RUHNKEN, DAVID one of the most illus trious scholars of the Netherlands, was of German origin, having been born in Pomerania in 1723. His parents had him educated for the church, but after two years at the University of Witten berg he determined to live the life of a scholar. At Wittenberg Ruhnken lived in close intimacy with the two most distinguished professors, Ritter and Berger. To them he owed a thorough grounding in ancient history and Roman antiquities and litera ture; and from them he learned a pure and vivid Latin style. But neither at Wittenberg nor at any German university was Greek seriously studied, so Ruhnken went to Leyden, where, stimulated by the influence of Bentley, the great scholar Tiberius Hemster huis had founded the only real school of Greek learning which had existed on the Continent since the days of Joseph Scaliger and Isaac Casaubon. At Leyden he became a close friend of Hem sterhuis, and when Hemsterhuis died in 1766 Ruhnken and his fellow-pupil Valckenaer carried on the tradition. With the excep
tion of a fruitful year (1755) spent in the libraries of Paris, he spent the rest of his life at Leyden where he died in 1798.
Ruhnken's principal works are editions of (I) Timaeus's Lexi con of Platonic Words, (2) Thalelaeus and other Greek commen tators on Roman law, (3) Rutilius Lupus and other grammarians, (4) Velleius Paterculus, (5) the works of Muretus. He also occu pied himself much with the history of Greek literature, particularly the oratorical literature, with the Homeric hymns, the scholia on Plato and the Greek and Roman grammarians and rhetoricians. A discovery famous in its time was that in the text of the work of Apsines on rhetoric a large piece of a work by Longinus was embedded.