RITSCHL, FRIEDRICH WILHELM (1806-1876), Ger man scholar, was born in 1806 in Thuringia. He was well taught in youth by Spitzner, a pupil of Gottfried Hermann, spent a year at Leipzig, and in 1826 went to Halle. He went to Bonn in 1839, where he controlled a philological seminary. The names of Georg Curtius, Ihne, Schleicher, Bernays, Ribbeck, Lorenz, Vah len, Hubner, Biicheler, Helbig, Benndorf, Riese, Windisch, who were his pupils either at Bonn or at Leipzig, attest his fame and power as a teacher. In 1865 a violent quarrel arose between him and Otto Jahn, now his colleague; he resigned, went to Leip zig, and died there in 1876. His great faculty for organiza tion is shown by his administration of the university library at Bonn, and by the eight years of labour which carried to success a work of infinite complexity, the famous Priscae Latinitatis Monumenta Epigraphica (Bonn, 1862). This volume presents in admirable facsimile, with prefatory notices and indexes, the Latin inscriptions from the earliest times to the end of the republic.
To the world in general Ritschl was best known as a student of Plautus. Ritschl's examination of the Plautine mss. was both laborious and brilliant, and greatly extended the knowledge of Plautus: for examples by the aid of the Ambrosian palimpsest he recovered the name T. Maccius Plautus, for the vulgate M. Accius, and proved it correct by strong extraneous argu ments.
In spite of the incompleteness, on many sides, of his work Ritschl must be assigned a place in the history of learning among a very select few. His studies are presented principally in his Opuscula collected partly before and partly since his death. The Trinummus (twice edited) was the only specimen of his contem plated edition of Plautus which he completed.
The facts of Ritschl's life may be best learned from the elaborate biography by Otto Ribbeck (Leipzig, 1879). An interesting estimate of Ritschl's work is that by Lucian Muller (1877).