Lachmann, KARL KONRAD FRIEDRICH WILHELM

Lachmann, KARL KONRAD FRIEDRICH WILHELM, a celebrated German critic and philologist, was born, 4th March 1793, at Brunswick, studied at Leipzig and Göttingen, became an extra-ordinary professor at Königsberg in 1818, at Berlin in 1825, and an ordinary professor there in 1827. He was admitted a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1830, and died 13th March 1851. Lachmann's scholarship was extraordinary alike in profundity and range. He was equally devoted to classical and German philology, and illustrated both by a singularly subtle and sagacious criticism evolved in strictly scientific method. Among his most important productions are his editions of the Nibelungenlied, the works of Walter von der Vogelweide, Propertius, Catullus, Tibullus, Badius, Avianus, Gaius, and the Agrimensores Romani. In his Betrachtungen über die Ilias (supplemented by Haupt, 1847) he maintained that the Iliad consisted of sixteen independent lays enlarged and interpolated in various ways. The smaller edition of his New Testament appeared in 1831 (3d ed. 1846); the larger, in 2 vols., in 1842–50. The design of the last of these works was to restore the Greek text as it existed in the Eastern Church in the 3d and 4th centuries; and Lachmann attached the greatest value to the readings found in the old Latin and Greek western uncials, where he found differences in his oldest eastern texts. His latest undertaking was his edition of Lucretius (1850), which Monro styles 'a work which will be a landmark for scholars as long as the Latin language continues to be studied.' See the Life by Hertz (Berlin, 1851), and also J. Grimm in vol. i. of his Kleinere Schriften.