BRUNCK, RICHARD FRANCOIS PHILIPPE (1729— 1803 ), French classical scholar, was born at Strasbourg, Dec. 3o 1729, and died June 12 1803. He was a military commissary during the Seven Years' War ; and at the outbreak of the French Revolution was imprisoned. In 1772-76 he edited the Antliologia Graeca or Analecta veterum Poetarum Graecorum. Where it seemed to him that an obscure passage might be made intelligible by a change of text, he made the alteration, whether the new reading were supported by manuscript authority or not.
Other works include: Editions of Anacreon (1778), plays of Aeschylus and Euripides, Apollonius Rhodius (178o), Aristoph anes, with an excellent Latin translation (1781-83), Gnomici Poetae Graeci (1784), Sophocles (1786) with Latin translation (his best work), editions of Virgil (1785), Plautus (1788) and Terence (1797).
See Sandys, Hist. of Classical Scholarship (1908), vol. ii. p. 395. BRUNDISIUM (mod. BRINDISI, q.v.), an important harbour town of Calabria (in the ancient sense), Italy, on the east-south east coast. The name is said to mean "stag's head" in the Mes sapian dialect, in allusion to the shape of the harbour. Fertile land made it the chief Messapian city; it became Roman after the conquest of the Sallentini in 266 B.C. The Romans founded a colony there in 245 B.C., and the Via Appia was perhaps extended through Tarentum as far as Brundisium at this period. After the Punic wars it became the chief point of embarkation for Greece and the East, via Dyrrachium or Corcyra, and was made a free port by Sulla. It suffered, however, from a siege conducted by Caesar in 49 B.C. and was again attacked in 42 and 4o B.C. Virgil died here in 19 B.C. on his return from Greece. Trajan constructed the Via Trajana, a more direct route from Beneventum to Brun disium. An ancient column 62ft. in height, with an ornate capital, still stands, and near it is the base of another, the column itself having been removed to Lecce. They are said to mark the end of the Via Appia.