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Otto Hirschfeld was inspired at Königsberg by Karl Lehrs (1802-78)  and Ludwig Friedländer (1824-1909), at Bonn by Friedrich Ritschl (1806-76) and Otto Jahn (1813-69), and at Berlin by August Boeckh (1785-1867), Moriz Haupt (1808-74), Johann Gustav Droysen (1808-84) & Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903), who fed his interest in Roman administrative history and epigraphy and invited him to collaborate on the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinorum, assigning him to work on Gaul and the two Germanic provinces. (Hirschfeld would succeed Mommsen at Berlin in 1885.) His work provided new light on Roman administration of its empire. When Hirschfeld was awarded newly established chairs in ancient history at Prague and later Vienna, he was the first to stress in history courses the value of inscriptional discoveries. In Vienna he founded an archaeology-epigraphy seminar in 1876 with archaeologist Alexander Conze (1831-1914) and then Conze’s successor, Otto Benndorf (1838-1907), with whom he edited the research products of the seminar, Abhandlungen des archäologisch-Epigraphischen Seminars der Universität Wien from 1877-97. Hirschfeld began exploration of the Roman legionary fortress Carnuntum on the Danube in lower Austria in the 1880s. Among his discoveries was the precise date of the Roman New Year, when the Tribunicia potestas was renewed, a great aid to dating inscriptions. He received a Festschhrift on his 60^th birthday in 1903 and in 1916 was succeeded by his student Wilhelm Kubitschek (1858-1936). His Kleine Schriften deal mostly with the imperial period. He edited Ephemeris Epigraphica and with Benndorf he edited the fiftieth anniversary volume of the Archaeological Institute in Rome.