His father was a poor weaver who had left Silesia and moved to Saxony to maintain his Protestant faith; Christian's education was paid for by his godfather.

In 1752 law professor Johann August Bach awarded Heyne a master's degree, but he was for many years in very straitened circumstances.

[1] An elegy written by Heyne in Latin on the death of a friend attracted the attention of Count von Brühl, the prime minister, who expressed a desire to see the author.

Another period of poverty followed, and only by persistent solicitation was Heyne able to obtain the post of under-clerk in the count's library, with a salary of less than twenty pounds sterling.

[1] Heyne increased this pittance by translation: in addition to some French novels, he rendered into German The Loves of Chaereas and Callirrhoe of Chariton, the Greek romance writer.

At the end of 1762, however, he was able to return to Dresden, where he was commissioned by P. D. Lippert to prepare the Latin text of the third volume of his Dactyliotheca (art account of a collection of gems).

[2] Unlike Gottfried Hermann, Heyne regarded the study of grammar and language only as the means to an end, not as the chief object of philology.

by GH Schafer, 1817), Apollodorus, Bibliotheca Graeca (1803), Homer, Iliad (1802); and Opuscula academica (1785–1812), containing more than a hundred academic dissertations, of which the most valuable are those relating to the colonies of Greece and the antiquities of Etruscan art and history.

They had four surviving children, including Benjamin Heyne, botanist, naturalist, and surgeon who worked in British India as a Botanist to Samalkot in the Madras Presidency under the British East India Company, and Therese Huber, who became one of the first well-known journalists in Germany[4] as editor of the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände.