Müller

A remarkable archaeologist and classical scholar, born at Brieg, in Silesia, August 28, 1797. He was educated at Breslau and at Berlin under Boeckh, and when only twenty-two years of age was made Professor Extraordinarius of Archaeology and Director of the Philological Seminary at the University of Göttingen (1819), and Professor Ordinarius in 1823. In 1840, while in Greece, he died from the effects of a fever contracted at Delphi, where he had been copying inscriptions. Müller was the author of a number of works that were really epoch-making, in that they opened up questions upon which several generations of scholars have since been continuously at work, and he may be said to have permanently established archaeology upon a scientific basis. His chief works in this field are Orchomenos und die Minyer (1820); Die Dorier (2 vols. 1824; Eng. tr. 1829); Die Etrusker, which received a prize from the Berlin Academy (2 vols. 1828; 2d ed. revised by Deecke, 1877), on which see the article Etruria; a treatise on the Macedonians (1825); Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie (1825); Handbuch der Archäologie der Kunst (1830, last ed. 1878; Eng. tr. 1847); and a History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, undertaken at the request of the British Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (1841, published by Dr. Müller's brother), of which the English version is by Sir George Cornewall Lewis and Dr. Donaldson, the latter continuing it through the Byzantine Period (last ed. 1882-84). He also edited the Eumenides of Aeschylus (1833-35), with valuable excursus on questions of scenic antiquities—a work that involved him in a bitter polemic with Gottfried Hermann, “the despot of Leipzig”; Varro, De Lingua Latina (1833); and Festus (1839), until lately the standard edition. See the memoirs by Lücke (1841) and F. Ranke (1870); and Bursian, Geschichte der classischen Philologie in Deutschland, pp. 1007-1028 (Munich, 1883).