Madvig

Madvig, JOHAN NICOLAI, Danish classical scholar, was born at Svaneke, in Bornholm, on 7th August 1804, educated at Frederiksborg and Copenhagen, began to teach at the university in 1826, and in 1829 was appointed to the chair of Latin Language and Literature, and made inspector of higher schools. He took a keen interest also in politics, was one of the chief speakers of the national Liberal party, sat in parliament, held the portfolio of religion and education from 1848 to 1851, and after 1855 was repeatedly elected president of the Danish parliament. He died blind on 13th December 1886. For more than half a century Madvig enjoyed the highest reputation, not in Denmark only, but throughout Europe, as a shrewd, clever critic of the Latin and Greek prose-writers. It was in criticising and emending the text of Cicero and Livy that he won his greatest laurels, his Emendationes in Ciceronis Libros Philosophicos (1828), editions of Cicero's De Finibus (1839; 3d ed., greatly improved, 1876), Cato Major et Lælius (1835; 2d ed. 1869), Emendationes Livianæ (1860; 2d ed. 1876), and the edition of Livy (4 vols. 1861–66) being all productions of first-rate scholarship. He provided for students very valuable information on Cicero's works in Opuscula Academica (2 vols. 1834–42; 2d ed. 1887); worked out a systematic account of his critical principles in Adversaria Critica (3 vols. 1871–84); published in 1841 his well-known Latin Grammar (7th ed. 1881), and in 1846 his still better known Greek Syntax (Eng. trans. 1853), both excellent works, but now being superseded by the results of newer philological study. The last books from Madvig's pen were a dissertation on the Constitution and Administration of the Roman State (2 vols. 1881–82), intended in some sort as supplementary and corrective to Mommsen's great history, and an Autobiography (1887).