All Scholars

Among the names of the great sons given to nineteenth-century scholarship by the eastern German province of Silesia, that of Karl Otfried Müller possesses unique resonance. Classical scholars, ancient historians, and archaeologists alike count him among the great masters of their fields. In all these disciplines, Müller’s influence is felt to the present day; Karl Kerényi has recently described him as “one of the best representatives of classical studies at the end of the age of Goethe.” To Müller’s personality, as well as to his life and work, clings an aura of genius and of great good fortune—and of tragedy too, when we consider his premature and unexpected death, at the zenith of his influence and creativity, in Hellas, the land of his longing.

Karl Müller (who later assumed the pen name Karl Otfried Müller on the advice of Philipp Buttmann, one of his teachers in Berlin) came from the family of a Silesian clergyman; he was born in Brieg on 27 August 1797, the oldest of four children—three sons and a daughter—of Pastor Karl Daniel Müller. Karl Otfried Müller spent his school days in Brieg, even after his father had exchanged his pastorate with that in Ohlau. Thus Ohlau became the site of the family home for Karl and for his two younger brothers, Julius, the famous theologian, and Eduard, who was later director of Gymnasia in Ratibor and Liegnitz; Ohlau was the domestic refuge to which they all eagerly returned, again and again, even in later years, when they practiced their professions far from home. In the surviving letters to his parents, Müller often expresses the attachment he feels for his father, mother, brothers, and sister, as well as for his home.

Even during his school days in Brieg, Müller revealed intellectual abilities far above the average in his original compositions, both in prose and in verse, and he distinguished himself in valedictory addresses for the graduates. He matriculated in the newly founded Schlesische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Breslau in Spring 1814. At first his studies were general, for he had broad interests in the humanities and the natural sciences, but he felt increasingly drawn to philological subjects. His chief teacher here was Friedrich Heindorf (1774-1816), who had been transferred from Berlin to Breslau in 1811 and who, in Berlin, had been one of the circle of Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776-1831), Phillipp Buttmann (1764-1829), and Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834). Müller always recalled Heindorf with great gratitude, and it was he who encouraged the young student to read Niebuhr’s Römische Geschichte. The reading of this work made a lasting impression on Müller, and it was the decisive factor in his resolve to devote himself entirely to philological and historical studies. Consequently, he undertook a history of the Roman king Numa Pompilius and a study of the most ancient Roman poetry. In his philological method he was even then an adherent of an all-encompassing historical view of classical antiquity, as it was being advocated at this time by Friedrich August Wolf (1759-1824) and by his student August Böckh (1785-1867) in Berlin.

So in Spring 1816 Müller transferred to Berlin to continue his studies. Here he attended lectures by Schleiermacher and by Schelling’s student Friedrich Solger (1780-1819), whose aesthetics were not without their effect on him. Wolf was a member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and thus gave lectures at the University, but he found less acceptance here than in Halle because of his intolerant manner, and Müller found him repellent. All the greater was the effect on Müller of Philipp Buttmann and, especially, of August Böckh. Buttmann was then writing his Mythologus, and the intensive exposure to questions of mythology and history of religions that Buttmann gave him was of great significance for Müller’s later scholarly work. But even more decisive was his encounter with August Böckh, the chief representative of the historical and antiquarian trend in Altertumswissenschaft, which contrasted with the more grammatical and text-critical school led by Gottfried Hermann (1772-1848) in Leipzig. Under Böckh’s direction Müller pursued the study of an all-embracing view of antiquity and thereby laid the foundation for his later position as the greatest representative of philological-historical research in his time, surpassing even his teacher Böckh in universality.

The rising scholar’s years in Berlin were characterized by a unique and indefatigable zeal for work and a passion for research. We are told that he could work as much as sixteen hours a day without exhaustion—-a phenomenon that later contributed to his great scholarly accomplishments. As the subject of his dissertation he chose the island of Aegina and set himself the task of portraying its history from every angle. In October 1817 he received his doctoral degree with the Latin dissertation “Aegineticorum liber scripsit Carolus Mueller Silesius.” Because of the work’s completely novel methodology—the historical consideration of the theme from all perspectives, taking into account all factual details (in his knowledge of which the author revealed a much-admired erudition)—it quickly became well-known among scholars of Altertumswissenschaft and had widespread influence.

