Greek Mythology and its Reception
Tales from Greek mythology are what got me into Greek and Latin in the first place.
In Germany, the most popular retelling of Greek myth is Gustav Schwab’s Sagen des klassischen Altertums (first published 1838–1840, translated into English 1946 by refugees from Germany under the title of “Gods and Heroes”). While there are a number of other German books like this, Schwab’s has by far been the most proliferate until way into the 21st century. (Personally, I recommend Dimiter Inkiow to German readers as a fresh alternative).
As students, Schwab’s narrative seemed suspiciously close to our required Greek and Latin reading, but at times it told a different story. Finding out that nobody had looked at the composition of Schwab’s work and his possible sources, I made this the topic of my Master’s thesis (2012) and subsequently to my PhD thesis (submitted in 2017, published in 2020).
Schwab used a vast number of Greek and Latin source texts to stitch together his narrative, or rather weave it into a tapestry of flowing prose that never betrays the sometimes haphazard foundation which it rests upon. For my thesis, I analysed (among others) the myths of Prometheus, the Ages of Man, Pentheus, Perseus, Daedalus and Icarus, the Argonauts, Tantalus, Meleagrus, Heracles and the Trojan War. It’s not an overstatement to say that Schwab took extraordinary pains to find as many ancient sources as he could in his time, including obscure and neglected but nonetheless influential works like the Troy Romances of Dares and Dictys Cretensis and the (then scarcely known or discussed) Posthomerica by Quintus of Smyrna, which Schwab had nothing but praise for in his preface.
I published my thesis two years after my viva in 2020, making no extensive changes although at the time, my former Göttingen teacher Christian Zgoll had published his magnus opus Tractatus mythologicus (De Gruyter 2019). Had I had a writing-up stipend or an academic job from 2018 through 2019 instead of going through the mill of teacher’s training, I might have published a better book. But even with this and other flaws, it received generally favourable reviews (listed here). Here are some voices:
Jonathan Groß has organized the massive amount of material well and helps his readership by presenting interim summaries after the individual chapters, a full bibliography not only of all editions and translations of Gustav Schwab’s work, but also of modern research, and a full index of ancient sources which—for the first time—enables readers to check the relationship of a passage in, say, Quintus Smyrnaeus, with the creative and ultimately more influential use by Schwab. Groß convincingly shows how Schwab based his narrative mainly on classical sources, and to a minor extent on their reception in translations and mythological lexica.
Kai Brodersen, BMCR (2021).
“Seine gründlich recherchierte, klug gegliederte,
Werner Schubert, AA (2020)
sorgsam abwägende, stringent argumentierende und flüssig geschriebene Monographie über Gustav Schwab stellt einen wichtigen Beitrag zu einem bislang
vernachlässigten Gebiet der Antike-Rezeption und darüber hinaus zur Geschichte der Klassischen Philologie insgesamt dar.”
Greek and Latin Historiography
If myth was what brought me to classics, literature is what kept me there. For PhD I was invited in 2012 to serve as research associate for the newly begun editorial project Kleine und fragmentarische Historiker der Spätantike (KFHist) at the University of Düsseldorf. This project, headed by Bruno Bleckmann and Markus Stein, makes accessible to students a number of authors and texts that are most useful for the study of Late Antiquity but have, for the most part, never been translated into German or been subject to a property historical and philological commentary.
My task was to create critical editions, translate and provide philological commentary on a number of ‘minor’ authors, including historians from the Crisis of the Third Century (Asinius Quadratus, Nicostratus of Trapezunt, Eusebius, Onasimus), anonymous illustrated 5th century chroniclers (of the Berlin Chronicle and the Alexandrian World Chronicle) and Eutropius who wrote a Breviarium ab urbe condita in 369/70. After publication of the volumes I contributed to in 2016 and 2018, I occasionally came back to those texts, especially once I discovered that Eutropius had been translated into Greek several times and that the first of those translations, the one by Paeanius, was still in need of a critical edition (not to mention translation and commentary). In 2020 I published a paper On the Transmission of Paeanius in GRBS where I established the relationship of the most important manuscripts and laid the foundation for this new critical edition. While writing the paper I got in touch with scholars from Austria, Finland, Italy and Spain who took great interest in the matter and helped me immensely. I still remember this as one of the highlights from a very hectic and troubling year for everybody.
History of Scholarship
From my early studies in Göttingen I’ve admired the achievements of our predecessors in the discipline, especially those in the “second brigade”. I started out writing articles on classical scholars for the German Wikipedia in 2006, mostly short ones. My first more ambitious one, on Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848–1931), was awarded the distinction of “excellent article” by the community in 2008 and subsequently featured on the main page on his 160th birthday on 22 December 2008. Other articles that were lauded by the community include Richard Foerster (1843–1922), Gustav Hirschfeld (1847–1895), Paul Maas (1880–1964) and Otto Regenbogen (1891–1966).
