13 Facts About Rudolf Pfeiffer

Rudolf Carl Franz Otto Pfeiffer was a German classical philologist.

Rudolf Pfeiffer is known today primarily for his landmark, two-volume edition of Callimachus and the two volumes of his History of Classical Scholarship, in addition to numerous articles and lectures related to these projects and to the fragmentary satyr plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles.

Rudolf Pfeiffer's parents were Carl Pfeiffer, the proprietor of a print-shop, and Elise.

The boy's grandfather Jakob, a printer, had purchased the house of the humanist Konrad Peutinger, and Pfeiffer would later consider it a special stroke of fate that he had been born and bred in the former home of a central figure from the golden age of humanism in Augsburg.

Rudolf Pfeiffer spent his leisure time with Beda Grundl reading Homer and a host of other Greek authors.

In 1913, under the direction of the literary historian Franz Muncker, Rudolf Pfeiffer completed a dissertation on the 16th-century Augsburg Meistersinger and translator of Homer and Ovid, Johann Spreng, entitled, a revised version of which was published as a monograph in 1919.

Rudolf Pfeiffer later remarked that his marriage to Lili was perhaps hasty, since his prospects for an academic position were still unclear.

In 1920 a promotion allowed Rudolf Pfeiffer to take a year's leave and return to that city, where he made the acquaintance of Wilamowitz who recognized great potential in the young scholar and with whom Rudolf Pfeiffer would have a lasting friendship.

Later in the very same year, Rudolf Pfeiffer took over the position at Frankfurt that Karl Ludwig Reinhardt had vacated at Hamburg, only to move on again in 1927 to Freiburg.

Finally, in 1929 Rudolf Pfeiffer returned to his alma mater as Ordinarius Professor of Greek, and a colleague of Schwartz, at Munich.

In 1937 Rudolf Pfeiffer would have to move again: he was forced out of his chair at Munich because of his marriage to a Jewish woman and opposition to the Nazi regime.

Rudolf Pfeiffer was restored to his chair at Munich in 1951 from which he would retire in 1957.

Rudolf Pfeiffer had intended to publish a third volume to cover the intervening period, but his interests in Hellenistic scholarship and the high humanist period drew him to the bookends of his history.