Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl
His chief teacher, Spitzner, a pupil of Gottfried Hermann, divined the boy's genius and allowed it free growth, applying only so much either of stimulus or of restraint as was absolutely needful.
[1] Here he came under the powerful influence of Christian Karl Reisig, a young Hermannianer with exceptional talent, a fascinating personality and a rare gift for instilling into his pupils his own ardour for classical study.
The early death of Reisig in 1828 did not sever Ritschl from Halle, where he began his professorial career with a great reputation and brilliant success, but soon hearers fell away, and the pinch of poverty compelled his removal to Breslau, where he reached the rank of ordinary professor in 1834, and held other offices.
[1] The great event of Ritschl's life was a sojourn of nearly a year in Italy (1836–37), spent in libraries and museums, and more particularly in the laborious examination of the Ambrosian palimpsest of Plautus at Milan.
[1] The philological seminary which he controlled, although nominally only joint-director with Welcker, became a veritable officina litterarum, a kind of Isocratean school of classical study; in it were trained many of the foremost scholars of the late 19th century.
The names of G. Curtius, Ihne, Schleicher, Bernays, Ribbeck, Lorenz, Vahlen, Hübner, Bücheler, Helbig, Benndorf, Riese, Windisch, and Nietzsche, who were his pupils either at Bonn or at Leipzig, attest his fame and power as a teacher.
In 1854 Otto Jahn took the place of the venerable Welcker at Bonn, and after a time succeeded in dividing with Ritschl the empire over the philological school there.
The spirited element in him was powerful, and to some at times he seemed overbearing, but his nature was noble at the core; and, though intolerant of inefficiency and stupidity, he never asserted his personal claims in any mean or petty way.
This volume presents in admirable facsimile, with prefatory notices and indexes, the Latin inscriptions from the earliest times to the end of the Republic.
The results of Ritschl's life are mainly gathered up in a long series of monographs, for the most part of the highest finish, and rich in ideas which leavened the scholarship of the time.
Ritschl's examination of the Plautine manuscripts was both laborious and brilliant, and greatly extended the knowledge of Plautus and of the ancient Latin drama.
By the aid of the Ambrosian palimpsest he recovered the name T Maccius Plautus, for the vulgate M Accius, and proved it correct by strong, extraneous arguments.
Ritschl proved that they meant Canticum and Diverbium, and hence showed that in the Roman comedy only the conversations in iambic senarii were not intended for the singing voice.
He may have in general, on the whole, some sympathy for the growing greatness of Germany, but, like myself, no special tendre [fondness] for Prussianism; yet he has vivid feeling for free civic and spiritual development, and thus certainly a heart for your Swiss institutions and way of living.
So Ritschl expected the case to be hopeless, 'although in the present instance,' he wrote, 'I should stake my whole philological and academic reputation that the matter would work out happily.'
Kaufmann continued: "His call to the university of Basel came as a surprise to Nietzsche, who had not yet received his doctorate though he had published some fruits of his research in a scholarly journal.