My contributions outside of Wikipedia circle around the contributors to Pauly-Wissowa’s Realencyclopädie (RE), namely its first editors Georg Wissowa (1859–1931) and Wilhelm Kroll (1869–1939). My first printed publication was a piece on the correspondence between Wissowa and Friedrich Carl Andreas (1846–1930), who wrote such exuberant articles on remote Persian villages that even reviewers took issue with it and Wissowa was eventually forced to let Andreas go, even though he admitted that he was the best authority on the matter at the time.
For Richard Foerster (1843–1922), best known as the editor of Libanius, I was invited to write a biography for Schlesische Lebensbilder (2012), my first peer-reviewed publication. I was glad for the opportunity to peruse Foerster’s letters to his friend Karl Dziatzko, where Foerster vividly talked about his life in Rostock and Kiel, where he was first appointed professor. In Rostock, Foerster (with the help of others) did away with the practice of handing out doctorates in absentia after a severe case of plagiarism had given way to critique all around the German Reich. At that time, when I was a doctoral student at the University of Düsseldorf, German minister of education Annette Schavan was accused of plagiarism in here dissertation as well and only a year later stripped of her PhD by the department, then headed by my advisor Bruno Bleckmann. Suffice it to say, the matter had some relevance at the time.
Apart from the odd article I wrote for Neue Deutsche Biographie, I focussed on collecting material on one particular scholar, the respectable, versatile, down-to-earth, dry-witted Wilhelm Kroll (1869–1939), who taught as professor in Greifswald, Müster and Breslau and for most of his life edited Pauly-Wissowa’s Realencyclopädie. Kroll fascinated me because he had been ‘untouched by the curious frenzy of Wissenschaftsgeschichte’ (to paraphrase PL Schmidt), i.e. no propert biography had been published, and because Kroll had so many diverse areas of expertise such as astrology, rhetorics, poetics, textual criticism, language and linguistics. As no Nachlass exists, I started gathering his letters preserved in other institutions (more than 500 until now). A moment of bliss was my getting in touch with his oldest grandson Achim Kroll (1924–2017) in 2016. Achim not only told me of his recollections and shared some postcards of his grandfather, he most generously sent me a copy of his grandfather’s autobiography, which covers the years until 1918. Kroll’s personality really comes to life in his letters and his autobiography, and I wish to share this richness with the world at some point. For now, you will have to make do with my short biography in the Schlesische Lebensbilder (2021).
Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikidata
Not really an area of research, more like a vessel of scholarly activity, Wikipedia was what brought me to scholarship and academic publishing in the first place. I started out on Wikipedia in 2005 writing about anything that interested me: 19th century art, villages from my Rügen holidays, warlords and warriors from the Three Kingdom era (Cao Cao and Sun Quan are featured as “excellent articles” on Wikipedia).
When I began studying Greek and Latin at Göttingen, I veered more towards topics close to my studies, with a strong propensity for biographies of classical scholars. Predominantly I got involved in a project started in 2007 to create a digital edition of Pauly-Wissowa’s Realencyclopädie (RE), a project which is still ongoing. At the time, we used to upload scans of pages where we meticulously cut out the parts still under copyright protection. We took great care to identify the authors of the articles, most of whom signed only with their surname. This quickly became a project in and of itself, prompting me to delve into 19th and 20th century scholarship, contacting the (presumed) authors who were still alive, asking town archives to search for years of death, and writing Wikipedia articles on all authors we could identify. Over the years we managed to correct the total number of authors from 1096 (counted by Winkler in his 1980 register) to 1126, correcting many of Winkler’s attributions in the process.
To this day, the RE project on Wikisource has a lot of momentum and has attracted several contributors over the years. Even though the publisher is less than pleased with the enterprise, they have held off from pressing charges, so let’s hope that my writing this doesn’t give them any ideas.
To serve as a hub (or spine) for all Wikimedia projects, Wikidata was launched in 2013, connecting pages from different language editions of Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikimedia Commons and so on. At first, Wikidata was nothing more than a repository for sitelinks, so I didn’t take much notice of it. But when Wikimedia added the ability to add statements (tripels) to items, Wikidata became very interesting to me: Finally a way to collect vast amounts of data without having to write encyclopedic articles (Wikipedia) or suggest, upload, transcribe, proofread and curate source texts (Wikisource).
Naturally, I focussed on my areas of expertise: academia and classics. I started projects to link external databases to Wikidata, for example the members of AcademiaNet, the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences members, some databases for classical scholars (Teuchos, Database of Classical Scholars, Eckstein’s Nomenclator philologorum), some encyclopedias (Hederich’s lexicon of mythology), but first and foremost Pauly-Wissowa’s Realencyclopädie.
After a long hiatus, I returned to Wikidata in the summer of 2023 to find an active community hard at work to adequately integrate the Greek and Roman world into the project. I now mainly focus on cooperation with other databases, matching their items to Wikidata’s and finding ways to import their knowledge into Wikidata.