WOLF, FRIEDRICH AUGUST German philologist and critic, was born on Feb. 15, 1759, at Hainrode, in the province of Hanover. He was educated at Nordhausen gram mar school and Gottingen university. There he chose philology as his faculty, which then had no existence, and succeeded in carry ing his point. He was dissatisfied with Heyne's treatment of Homer, and the two fell out. Later his edition of the Symposium obtained for him a chair at Halle. The moment was a critical one in the history of education. The literary impulse of the Renais sance was almost spent ; scholarship had become dry and trivial. A new school, that of Locke and Rousseau, sought to make teaching more modern and more human, but at the sacrifice of mental discipline and scientific aim. Wolf was eager to throw himself into the contest on the side of antiquity. In Halle (1783-1807), by the force of his will and the enlightened aid of the ministers of Fred erick the Great, he was able to carry out his long-cherished ideas and found the science of philology.
During his time at Halle Wolf published his commentary on the Leptines of Demosthenes (1789) and a little later the cele brated Prolegomena to Homer (1795). This book, the work with which his name is chiefly associated, was thrown off in compara tive haste to meet an immediate need. It has all the merits of a
great piece of oral teaching—command of method, suggestiveness, breadth of view. From it originated the great Homeric controversy and Wolf's main points, oral tradition, deliberate revision after reduction to writing, and plurality of authorship, are still the crucial questions. The French invasion swept away the university, and the rest of his life was spent at Berlin, where he had another professorship. His most finished work, the Darstellung der Alter tumswissenschaft, though published at Berlin (1807), belongs essentially to the Halle time. At length his health gave way. He was advised to try the south of France. He got as far as Marseilles, and died there on Aug. 8, 1824.
Mark Pattison wrote an admirable sketch of Wolf's life and work in the North British Review of June 1865, reproduced in his Essays (1889) ; see also J. E. Sandys, Hist. of Class. Schol. iii. (1908), pp. 51-6o. Wolf's Kleine Schriften were edited by G. Bernhardy (Halle, 5869). Works not included are the Prolegomena, the Letters to Heyne (1797), the commentary on the Leptines (Halle, 1789) and a transla tion of the Clouds of Aristophanes (I8i I).