another project of Ritschl, the Corpus glossarium Latinorum (1888-1923) begun by his student Löwe but completed by Götz with the collaboration of his Jena colleague Gotthold Gundermann (1856-1921), Henry Nettleship (1839-93), and others. Götz wrote the articles on glosses for the Pauly-Wissowa. His work was beneficial to the giant project Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, begun in 1894 in Munich by Eduard Wölfflin (1831-1908).