1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Lehrs, Karl

LEHRS, KARL (1802–1878), German classical scholar, was born at Königsberg on the 2nd of June 1802. He was of Jewish extraction, but in 1822 he embraced Christianity. In 1845 he was appointed professor of ancient Greek philology in Königsberg University, which post he held till his death on the 9th of June 1878. His most important works are: De Aristarchi Studiis Homericis (1833, 2nd ed. by A. Ludwich, 1882), which laid a new foundation for Homeric exegesis (on the Aristarchean lines of explaining Homer from the text itself) and textual criticism; Quaestiones Epicae (1837); De Asclepiade Myrleano (1845); Herodiani Scripta Tria emendatiora (1848); Populäre Aufsätze aus dem Altertum (1856, 2nd much enlarged ed., 1875), his best-known work; Horatius Flaccus (1869), in which, on aesthetic grounds, he rejected many of the odes as spurious; Die Pindarscholien (1873). Lehrs was a man of very decided opinions, “one of the most masculine of German scholars”; his enthusiasm for everything Greek led him to adhere firmly to the undivided authorship of the Iliad; comparative mythology and the symbolical interpretation of myths he regarded as a species of sacrilege.

See the exhaustive article by L. Friedländer in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, xviii.; E. Kammer in C. Bursian’s Jahresbericht (1879); A. Jung, Zur Erinnerung an Karl Lehrs (progr. Meseritz, 1880); A. Ludwich edited Lehrs’ select correspondence (1894) and his Kleine Schriften (1902).