Joseph Hilarius Eckhel

His father was farm-steward to Count Zinzendorf, and he received his early education at the Jesuit College in Vienna, where, at the age of fourteen, he was admitted into that order.

After being engaged as professor of poetry and rhetoric, first at Steyr and afterwards at Vienna, he was appointed in 1772 as keeper of the cabinet of coins at the Jesuits' College, and in the same year he went to Italy for the purpose of personal inspection and study of antiquities and coins.

Upon the suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773, Eckhel was appointed by the empress Maria Theresa of Austria professor of antiquities and numismatics at the University of Vienna, and this post he held for twenty-four years.

He was in the following year made keeper of the imperial cabinet of coins, and in 1779 appeared his Catalogus Vindobonensis numorum veterum.

[2] According to the 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica: The author's rich learning, comprehensive grasp of his subject, admirable order and precision of statement in this masterpiece drew from C. G. Heyne enthusiastic praise, and the acknowledgment that Eckhel, as the Coryphaeus of numismatists, had, out of the mass of previously loose and confused facts, constituted a true science.