He was a Dozent and Professor at the University of Würzburg from 1867 to 1912, and is especially known for his history of Roman literature and his ground-breaking, critical edition of Plato's dialogues.

After studying for a semester at the University of Bonn (1864/1865) with Otto Jahn and Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl, he returned to Würzburg and was promoted in 1866 with a dissertation on the reconstruction of Socrates' philosophy from Plato's writings.

[7] This replaced the obsolete and inconvenient work of Wilhelm Siegmund Teuffel and appeared in the Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft.

Schanz died while working on the second part of the last volume, which was completed by his successor at Würzburg, Carl Hosius.

[10] Just as modern books are measured in pages, ancient authors and scribes counted the lines in prose compositions.

[11] Stichometry now plays a small but useful role in the study of ancient Greek and Latin papyri, and especially of the scrolls evacuated in Herculaneum.

From 1882 to 1912 he edited twenty volumes of the Beiträge zur historischen Syntax der griechischen Sprache.