All Scholars

Friedrich Hultsch received a firm grounding in classical philology at Kreuzschule, where he later taught for nearly 30 years. His scholarly career fell into three phases: history, metrology, and mathematics.

        He began his work on Polybius while still in university. His early series of articles, Quaestiones Polybiana, offered numerous corrections of the 1670 text of Jakob Gronovius (1645-1716) based on Hultsch’s examination of manuscripts. His definitive edition, translation, and commentary of Polybius (1867-72; 2^nd ed., 1888-92) was considered superior to that of Ludwig Dindorf (1805-71), published in the same year. His study of Book Six on the Roman constitution clarified many details about Roman government, but Hultsch’s interests became increasingly focused on the details of army life, particularly on the measurements and weights without which an army and a society cannot function. 

        In 1862 Hultsch published a compendium of Greek and Roman measurements of size and weight (1862), followed by a text of the fragments of the metrologists (1864-6). He then edited individual authors, reconstructing the geometric and stereometric content of Heron of Alexandria’s Mechanica from Pappus’s eighth book (1864). A lasting contribution throughout his work lay in his Latin translations of Greek technical terms for weights, measures and in Heron’s passages in Pneumatica, levers, pulleys, and water organs. For Censorinus On Birthdays he elucidated many facts about the Roman calendar and astrological calculations.

       His work on Heron led him deeper into the field of mathematics.  He reconstructed the bases of ancient mathematics in Pappus’s eight-volume Synagoge, comprising geometry, astronomy, and mechanics twelve years later. He edited Autolycus of Pitane’s On the Moving Sphere (1885), the Scholia to Theodosius’s Spherics (1887), and Archimedes on the measuring of a circle. His achievement was to examine the Byzantine sources for Hellenistic metrology and mathematics, comparing Greek sources with Arabic accounts. Toward the end of his career, he studied the Ptolemaic system of accounting. He concluded that the Greek system of weights was developed in Egypt, not Babylon (1898) and that Roman metrology adapted Greek prototypes with regional variations. In his study of coinage, he worked out the weight of a talent at 26.2 kilograms. 

         He standardized and disseminated the texts of these little-read authors and thus created primary sources on which scholars, especially Otto Neuegebauer (1899-1990), could rely. He wrote over `132 articles for Pauly-Wissowa, including “Arithmetica,” “Astronomia,” and “Geometria.”