All Scholars

J.J. Hartman was a student of C.G. Cobet (1813-89), for whom he had great admiration: during his classes, he frequently discussed the question of whether Bentley or Cobet had been the greater scholar. Hartman himself was called ‘Cobet minor’ in certain circles; like his teacher, his scholarly work centres almost exclusively around textual criticism (on texts in both Greek and Latin), mostly in the form of textual notes published in Mnemosyne. Hartman had the ambition of succeeding Cobet as Professor of Greek in Leiden in 1884, but would not get an academic position until 1891, when the Leiden Chair of Latin became vacant. 

Hartman put his proficiency in the active use of Latin (like Cobet, his spoken Latin was praised by many) to good use by writing many poems in that language, which were on subjects as diverse as the virtues of cats and the hurriedness of modern life (see Mermans 2016 and Van Bommel 2020 for a studies of his poetic output). Some of these won prizes at the annual Certamen Hoeufftianum, a Latin-poetry competition for which he later served as a member of the jury for some two decades. Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912), the most successful and accomplished Latin poet of this generation, saw Hartman as his equal. Hartman saw the writing of Latin poetry as worthwhile for its own sake (he declared that some of modern Latin poetry was not inferior to even the best ancient examples), but also as the best training for an aspiring textual critic. Hartman was also a supporter of the revival of Latin as a universal scholarly and literary language, and expected his students to converse in Latin during classes as well. 

Like his teacher Cobet, Hartman never bothered to study and put to use the stemmatical method in textual criticism, nor did he pay much attention to the publications of his German colleagues who employed that method to great effect. He did not take kindly to German Altertumswissenschaft in general, declaring that his interest was not in “scholarship for scholarship’s sake, but for my own, in order to clarify my understanding, occupy my mind, to put in shortly but concisely, for my happiness in life” (Hartman, 1909, 20). He understood perfectly well, for instance, that Eduard Norden’s 1903 groundbreaking commentary on Aeneid 6 (reviewed in Hartman 1904) was a piece of great learning, but he saw Norden’s Quellenforschung as to some extent stifling the innate force or Virgil’s poetry.

But even though he was clearly not in line with his times, Hartman’s textual scholarship, firmly rooted in a very deep knowledge of Greek and Latin literature, cannot be simply brushed aside. A.E. Housman (1859-1936), in a letter to J.S. Phillimore (1873-1926), calls Hartman ‘worthy’, a qualification which that scholar did not employ often.

Hartman’s general views were conservative: his rectoral address (Hartman 1908), held at a time when female students had been admitted to Leiden University for three decades, claimed that a women’s natural place was the home, not the university. Hartman’s conservatism was the stuff of legend in Leiden circles: one story recounts how he was one of the last to have electric light installed in his home; and how he only used it when searching for his matchbox in order to light his paraffin lamps.

Hartman was probably the best-known classicist among the general audience of the Netherlands of his day. He was a ‘popularizer’ of the Classics avant-la-lettre, who believed that the survival of Classics as a discipline depended on whether Classicists would manage to keep people who had studied Latin and Greek in high school engaged with the subject later in life. His beliefs in the benefits of this kind of a continuous classical education could be a bit naive: in his inaugural address (Hartman 1891, 10) he even claims that a thorough study of the Classics can help to avoid heated debates get out of hand: ‘if you end up in a quarrel of intellectuals, insert a wise admonition of a Latin author with a loud voice, and you will see straight away that anger subsides, that minds are reconciled, that peace and quiet are restored’. Following his belief in the importance of what we now call ‘outreach’, Hartman wrote books on ancient authors meant for a general audience (the most important ones are Hartman 1910 on Plutarch and Hartman 1913 on Horace), lectured widely to audiences of non-specialists, and wrote columns on ancient literature in a major newspaper. It was the latter format in which he first formulated the theory, still upheld in some circles today, that Ovid’s exile had been completely fictional (see Van der Velden 2020). 

Apart from this theory, modern scholars may come across his name because it survives in the critical apparatuses of some modern editions.