After completing his studies Müller accepted, at the beginning of 1818, a position as gymnasium teacher at the Magdalenaum in Breslau. But this period as gymnasium teacher in Breslau gave him little satisfaction; he found contentment here only in scholarly activity. He was then working on his Orchomenos und die Minyer, which was intended to continue the portrayal of individual Greek states that he had begun in the “Aeginetica.” It was all the more important, therefore, that he maintain scholarly contact with Berlin—especially with Böckh, who continued to take a lively interest in Müller’s personal and professional future and was trying to advance him. And it was Böckh who, in reply to a query from Göttingen, was able to recommend Müller as successor to Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker (1784-1868), who had transferred to Bonn, as Professor of Classical Philology and Archaeology.

In the fall of 1819 Karl Otfried Müller—just turned twenty-two—became Professor Extraordinarius at the Georgia Augusta University in Göttingen. Since the duties of his position included the archaeology of art—a Göttingen tradition that went back to Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729-1812)—the Hanoverian government granted Müller supplementary funds for a two-month stay in Dresden, where he would be able to deepen his knowledge by personal examination of the objets d’art in the collections of antiquities. Müller later attested to the special importance of personal examination of ancient monuments for his scholarly work; as is well-known, he often used the periods when he gave no lectures to visit collections in Europe.

In his new location Müller, with characteristic energy, became deeply involved in research and teaching and also in university administration. Despite his youth he already, at the beginning of his teaching career, lectured on a great variety of subjects, and this variety increased over the years. As early as 1821 the Hanoverian government rewarded his success as an academic teacher (especially as an interpreter and explicator of ancient art-works, of which he had plaster casts made as visual aids) by approving a more extensive tour, in France and England, for the study of art history. Academic promotion also came quickly: in 1823 he was named Professor Ordinarius and was appointed member of the Göttingen Society of Sciences. In the same year Bockh arranged to have him called to the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat in Berlin—however, he did not accept. He felt obligated to the Hanoverian government, and besides, he had come to feel at home in Göttingen; after his marriage in 1824 to Pauline Hugo, daughter of the famous Göttingen jurist Gustav Hugo, he became even more closely attached to the city. Yet his attachment to Göttingen did not mean that he felt any weakening of ties to his Silesian homeland and to his parents’ house in Ohlau; during the 1820s he traveled to Silesia each year during the autumn vacation. That he always retained Silesian traits in his personal manner is suggested too by the jocose remark of friends about the house that he designed and constructed in Göttingen: it was built, they said, in the “Silesio-Hellenic style.”

Müller’s academic career in Göttingen was crowned with outstanding success. The essential factor in this success—much more significant even than his university teaching—was the number of his scholarly publications, which documented his pioneering research in the most various fields of Altertumswissenschaft and acquired for him a reputation as one of the most brilliant and most versatile classical scholars of the nineteenth century. He had already made a name for himself among classical scholars with his dissertation, for in this work he had used an extensive knowledge and evaluation of all available sources concerning the island of Aegina to sketch a full picture of its history from the beginnings to Frankish times. His investigations had embraced topography and geography, commerce, coinage, navigation, demography and social structures, constitutional law, national customs, and art. Under the influence of Romantic thought, Müller had, already in this work, used myth and saga as historical sources; he had tried to extract from them the kernel of historical fact about the shadowy early history of Aegina and had attempted to illuminate, on the evidence of sacral cult sources, the idiosyncrasies of individual Greek peoples and their relations to each other. With this multi-faceted portrayal of one Greek community, Müller gave methodological direction to the historical study of antiquity; his encyclopedic examination of one Greek people became the model for many other histories of peoples and cities.

