CHRISTIAN

See also:

• AUGUST (originally Sextilis)

AUGUST

See also:

• CHRISTIAN AUGUST LOBECK (1781-186o)

LOBECK (1781-186o)  , German classical scholar, was born at Naumburg on the 5th of June 1781 . After having studied at Jena and Leipzig, he settled at Wittenberg in 1802 as privat-docent, and in 1810 was appointed to a professor-ship in the university . Four years later, he accepted the chair of rhetoric and ancient literature at Konigsberg, which he occupied till within two years of his death (25th of August 1860) . His literary activities were devoted to the history of Greek religion and to the Greek language and literature . His greatest work, Aglaophamus (1829), is still valuable to students . In this he maintains, against the views put forward by G . F . Creuzer in his Symbolik (1810-1823), that the religion of the Greek mysteries (especially those of Eleusis) did not essentially differ from the national religion; that it was not esoteric; that the priests as such neither taught nor possessed any higher knowledge of God; that the Oriental elements were a later importation . His edition of the Ajax of Sophocles (1809) had gained him the reputation of a sound scholar and critic; his Phrynichus .(1820) and Paralipomena grammaticae graecae (1837) exhibit the widest acquaintance with Greek literature . He had little sympathy with comparative philology, holding that it needed a lifetime to acquire a thorough knowledge of a single language . See the article by L . Friedlander in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie; C .

Bursian's Geschichte der klassischen Philologie in Deutschland (1883) ; Lehrs, Populare Aufsatze aus dem Altertum (2nd ed., Leipzig, 1875) ; Ludwich, Ausgewahlte Briefe von and an Chr . Aug . Lobeck and K . Lehrs (1894); also J . E . Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, i . (1908), 103 . Bills introduced for purposes of blackmail .