All Scholars

Martin Hertz’s Jewish family moved from Hamburg to Berlin and converted to Lutheranism in 1828. At his Gymnasium his teachers Eduard Bonnell (1802-77), Wilhelm Pape (1807-54), and Karl Friedrich Siegmund Alschefsky (1805-1852) interested him in classical studies. At Bonn he studied under the Roman historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776-1831), who influenced Hertz’s choice of dissertation topic, and Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker (1784-1868) before returning to Berlin where he studied under the Hellenist August Boeckh (1785-1867), the historian Johann Gustav Droysen (1808-84), and the philosopher Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg (1802-72). His future as a text critic and linguistic analyst may date from his study under the text critic Karl Lachmann (1793-1851), who provided rigorous training and embodied the breadth of learning about the ancient world necessary to judge its texts. Lachmann trained Hertz in the collation of manuscripts and the establishment of an archetype.  During his subsequent travel in Europe, Hertz set about following this method by seeking out manuscripts for the editions of the grammarians Aulus Gellius and Priscian, by which Hertz is best known. 

        Though he edited poets and historians (he traced quotations of Sallust in Ammianus Marcellinus, his chief interest was in the Latin grammarians and rhetoricians like Sinnius Capito, Nigidius Figulus, Priscian, Voltacilius Pitholaus. His editio maior of Aulus Gellius with a full apparatus totaled over 1000 pages, in which he restored lost portions of Book 8. His study of Germanicus’s Aratea showed the commonality between Hellenistic Greek and Republican Latin. Hertz’s editorial abilities reached maturity with his edition of Horace revised for the use of the TLL.

        In the year of Lachmann’s death Hertz published an exceptional biography of his teacher, whose insistence on discipline and precision Hertz passed on to his students. He carried on Lachmann’s practice of quickly and sternly correcting student mistakes as that was the best way for them to learn. He also taught his students the value for editors of thorough knowledge not only of the language but the historical context of the authors being studied. At both Greifswald Breslau he started a Latin Societies. As curator of the Art Museum, he gave public lectures on Greek art and expanded his studies to Greek. He briefly became politically involved in 1848, as an elector for the National Assembly, but then quit politics altogether. His brother, Wilhelm Hertz (1822-1901), owned a bookshop and published a number of Martin’s editions.  

        As a pre-eminent scholar of Latin grammar, he was supportive of the 1858 proposal of Karl Halm (1809-82) to establish a comprehensive lexicon of Latin. When international support proved unworkable, Hartz devoted his 1889 address to the congress of scholars and teachers at Görlitz to engaging the five German academies to support the project. The project had the support of the historian Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903) and Eduard Wölfflin (1831-1908) but it was the plan outlined by Hartz that gave a basis on which the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (TLL) could proceed upon its founding in 1893.