All Scholars

Wilhelm von Hartel’s teachers in Vienna included Hermann Bonitz (1814-88) and Johannes Vahlen (1830-1911), both of whom he would succeed, Bonitz as professor and Vahlen as head of the Seminar. He taught at the secondary level for a year while completing his habilitation but then rose quickly at Vienna. When Vahlen departed for Berlin in 1874, Hartel joined his colleagues Karl Schenkl (1827-1900) and Emanuel Hoffmann (1825-1900) as co-editor of Zeitschrift für die österreichischen Gymnasien, a journal devoted to all subjects in the secondary curriculum. His work on Homer involved the use of linguistic statistics to qualify Homer’s use of the digamma. He published a number of early and important articles on Greek philology in Wiener Akademie der Wissenschaft, philosophisch-historichen Klasse (WAW) but Hartel recognized a need to showcase Austrian philology and in 1879 he founded and co-edited with Schenkl Wiener Studien, in which he published a number of his early articles. From 1896 he devoted himself to education administration at the territorial and then national level, rising to Minister of Education in 1900.

     In 1883 Hartel helped secure for Vienna a papyrus brought there by the collector of Egyptian antiquities Theodor Graf (1840-1903) for the Papyrus Collection of the Austrian National Library. He also wrote on the history of the Greek constitutions. He then turned to Latin studies, particularly the Vienna Academy’s Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (CSEL). Its first editor, Vahlen, encouraged Hartel to contribute editions of Cyprian, Ennodius, Lucifer of Caligiari, and Paulinus of Nola, His editions remained authoritative through the following century. In 1875 following his work on Eutropius’s Breviarum, he joined the commission of the CSEL and took over the editorial management of this project, eventually becoming chair of the commission from 1891 onwards. 

       Hartel had a clear vision accompanied by managerial gifts, for which he is more remembered than for his scholarship. He recognized a competition between his Austrian CSEL and the German Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH), a series begun in Hamburg in 1826 and since 1875 published in Berlin covering European history from Roman times to 1500. When Hartel’s 1872 edition of Breviarum was followed by an edition of the same author by Hans Droysen (1851-1918) seven years later and his Ennodius of 1882 was followed by another of Friedrich Vogel (1856-1945) three years later, Hartel saw a problem. When Hartel ascended to the presidency of  the 1893 Association of German Philologists and Educators, he conferred with Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903) on the possibility of a German-Austrian association between the German and Austrian academies. In Leipzig in 1893 most German and Austrian academies joined the cartel (Berlin, an early supporter, did not join until 1906). This led eventually to the formation of the International Association of Academies in Wiesbaden in 1899.

        Representing the Vienna Academy Hartel also attended the foundational meeting of the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in Munich in 1894, a cooperative project begun by the academies of Berlin, Göttingen, Leipzig, Munich, and Vienna in 1893. Under the plan devised by Franz Buecheler (1837-1908) and Eduard Wölfflin (1831-1908), a Swiss professor at Munich who became its first director, there would be a commission of members from the various participating academies.  

      Hartel also instituted the publication of the Medieval library catalogs in 1897 and was its chair until 1902. 

      As director of the Imperial Library (1891–96), he oversaw the first photographic facsimile of the "Tabula Peutingeriana" (1888) and in 1895 together with F. Wickhoff, produced an edition of the 6^th century Greek manuscript of the Book of Genesis. (1895) 

       In the 30th year of his career at Vienna, friends and students commissioned a medal struck by Viennese Anthon Scharff (1845-1903) and a bust by Georg Leisek (1869-1936). 

      As Minister he was unable to institute extensive and lasting reform, but he was instrumental in admitting women to study classics, in saving paintings of Georg Klimt, and in building a large general hospital.