Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2013, Greek and Latin
This dissertation studies the reception of the Greek historian Thucydides (c. 460-395 B.C.) by Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560), professor of Greek at the University of Wittenberg and theological right hand man to Martin Luther, as well as by a number of Melanchthon's students and friends. I begin by examining the work on Thucydides done by Melanchthon himself, which primarily comes from an unpublished manuscript now in Hamburg, Germany, Staats- und Universitatsbibliothek Cod. Philol. 166, dated to the 1550s. As it stands, this manuscript claims a unique and important status as one of the oldest – if not the oldest – examples in existence of lectures delivered on Thucydides in the Latin West. I will also analyze the 1565 commentary on Thucydides by Melanchthon's close professional friend, Joachim Camerarius, and the 1569 commentary and translation of Thucydides by one of Melanchthon's students, Vitus Winsemius. Studying the popularity of Thucydides during the resurgence of Greek studies in the Renaissance proves to be an endeavor with many blank spaces. Evidence of commentaries on Thucydides from the Italian Quattrocento, where Thucydides was first reintroduced in the West, is very limited. Thanks however to Marianne Pade's article on Thucydides in the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum, we can now see that Thucydides enjoyed considerable popularity across the Alps among certain Humanist members of the early German Protestant Reformation. Despite Pade's work, however, little detailed research has been done on the reception of Thucydides (or most Classical authors) in German Protestant Humanism. This dissertation aims to examine in detail part of this largely unexplored but very important area of Thucydidean reception. The works that I study in this dissertation represent, therefore, the first evidence for a systematic commentary and teaching tradition in the Latin West on Thucydides since antiquity. In this examination we face the obvious conundrum of devout re (open full item for complete abstract)
Committee: Frank Coulson Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Benjamin Acosta-Hughes Ph.D. (Committee Member); Anthony Kaldellis Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Subjects: Classical Studies; European History