All Scholars

Rudolf Hirzel was born to an old Swiss Protestant family of scholars and merchants. Before entering the publishing field, his father was a professor of philosophy in Zurich who sent his son to learn classics at the Thomasschule in Leipzig. After Heidelberg he studied under Hermann Sauppe (1809-93) at Göttingen and Moritz Haupt (1808-74), his Doktorvater, at Berlin. His father’s interest in philosophy led him first to Plato, on whom he wrote his dissertation, and a number of articles in RhM and Hermes examining Platonic influence on Hellenistic philosophers, particularly the Stoics. In a three-volume collection of articles he traced the development of Roman Stoicism in Untersuchungen zu Ciceros philosophischen Schriften (1877-88) and argued that Stoicism not Epicureanism was the sole source of Cicero’s philosophy. (This view is no longer generally held.) For all but two years of his professorship in Jena (1889-1913) he and his wife lived on the top floor of a house occupied by the analytic philosopher Gottlob Frege (1848-1925), who is thought to have influenced his arguments on Stoicism. (Bobzien) A series of subsequent articles (1887, 1892) examine Cicero’s use of Plato and Hellenistic philosophy. Though he lived in an era of increasing specialization, he chose rather to study a single subject and chart its development and decline. He returned to Plato for his monumental two-volume historical study of the dialogue (1895) as a mode for philosophical exposition from the Homeric period through European literature. The form began to die out when it was not adopted by Aristotle, but rose again with Varro, Cicero, and Plutarch. Hirzel showed this same ability to examine a subject from antiquity to modern times in his later work on Homer’s influence. (1912) His work on the dialogue remained the standard work on the subject through the 20^thcentury. Drawing on epigraphical and literary sources, he then turned to oaths (1902) in Greece citing their importance for legal, religious and social stability. Other studies examined the concept of the name (1914, 1918). Themis und Dike (1907) traces the development in Greece of notions of divine order (Themis) and human justice (Dike) and the tensions that develop between them. He takes a broad approach to the life and reception of Plutarch (1912) with an emphasis on his philosophical and historical aspects. Throughout his career he emphasized in widely ranging and deeply researched studies not only the value of the historical and philosophical literature as literature but his breadth of knowledge beyond classics enabled him to draw from a wide variety of sources to show its subsequent influence.  W.A. Oldfather (1880-1945) called him a “brilliant and prolific scholar.” (118)