[2] He was an influential scholar in the areas of Greek tragedy, particularly for his work on Aeschylus, and the philosophy of the physical world and its relation to the soul, especially the systems of Plato and Aristotle.
"[4] Solmsen was also a student of Eduard Norden, Otto Regenbogen, and Werner Jaeger, to the three of whom along with Wilamowitz he dedicated the first volume of his collected papers.
Among his courses was "Foundations of Western Thought," which explored the history of philosophical, scientific and religious ideas from early Greece through the Hellenistic and Roman periods.
He gave occasional lectures at the University of North Carolina, conducted a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar, and led readings in Pindar and Plotinus.
"[11] The Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin offers four one-year fellowships in his name for postdoctoral work on literary and historical studies of the Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance periods to 1700.
"The post-World-War-I generation for whom the value of the Classics had become a problem," he writes, "did not find [from Wilamowitz] an answer to their question what made ancient civilization particularly significant and worth intensive study," adding that Wilamowitz "did not realize the need of justifying their study to a generation for whom the continuity of a tradition that reached back to the age of Goethe was weakened (though not completely broken) and whose outlook was still in the process of formation; many in fact were consciously striving for a new orientation.