Prolegomena to Friedrich August Wolf

N I908 classical philology was still important enough to provoke a satire. Ludwig Hatvany provided it. His Die Wissenschaft des nicht Wissenswerten is a slashing parody of of all things a Berlin student's notes on a year's work in classics. The professors whose lectures it records are nightmare figures, academic hobgoblins. The Latinist, Woepke, buries Catullus's Lesbia poems under heaps of unnecessary lexical distinctions: 'Vivamus here means not only "let us live" but "let us enjoy life"; we find this expression used in the same sense in an inscription in the C.I.L. . . .'1 The Greek professor spews out over Plato's Protagoras a flood of details about the daily trivia of ancient life: 'As you see, gentlemen, the porter shut the gate [on Socrates and his companions]. At this passage anyone would be struck by the question of how this gate was constructed, and also by the important, still unsolved problem of door-shutting in antiquity.'2 Hatvany's fellow students are no better than their masters. One barges into Hatvany's room on an April morning, waking him, to introduce himself: 'My name is Meier, student of philology. I've come to explain why I'm so serious.'3 Hatvany's own mock-seminar report uses the fragments of Sappho to argue that she was the headmistress of a Midchenpensionat.4 Like most elaborate satires, Hatvany's had a serious message. It was an attack on the main tenets ofAltertumswissenschaftabove all, on the demand that the student pay equal attention to every aspect of the Greek and Roman worlds and fit every text into an elaborate political, social and material context. For Hatvany this approach destroyed the literature it was meant to explain. The student was too bogged down in a swamp of facts to appreciate any single work of art, too worried about the details ofCatullus's hypothetical biography and the place of pet sparrows in Roman society to take fire from his