All Scholars

Hermann Hitzig’s family moved from Heidelberg to Zurich in 1833, where his father Ferdinand (1807-1875) became one of the first appointments at the new university there. In 1860 Ferdinand returned to a professorship at Heidelberg. Young Hermann received his early education in Zurich and Heidelberg and as a teenager he enrolled at the latter university. He later moved to Göttingen where he heard the lectures of the epigraphist Hermann Sauppe (1809-93) and the historian Ernst Curtius (1814-96). 

         In the year of Hitzig’s doctorate Arnold Hug (1832-95) moved from the Winterthur Gymnasium to a professorship at Zurich. Hitzig succeeded him. There he met the lexicographer Eduard Wölfflin (1831-1908) and Johann Jakob Welti (1828-1900). Among the students in his Greek class was the future numismatist Friedrich Imhoof-Blumer (1838-1920). At the end of the Franco-Prussian War it was safe to return to the Gymnasium at Heidelberg. There he began to publish on the author by which he is best known, Pausanias. Pausanias’ “Guide to Greece” was much in the news due to the discovery by the banker and amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (1822-90), at the urging of his colleague Frank Calvert (1828-1908), of the likely site of Troy at a place in Turkey called Hissarlik. Schliemann claimed that he found the site by relying on Pausanias II.16. Almost immediately the leading classical scholar in the world, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848-1931), rejected Schliemann’s conclusion (which by 1873 included the golden “Treasure of Priam”) not only by calling Schliemann a mere “amateur,” but by attacking the credibility of Pausanias. Chiefly he noted that most of Pausanias’s sources dated back hundreds of years and it was doubtful that Pausanias himself ever visited the sites he described. Hitzig and other archaeologists set out to defend Pausanias, writing his first defense of him in 1873, the year he moved to Burgdorf, then a progymnasium. The effectiveness of Hitzig as teacher and administrator, not to mention scholar, helped upgrade the school to the status of Gymnasium. After making his habilitation in secondary school studies, he was named rector of what was now the Bern Municipal Gymnasium while he became extraordinarius at Bern. 

        Hitzig traveled to Greece in 1884 to discuss Pausanias with Schliemann. When Arnold Hug became ill as professor in Zurich, Hitzig, who had succeeded him at Winterthur, now succeeded him at Zurich. His inaugural lecture on the credibility of Pausanias (“Über die Glaubwürdigkeit des Periegeten Pausanias”) was a direct rebuttal of Wilamowitz. A century later Christian Habicht wrote “It was archaeologists proving [Schliemann] correct while literary critics and historians, especially in Germany for some time found nothing but fault in him.” (Habicht 221) Hitzig was fortunate to have as a colleague the archaeologist Hugo Blümner (1844-1919), who would co-edit Hitzig’s great three-volume edition of Pausanias’s work. He and Blümner fundraised to support Greece in Greco-Turkish War (1896-7), for which both were honored by the Greek government. In addition to his regular teaching duties at the Gymnasium and university, Hitzig regularly taught classes in the local girls’ school in Zurich and gave public lectures on the then-new science among the Swiss of papyrology as an aid to text criticism.