Johann Matthias Gesner

His father, Johann Samuel Gesner, a pastor in Auhausen, died in 1704, leaving the family in straitened circumstances.

He was given special attention and instruction by the rector of the Gymnasium, Georg Nikolaus Köhler, who sparked his interest in languages, loaned him Greek texts, and devised special exercises in which the boy had to reconstruct intelligible texts from fragments.

[citation needed] In 1715, he became librarian and vice-principal at Weimar,[2] where he became good friends with Johann Sebastian Bach (Bach later dedicated his Canon a 2 perpetuus BWV 1075 to Gesner),[citation needed] in 1729 (having been dismissed as librarian at Weimar) rector of the gymnasium at Ansbach, and in 1730 rector of the Thomasschule at Leipzig.

Having probably become familiar with a similar organization in Leipzig, in 1738 he founded the Deutsche Gesellschaft, devoted to the advancement of German literature.

Baumgarten, in his Aesthetics (1750), quoted passages from writers such as Horace, Virgil, Catullus, Juvenalis, and Cicero.