All Scholars

Otto Hense showed an early interest in tracing fragments of ancient authors quoted by other authors. For his dissertation on the fragments of Euripides, he used his training in textual criticism to identify moral maxims in fragments that demonstrated the philosophical influence of Hellenistic authors upon the Roman Stoics and Cynics. His early study of Heliodorus’s novel Aethiopica focused on the ethical sections and excerpts on virtue and natural philosophy. As a text critic he annotated Aeschylus’ Choephoroe and brought new collations to his revision of Friedrich Schneidewin’s (1810-56) Agamemnon. He continued his investigation of Greek morality and the structure of Sophoclean tragedy. For instance, in Der Chor des Sophokles (1877) he defines the role of Sophocles’ chorus as more meditative than the Aeschylean chorus. Hense uses his highly trained text criticism in the essays of Studien zu Sophokles (1880). He restores passages of the Trachineae and Philoctetes and explores the trial of Sophocles’ son, the tragedian Iophon, who brought his father to trial at age 90 on a charge of incapacity (paranoia). Sophocles was writing the Oedipus at Colonus at the time and is said to have been acquitted after reading sections of the play at the court. Hense elaborates the biographical context of the OC as it relates to the mythical content of the play. 

        His interest in ancient concepts of morality led him to the rhetorical influence of the Hellenistic Stoic Athenodorus of Tarsus upon the Roman Stoic Seneca’s epistles. He produced supplements to editions of Seneca’s Epistulae morales ad Lucilium and the Supplementum Quirinianum (1896). His work on Stobaeus had yielded fragments on autonomy and perseverance by the Cynic Teles, another influential Hellenistic philosopher. He later compiled the fragments of the Stoic Musonius Rufus. His editions opened new perspectives on Roman philosophy.

        Hense admired the work of Nicolaus Schow in the use of manuscripts to show anthological sources and excerpts from earlier philosophers like Thales and Epictetus. Hense’s abilities as a text critic and philosopher combined in his editorial work on the anthology of Stobaeus, the monumental five-volume work by which he is best remembered. He collaborated with the historian Kurt Wachsmuth (1837-1905), who contributed the first two volumes, Eclogae physicae et ethicae, while Hense contributed books 3 & 4, the Florilegium.  His emendations to the text based on a disciplined reading of previous manuscripts and evidence from new collations, many of the quotations were reliably attributed to lost works. 

         He was a well-known lecturer at Freiburg and maintained a leadership role in maintaining standards during the period of the as the ancient university met the increasing demands for advanced education in the nineteenth century.