DOMENICO

COMPARETTI (1835- )  , Italian scholar, was born at Rome on the 27th of June 1835 . He studied at the university of Rome, took his degree in 1855 in natural science and mathematics, and entered his uncle's pharmacy as assistant . His scanty leisure was, however, given to study . He learned Greek by himself, and gained facility in the modem language by conversing with the Greek students at the university . In spite of all disadvantages, he not only mastered the language, but became one of the chief classical scholars of Italy . In 1857 he published, in the Rheinisches Museum, a translation of some recently discovered fragments of Hypereides, with a dissertation on that orator . This was followed by a notice of the annalist Granius Licinianus, and one on the oration of Hypereides on the Lamian War . In 1859 he was appointed professor of Greek at Pisa on the recommendation of the duke of Sermoneta . A few years Iater he was called to a similar post at Florence, remaining emeritus professor at Pisa also . He subsequently took up his residence in Rome as lecturer on Greek antiquities and greatly interested himself in the Forum excavations . He was a member of the governing bodies of the academies of Milan, Venice, Naples and Turin . The list of his writings is long and varied .

Of his

works in classical literature, the best known are an edition of the Euxenippus of Hypereides, and monographs on Pindar and Sappho . He also edited the great inscription which contains a collection of the municipal laws of Gortyn in Crete, discovered on the site of the ancient city . In the Kalewala and the Traditional Poetry of the Finns (English translation by I . M . Anderton, 1898) he discusses the national epic of Finland and its heroic songs, with a view to solving the problem whether an epic could be composed by the interweaving of such national songs . He comes to a negative conclusion, and applies this reasoning to the Homeric problem . He treats this question again in a treatise on the so-called Peisistratean edition of Homer (La Commissione omerica di Pisistrato, 1881) . His Researches concerning the Book of Sindibad have been translated 3 . 4• 5• Limited partner-ships . in the Proceedings of the Folk-Lore Society . His Vergil in the Middle Ages (translated into English by E . F .

Benecke, 1895) traces the

strange vicissitudes by which the great Augustan poet became successively grammatical fetich, Christian prophet and wizard . Together with Professor Alessandro d'Ancona, Comparetti edited a collection of Italian national songs and stories (9 vols., Turin, 1870-1891), many of which had been collected and written down by himself for the first time .