Müller’s plan was to investigate the history of individual Greek peoples and communities in order to derive from this mosaic a comprehensive history of the entire Greek nation, and he pursued his aim still further. While in Breslau as a Gymnasium teacher he occupied himself (as mentioned above) with the history of the Boeotian city Orchomenos and with the legendary race of the Minyae, who are connected with the place; he strove to disentangle their early history from the North Greek myths. His work appeared in 1820 under the title Orchomenos und die Minyer; it was the first volume of a multivolume work with the programmatic title Geschichte der hellenischen Stämme und Städte. Yet Müller did not envisage his work as a final history of the Greek peoples but only as a series of preliminary studies. In this connection he discussed his much-criticized principle of evaluating myth and saga as source material for early Greek history. He called attention to his strict and careful distinction between the “historical” and the “symbolic,” the genuine content of the sagas and their poetic elaboration. Only when this distinction had been made might one proceed to compare the similarities and differences in the transmission of the saga among other peoples; this comparison would lead finally to “the basis and common theme of old sagas.”

Continuing the Geschichte der hellenischen Stämme und Städte, he produced perhaps his richest work, Die Dorier (2 vols., 1824). Here he followed the same principles to portray the history, the religion, the politics, and the culture of this great Greek people, which he found especially attractive. Müller distinguished the Dorians rather too starkly from the other Greeks; for example, he attributed solely to the Dorians cultic and mythic elements, such as the cult of Apollo, which were common to all or to several Greek peoples. The just reproach of one-sidedness is still heard today. However, there is evidence for the supposition that Müller would have revised his views on the basis of what he learned on his later trip to Greece, especially on his visit to Athens and Attica, and that he would have granted to the Ionian-Attic people the place they deserve.

The critics of his Geschichte der hellenischen Stämme und Städte took issue above all with his practice of deriving evidence for early Greek history from myth and saga, and these criticisms moved Müller to produce a basic work on this theme: the Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie (1825). In this book he developed a definition of myth and described its characteristic traits; moreover, he described the origins and dissemination of myth. In his opinion, myths had been based on historical events and had been developed among the various peoples as national sagas; they had then been disseminated by migration and colonization. These sagas are, according to Müller, characteristic of a particular people, and from them one can draw several conclusions as to its original location and its wanderings. But along with this aspect of myth, Müller described the symbolic dimension of many myths. He paid less attention to the myths of the gods and mythic elements in cult, and Welcker was one of the first to reproach him for this. Though the objection may be valid that his view was perhaps somewhat one-sided, yet Müller’s researches into myth constituted fundamental progress, and their effects are still felt today; Martin P. Nilsson (1874-1967), for example, one of the foremost modern scholars of Greek religion, justly characterized Müller as a “pathfinder in the labyrinth of the myths.”

Shortly after the publication of the Prolegomena, Müller entered an entirely different field of Altertumswissenschaft. A prize offered by the Berlin Academy of Sciences for a work on the history of the Etruscans called forth his two-volume book on this enigmatic people. Müller won the prize and received it on 3 July 1826; his work was published in 1828. The methodology of the work, like that of his other histories of peoples, followed the universal-historical principle. As regards the content, Müller (as he himself remarked) restricted himself to linguistic questions and was able to discuss artistic monuments only incidentally. Despite this self-imposed limitation, Müller’s work was the first comprehensive description of the Etruscans and on the whole has remained a basic work of Etruscology down to the present time.

The archaeological instruction that had been assigned to him in Göttingen bore fruit in numerous publications on archaeology, which he likewise produced from a universal historical-philological perspective on antiquity. An immediate product of his stay in Dresden, before he assumed his post at Göttingen, was the Latin treatise De tripode Delphico (1820), which discussed the famous candelabra base in Dresden portraying the theft and reconsecration of the tripod. In a Latin treatise written in the same period, Minervae Poliadis sacra (1820), Müller discussed the cult of the city- goddess Athena and the site and construction of the Erechtheion on the Athenian Acropolis. A few years later he published De Phidiae vita et operibus commentationes tres (1827), a biographical study of the great Greek artist, which dealt especially with the artistic ornamentation of the Parthenon, including the fragments brought to the British Museum by Lord Elgin.

