11 Facts About David Ruhnken

David Ruhnken was a Dutch classical scholar of German origin.

At Wittenberg, David Ruhnken studied with two distinguished professors, Johann Daniel Ritter and Johann Wilhelm von Berger.

David Ruhnken followed the advice of his friends at Wittenberg and early in 1744 went to the University of Leiden, where, stimulated by the influence of Richard Bentley, Tiberius Hemsterhuis had founded the only real school of Greek learning on the Continent since the days of Joseph Justus Scaliger and Isaac Casaubon.

Hemsterhuis and David Ruhnken were close friends during the twenty-three years between David Ruhnken's arrival in the Netherlands in 1743 and the death of Hemsterhuis in 1766.

In 1757 David Ruhnken was appointed lecturer in Greek, to assist Hemsterhuis, and in 1761 he succeeded Oudendorp, with the title of "ordinary professor of history and eloquence", as Latin professor.

David Ruhnken's defence was to publish works on Latin literature which eclipsed and silenced his rivals.

David Ruhnken wrote that Ruhnken was not a recluse or a pedant, but was sociable and cared nothing for rank.

David Ruhnken greatly widened the circle of those who valued taste and precision in classical scholarship.

David Ruhnken powerfully aided the emancipation of Greek studies from theology.

David Ruhnken was one of the first scholars of the 18th century to study and interpret Plato's writings in ancient Greek rather than interpreting Plato's works through the prisms of translations by others.

David Ruhnken occupied himself much with the history of Greek literature, particularly the oratorical literature, with the Homeric hymns, the scholia or, Plato and the Greek and Roman grammarians and rhetoricians.