Friedrich Wilhelm Schneidewin

Friedrich Wilhelm Schneidewin (June 6, 1810 - January 11, 1856), German classical scholar, was born at Helmstedt.

In 1833 he became a teacher at the Brunswick gymnasium, in 1837 extraordinary and in 1842 ordlinary professor of classical languages and literature in the university of Göttingen, where he died.

Schneidewin's work on Sophocles and the Greek lyric poets is of permanent value. His most important publications are:

• Ibyci Rhegini reliquiae (1833), severely criticized by G Hermann; Simonidis Cei reliquiae (1835)
• Delectus poesis Graecorum elegiacae, iambicae, melicae (1838-1839), in which the fragments of the lyric poets were for the first time published in a convenient form
• Paroemiographi graeci (1839, with E von Leutsch)
• Sophocles (1849-1854, revised after his death by A Nauck).

He also edited the fragments of the speeches of Hypereides on behalf of Euxenippus and Lycophron (already published by Churchill Babington from a papyrus discovered in Egyptian Thebes in 1847) and a Latin poem on rhetorical figures by an unknown author (Incerti auctoris de figuris vel schematibus versus heroici, 1841), found by Jules Quicherat in manuscript in the Paris library. Schneidewin was also the founder of Philologus (1846), a journal devoted to classical learning, and dedicated to the memory of KO Müller.

See A Baumeister in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie; E von Leutsch in Philologus, x.; and M Lechner, Zur Erinnerung an K. F. Hermann, F. W. Schneidewin (1864).

This entry was originally from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.