All Scholars

Wilhelm Henzen and his brother spent their early lives in a comfortable middle-class household in mercantile Bremen, but when both parents died while the boys were young, they were adopted by a family of lesser means. Henzen compiled a brilliant record at Altes, a school known for its training in classical philology. At Bonn he was influenced by the Shakespearean Nikolaus Delius (1813-88; also a Bremen native) and particularly the archaeologist and philologist Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker (1784-1868). At Berlin he was taught by August Boeckh (1785-1867), but he was most influenced by the historians Johann Droysen (1808-84), Franz Ritter (1803-75), and Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886). Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903) interested him in epigraphy. After completing his dissertation, a biographical study of Polybius, he traveled to England and France but happened upon Welcker in Rome and accompanied his teacher to the important sites in Italy and Greece. In Athens, he met the archaeologist and professor at the University of Athens Heinrich Nicolaus Ulrichs (1807-43; also a Bremen native) and Ludwig Ross (1806-59), the inaugural professor of archaeology at the University of Athens (1837-43), soon to depart for Halle. Ulrichs was a passionate advocate for teaching Latin (then scarcely taught in Greece) and encouraged Henze to teach at the Gymnasium in Aegina where Ulrichs was master. Ulrichs also showed him his methods for studying and recording his findings in topography, art, and architecture. Henze and Welcker took Ulrichs’s new book Reisen und Forschungen in Griechenland, 1840) with them on a tour of Greece and Sicily, where Henzen met August Emil Braun (1809-56), the curator of the Rome branch of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (Instituto di correspondenza Archeologica, Rome). Henzen continued work on Sicily but returned to Rome in 1842, having exchanged his passion for Greece into enthusiasm for Roman archaeology. When it became clear that Henzen’s talents were more applicable to epigraphy than mainstream archaeology, Braun took on Henzen as his assistant chiefly to catalogue the Institute’s holdings, but Henzen used both his German and Italian contacts to widen the network of scholars contributing to the Institute’s work. Braun sent Henzen to San Marino, where Count Bartolomeo Borghesi (1781-1860), the leading Italian epigraphist, trained him and introduced him to other eminent epigraphists. Borghesi had drawn up a plan for a comprehensive collection of Latin inscriptions and sought Henzen’s input. Henzen also met the French archaeologist Adolphe Noel des Vergers (1805-67), who recruited him and Mommsen to work on his plan for a comprehensive collection of Italian inscriptions. The plan fell through for want of international funding. 

        Following the publication of the final edition of Boeckh’s Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum in 1842, Mommsen and Giovanni Batthista de Rossi (1822-94) began planning their own project for a collection of Latin inscriptions and in 1847, after the failure of des Vergers’ plan, proposed it to the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Braun had earlier suggested that Henzen work on the public monuments of Rome and the 2000-3000 new inscriptions for the Swiss philologist Johann Caspar von Orelli’s (1787-1849) Inscriptionum Latinarum selectarum amplissima Collectio (1828; revised by Henzen, 1856). After acceptance of the plan in 1853, Henzen was named co-editor and managed the first part of volume I, Inscriptiones antiquissimae ad C. Caesaris mortem (1863) and CIL vols. VI. 1-3 Inscriptiones Urbis Romae Latinae (1876-86). Henzen’s 1845 study of the bronze tablet from Veleia on Trajan’s plan to aid Italian children was an important study in Roman welfare systems. In 1862 his examination of an honorary inscription to Hadrian in the theatre of Dionysus in Athens, showed Hadrian’s positive policies toward Greece. Henzen’s cooperative and generous character was well suited for collaboration with numerous demanding scholars, chiefly Mommsen, de Rossi, Gustav Heinrich Wilmanns (1845-78), and Hermann Hirschfeld (1825-85). Henzen edited Ephemeris epigraphica, a supplement to the CIL started in 1879 and published new findings through the 1890s (the supplement continued until 1913). He also edited Borghesi’s complete works. 

        In 1856 he succeeded as first secretary of the Institute. He dedicated himself to the founding (1829) principles of the Institute as a multinational clearing house to support, record, and publicize further discoveries. He would spend ten years on the Orelli supplement and 30 on the sixth volume of the CIUL, He completed the revision of Orelli first and then the vol. VI of the CIL. It would take ten years for his to get started on it and 30 years to finish. In the meantime, as director of the excavation in the grove of the Arval Brotherhood, he published significant findings on Roman religious ritual in 1874. He published over 400 essays mostly in the periodicals of the Institute.  In 1871 the Institute became a Prussian institution but after it became a German imperial entity in 1874 the reforms imposed upon his administration gradually proved impossible for him and he resigned in 1886.  

        For his 70^th birthday a marble statue was placed in Institute library, subsequently moved to a place in the Capitol opposite Borghesi’s.