Müller crowned his archaeological researches with his Handbuch der Archäologie der Kunst—once more, the first comprehensive treatment of a field of research—which first appeared in 1830. This Handbuch, which has remained a model work to the present day, took as its aim “to sum up previous scholarly work” in the field. In very compressed and strictly articulated form Müller here described the evolution of art in antiquity as well as providing a geographical conspectus of the monuments of ancient art and a systematic overview of the individual subdivisions within the subject—e.g., architecture, painting, sculpture, and vase-painting, as well as “artistic form” and artistic motifs. The Handbuch found widespread acceptance; a second edition appeared within five years. Further reprints followed, as well as translations into English and French. Müller continued his series of archaeological publications with the major “Ubersicht der Griechischen Kunstgeschichte von 1829-1835” in the Halle Allgemeine Literaturzeitung.

Also worthy of mention is his topographical treatise De munimentis Athenarum (1836), in which he described the fortifications of Athens and their construction in the time of Demosthenes. Much earlier, at the beginning of his Göttingen period, he had published topographical investigations on Athens and Attica, producing, in the article “Attika” in Ersch und Gruber’s Allgemeine Realencyclopaedie, the first German scholarly work on this subject; he also wrote for this encyclopedia the articles “Bootien,” “Eleusinien,” and “Pallas Athene.” Topographical researches were also published in his Latin work Antiquitates Antiochenae (1839), in which he gave a geographical description of the city of Antioch on the Orontes in Syria and a history of architectural structures there from the founding of the city to the Middle Ages. Especially in this final archaeological publication Müller displayed his astonishing ability to gather information from all available sources on the monuments and to sketch as authentic a picture of the city as if he had engaged in archaeological fieldwork on the site. Some one hundred years later the book was used as a guide by the American excavators of Antioch. Müller was their Pausanias.

In the field of philology in the stricter sense, Müller produced a Greek- German edition of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, which grew out of a lecture. The main goal of the edition was to interpret the drama by means of a literal translation that would yet reproduce the drama’s poetical content. In the notes and appendices Müller gave valuable descriptions of artifacts, especially those connected with the Greek stage; he also discussed blood revenge and its expiation in the cult of Apollo. With his edition of the Eumenides Müller came into close contact with the area of work of Gottfried Hermann, the chief representative of the school of research that concentrated on philology and textual criticism, and a remark in Müller’s preface (made more for the sake of his colleague in Göttingen, Ludolph Dissen [1784-1837]) about “deeper questions than pedantry (Notengelehrsamkeit) can answer” ignited a violent feud. With this polemic and the self-vindications that followed from both sides, Müller entered the front ranks in the methodological quarrel between the schools of Hermann and Böckh. Müller recognized the necessity and importance of philological textual criticism, although it was not among his own favorite areas of work. He was not himself one of the classical scholars who, directing their researches toward history and antiquities, underrated text-critical study, but he was just as disinclined to exalt textual criticism as an end in itself. He viewed it rather as one area in a comprehensive and universal investigation of antiquity.

Müller first turned to editing and textual criticism in his edition of M. Terentius Varro’s De Lingua Latina (1833). Yet the purpose of his work on Varro was not primarily to produce a critical edition of the text; his investigations proceeded rather from his researches on the Etruscans and from questions on the history of the Latin language, which he dealt with especially in his lectures. A role was also played by the influence of the two most significant representatives of the newly founded science of comparative linguistics, Franz Bopp (1791-1867) and Jacob Grimm (1785-1863), with whom Müller was in personal and scholarly contact in Göttingen. As a preliminary to source analysis on the evolution of the Latin language, it was necessary to produce a usable text of Varro’s important source work. Müller’s edition contained numerous valuable additions to the important earlier work of Leonhard Spengel. Nevertheless, as Müller himself noted in the “Praefatio” to his edition, many important questions remained open.

