Wolf, FRIEDRICH AUGUST, the most gifted classical scholar and first critic of his age, was born at Hainrode near Nordhausen, 15th February 1759, son of the village schoolmaster and organist. His father removing to Nordhausen, he was sent to the gymnasium there, but his real education he gave himself with a zeal almost unparalleled in the annals of human learning. While still a schoolboy, besides a wide range in classical reading, he had mastered French, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew, and English, and perfected himself in the theory and practice of music. In April 1777 he went to the university of Göttingen, and inscribed himself in the matriculation-book as 'student of philology,' the first instance at any university. The matriculation was an epoch in German education,' says Mark Pattison. He attended the lectures very irregularly, being already much given to private study. For the rest he led a very retired life, was little visited or known, and was intimate only with a few. From Heyne, who once excluded him from his lectures on Pindar for his former irregularity, he kept himself quite aloof. That overpraised scholar coldly returned him the dissertation he laid before him in 1779, containing some novel views regarding the Homeric poems. The same year Wolf went as teacher to the Pädagogium at Ilfeld, and there first established his fame by an edition of the Symposium of Plato, with notes and introduction in German. In 1782 he was appointed to the rectorship of the High School at Osterode, in the Harz; and in 1783 he accepted an invitation to Halle as professor of Philology and Pädagogik. Here he spent twenty-three delightful years, giving a new meaning to philology, which he defined as 'knowledge of human nature as exhibited in antiquity.' As a science of interpretation it embraces literature, art, and, indeed, anything distinctly characteristic in the life of antiquity. At first he rather estranged than attracted students by the high tone of his teaching. However he learned to adapt himself to his audience, and was soon surrounded by a crowd of eager pupils. In his famous Seminarium he lavished all the stores of his mind upon his pupils, giving them also a brotherly sympathy and comradeship that aroused their enthusiasm. Three of his pupils were especially dear to him, Heindorf, Immanuel Bekker, and August Böckh. Before all things a teacher, literary labours and fame he looked upon more as a subordinate object, and all his writings were written merely on the spur of occasion and necessity. Yet he established his reputation as a scholar and critic by an edition of Demosthenes' Oratio adversus Leptinem (1789), and still more by his celebrated Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795), in which he unfolded, with equal erudition and acuteness, his bold theory that the Odyssey and Iliad are composed of numerous ballads by different minstrels, strung together in a kind of unity by subsequent editors. He maintains (1) that the Homeric poems were composed without the aid of writing, which was impossible for literary purposes about 950 B.C.; that they were handed down by oral recitation, suffering many changes in the process; (2) that the poems suffered many more changes after they were written down (c. 550 B.C.), made by revisers (διασκευσται) or by learned critics with critical theories of their own; (3) that there is an artistic unity in the Iliad, still more in the Odyssey, but this is not due to the original poems, but the effect of the later redactions; (4) that the original poems, from which they have been put together, were not all by the same author. Yet he does not deny a personal Homer, but believes him a sovereign genius who 'began the weaving of the web.' This work made a great sensation through the whole of Europe. Some scholars gave out that they had long entertained similar notions regarding the Homeric poems; and Heyne insinuated that the Prolegomena were only a reproduction of what Wolf had heard at Göttingen. This gave rise to the spirited Briefe an Heyne (1797), of which the first three especially are models of scholarly polemic and fine irony. In 1801 Wolf confirmed by an exhaustive inquiry the suspicions, first broached by Markland in England, of the genuineness of the four orations of Cicero: Post reditum in Senatu, Ad Quirites post reditum, Pro domo sua ad pontifices, De haruspicum responsis. He next demolished the authenticity of the oration Pro Marcello (1802), which had long been studied by the Ciceronians as a model of eloquence and style. He refused a call in 1796 to Leyden, in 1798 to Copenhagen, and in 1805 to Munich, but after the disasters of 1806 the university at Halle was dispersed, and Wolf was for a time reduced to great straits. He soon, however, became member of the Academy of Sciences at Berlin, where he took an active part in the re-organisation of the university, and was appointed a professor. He also received a post in the department for public instruction; but his administrative work proved a complete failure from his absolute-ness and lack of tact, and, still worse, even in the lecture-room he seemed to have lost all the attractiveness and fire of his Halle days. He quarrelled with everybody—with Buttmann, even with Heindorf; Schleiermacher nicknamed him the 'distinguished Eremit.' His health began also to give way, and he took a journey to the south of France in April 1824, and died at Marseilles, 8th August 1824.
While in Berlin he edited along with Buttmann the Museum der Alterthumswissenschaften (1807-10), and afterwards the Litterarische Analekten (1817-20), perhaps the best philological journal that has ever been published. From the papers which he left his son-in-law, Körte, published Ideen über Erziehung, Schule und Universität (1835). Wolf never completed the greater part of his literary projects, and even his published writings remained splendid torsos. The Darstellung der Alterthumswissenschaft (1807) is his most finished work. His Kleine Schriften were edited by G. Bernhardy in 1869. See Hanhart, Erinnerungen an Fr. Aug. Wolf (1825); Körte, Leben und Studien Fr. Aug. Wolf's des Philologen (2 vols. 1833); Arnoldt, F. A. Wolf in seinem Verhältnis zum Schulwesen (2 vols. 1861-62); and Mark Pattison's Essays (vol. i. 1889)—the best account of Wolf in English.