All Scholars

Heinze was strained by some of the most significant classicists of his day, any one of whom could have had a prevailing influence over his scholarly work. At Leipzig he studied Virgil under Otto Ribbeck (1827-1898), at Bonn Epicurus under Hermann Usener (1834-1905) and philology under Franz Bücheler (1837-1908), at Berlin Roman political and legal life under Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903), and at Strasbourg epigraphy under Georg Kaibel (1849-1901). His fellow Berlin students Alfred Körte (1866-1946) and the prodigious Eduard Norden (1868-1941) would become close associates.  

      Heinze’s early indispensable edition of Book Three of De rerum natura likely owes in part to Usener’s teaching on Epicurean influence on Lucretius. Strasbourg professor Adolf Kiessling (1837-1893) lived for only three years after coming to Strasbourg in 1889, but he showed Heinze how to encompass all of a great poet’s varied output using the training of a philologist. Following Kiessling’s death, Heinze revised and enlarged his teacher’s already monumental three-volume edition with commentary on Horace’s works (1884-9). Through the next century the standard text of Horace was “Kiessling-Heinze.” He refined his critical method in individual studies of Horace’s Odes and Ovid’s elegies. Through a deep sensitivity to language, a thorough knowledge of Greek and Roman poetry, and an acute critical sensibility, Heinze expanded our understanding of the influence of the major Greek poets as well as the then little-read Alexandrian poets on the great Roman poets. By emphasizing the debt to the Greeks, Heinze was able to highlight the individual creativity of the Roman authors in adapting them. When he turned his critical faculties on Virgil the result was one of the most groundbreaking books in the study of ancient poetry. Virgils epische Teknik was the first examination of Virgil’s creative contribution to the development of Latin epic poetry. One example is his adumbration of Virgil’s “subjective style,” elaborated later by Brooks Otis (1908-77) who wrote, “Heinze has suggested…that Virgil puts himself in the place of his characters and narrates through them.” (48) He cites Homer’s chariot-race at Iliad 23:287-652 in which Homer on dwells objectively on the events of the race, the efforts of the horses, and the capriciousness of the gods, while at Aeneid 5.114-243 Virgil focuses on the mood and emotions of the captains and gives the story a moral: the bad Gyas loses and the good Cloanthus wins. Much of Heinze’s technique was elaborated in H.W. Prescott’s (1874-1943) as The Development of Virgil’s Art (New York: Russell & Russell, 1927), but, as influential as Heinze’s work on Virgil has been, his book was not translated into English until 1993. Heinze’s insights into the Modern literary critics of Roman poets have a foundation in Heinze’s work . Originality of roman poets through his text criticism and exegetical methods.

       Heinze  succeeded Georg Wissowa (1859-1931) as editor of Hermes in 1923 and was succeeded by Körte in 1929. 

       Once he had his say on the four major Roman poets, Heinze began in his late career to synthesize what he had learned about Roman public life and the national character as embodied in the princeps. In addition, the coming war and rising German nationalism led him to examine the concept of supplicium in relation to the German.state. During World War I he gave speeches to the German military, comparing the Roman and German nations. Most of these are collected posthumously as Die augusteische Kultur. Erich Burck (1901-94) gathered nine of his late lectures or articles, some previously unpublished, with a full bibliography of Heinze’s work.