Further work on the Latin grammarians led Müller to S. Pomponius Festus’ incompletely preserved extract from the De Verborum Significatione of M. Verrius Flaccus, a lexical work from the age of Augustus that explained archaic and obsolete expressions and thus offered rich sources of antiquarian knowledge. But, here, too it was first necessary to produce a readable text in order to evaluate these sources. Müller’s edition, which appeared in 1839, contained a precise description of the manuscripts, much factual explanation, and an investigation into the original work of Verrius and Festus’ handling of it. Müller was the first to recognize the two layers of Verrius and Festus, and the thoroughness of his researches began a new era in the study of this Roman grammatical work.

Müller’s last great project, which remained unfinished, was his Geschichte der griechischen Literatur bis auf das Zeitalter Alexanders. The incitement to begin the work came from an external source: it was commissioned by the London Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. From 1836 on, Müller worked at this task. A first part appeared in 1841, in English translation. When he departed on his trip to Italy and Greece, he left behind an uncompleted manuscript, which his brother Eduard published posthumously in 1841. Of the individual literary genres, only the section on the development of Greek poetry was completed; on philosophical literature, the chapters on Anaxagoras and Empedocles; on historiography, Herodotus and Thucydides; of the orators, Lysias and Isocrates. Müller did not plan a literary history complete with scholarly apparatus, but rather an extended and comprehensive account for young readers. His basic scheme in this work, as before, was to begin with the division of the Greek nation into various peoples and with the characteristics of these peoples. Müller’s Geschichte der griechischen Literatur, despite its fragmentary condition, probably exercised greater influence than any other in the previous century, and Wilamowitz could still declare that it was “not only the most readable, but the only real, history.”

To a degree attained by very few classical scholars of the nineteenth century, Karl Otfried Müller realized in his scholarly work the ideal of an all-encompassing view of antiquity. His ability to differentiate clearly between the essential and the less significant enabled him to arrange the multiplicity of separate facts and insights into a coherent system of Altertumswissenschaft.This breadth of vision made it possible for him, in the little more than two decades of his scholarly life, to create fundamental comprehensive surveys in various fields of Altertumswissenschaft—in several cases, the first such surveys made up to that time. In this way Müller was not only a pioneer for his own time, opening up many hitherto unknown aspects of antiquity; on the contrary, many of the results of his researches have become and remain common property to this day, and others provided the impetus to further investigation. Methodologically too, Müller laid the groundwork for the posing of problems in Altertumswissenschaft beyond his own time, particularly in that he regarded personal examination of ancient monuments as the foundation of research—a thought that was less well-defined in Böckh. Many of Müller’s ideas prepared the way for the new concept of a total Altertumswissenschaft as it was sketched out by Theodor Mommsen and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff in the second half of the nineteenth century and determined the course of research in the twentieth.

In the late summer of 1839 Karl Otfried Müller was able to realize his long- cherished plan of visiting the ancient sites of Greece and Italy. The journey was intended to lay the foundations for his lifework, the great Geschichte Griechenlands, for which he regarded all his previous works as preliminary studies. Fate decided otherwise: Müller did not return from his great journey. Almost at the end of his visit to Hellas, which had proved so productive of scholarly results, the great god of Delphi struck him down with his death-bringing arrow in his holy temple. With his indefatigable passion for research and characteristic energy, Müller had copied, in the broiling sun, the inscriptions he had discovered near the temple terrace in Delphi. This exertion, though he was otherwise so resilient, proved too much for him. He contracted a severe fever; on the journey back to Athens he collapsed on the first stage to Kasa, the pass of Eleutherai. He was brought with difficulty to the then new capital of Greece. But help came too late. There he died on 1 August 1840. He was buried on the hill of Kolonos in north Athens, on the spot where Oedipus found his redemption, as Sophocles has described. The deme of Kolonos was also the home of the great tragic poet, who, according to ancient tradition, reached an extreme old age in the greatest serenity and yet as a poet had an unrivalled ability to depict human suffering. This union of radiant happiness and deep tragedy is mirrored in the brief life of Karl Otfried Müller, a scholar who was one of the most brilliant figures in the Altertumswissenschaft of his age and whose influence, as evidenced by scholarly interest in him, continues to the present day.

Translated by Michael Armstrong