All Scholars

Karl Halm’s career, as Sandys writes, “had been a noble example of triumphing over difficulties.” (196) Halm never knew his father, who died shortly after Halm’s birth. His stepfather pulled him out of lower school to work long hours in a grocery. When Halm promised to support himself if he were allowed to finish his education, his stepfather agreed. Halm studied classical philology at the gymnasium in Munich, where he became a student of Friedrich Thiersch (1784-1860), known as the “tutor of Bavaria.” Thiersch moved on to a professorship at Landshut in 1826 and his position was filled four years later when Halm passed the state examination for teachers. Thiersch’s attempts to reform the teaching of classics greatly influenced Halm, who put the precepts of the new method into his elementary Greek textbook and Greek Reader.  Throughout his career he would be passionate about reforming secondary instruction. His early publications dealt with Lycurgus and Aeschylus, but when he moved to Speyer, his scholarly interest turned to the manuscript tradition of Cicero. The first volume of his edition with commentary on Cicero’s speeches appeared in 1845 and the next three years later. When the Maximiliansgymnasium was founded in 1849, Halm was named rector. Following the death of Johann Casper von Orelli (1787-1849), Halm and Johann Georg Baiter (1801-77), a frequent collaborator with others, revised and enlarged Orelli’s 1828-36 text to cover the entire corpus of Cicero’s work, adding emendations by Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903) and J.N. Madvig (1804-66). He then published his own edition first of seven speeches (1850-66) and then eighteen. (1868) He edited the minor Roman orators and Quintilian along with many other writers of Latin prose. Though Halm received the offer of a professorship at Vienna, his hometown of Munich responded with not only an ordinarius position but the directorship of the Royal Library in 1856. In this role he greatly expanded the manuscript holdings, and enlarged the number of volumes, sometimes at the cost of selling off duplicates, the most notorious of which was a Gutenberg Bible (Munich had another one.). This raised considerable criticism, reaching all the way to Anton Ruland (1809-74), director of the Royal Library in Würzburg, but Halm used many of the purchased manuscripts as bases for his various editions. His catalogue of the manuscripts in the Royal Library and the autograph collection of the Camerarii family gave the public much useful material on the previous centuries. 

      As a lecturer he remained true to his text-critical roots and read out conjectures and stylistics. A practitioner of Wissenschaftsgeschichte, he published numerous biographical entries on classicists in the 1875 ADB. Halm also took an interest in major projects that would benefit the classical world. Chief among them was the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, which he first suggested in 1858.