Georg Friedrich Creuzer

Friedrich Creuzer
Georg Friedrich Creuzer, lithograph by Joseph Nicolaus Peroux after a painting by Jakob Roux
Born	10 March 1771 Marburg
Died	Heidelberg
Nationality	German
Alma mater	University of Jena
Occupation	Archaeologist and philologist
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Georg Friedrich Creuzer (German: [ˈɡeːɔʁk ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈkʁɔʏtsɐ]; 10 March 1771 – 6 February 1858) was a German philologist and archaeologist.

Biography

Georg Friedrich Creuzer was born at Marburg, the son of the bookbinder and later tax collector Christoph Andreas Joachim Leonhard (1726–1772) and the Philippine Eleonore Bang (1734–1795). His older brother was the Marburg theologian Andreas Leonhard Creuzer. Friedrich Creuzer studied theology, philology and philosophy from the summer semester of 1789 at the University of Marburg, at the University of Jena and later again in Marburg. In 1794 he and others founded an "Eleven Institute" there, where he worked as a teacher until he went to Leipzig as a private tutor in 1798. In the winter semesters of 1797/1798 and 1798/1799 he taught as a private lecturer in Marburg. He received his doctorate in philosophy on May 24, 1794 (or not until October 9, 1799) in Tübingen. In 1799 he was habilitated in Marburg, on October 21 of the following year he was appointed associate professor there and on October 31, 1802 full professor of classical philology. On April 4, 1804 he went to Heidelberg University as a full professor, where he founded the "Philological-Pedagogical Seminarium" with Friedrich Heinrich Christian Schwarz in 1807. He took up the chair in Leiden for the summer semester of 1809, where his health was affected by the Dutch climate, but was called back to Heidelberg after a few months. He turned down later offers to the universities of Göttingen, Kiel, Bonn and Munich.

Creuzer was personally friends with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Clemens Brentano. On October 7, 1799, he married Eleonora Sophia Müller (1758–1831), the widow of the financial scientist and economist Nathanael Gottfried Leske. From 1804, he was also in a relationship with Karoline von Günderrode, who committed suicide in 1806 after Creuzer abruptly left her. After his wife's death, he married Anna Jacobina Sebastian (1803–1889), the daughter of the pathologist Friedrich Jacob Christian Sebastian, on November 9, 1831. Both marriages remained childless.

Creuzer was one of the principal founders of the Philological Seminary established at Heidelberg in 1807. The Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Paris, appointed him one of its members, and from the Grand Duke of Baden he received the dignity of privy councillor. In 1844 Creuzer received a medal for his 40th anniversary of employment at the University of Heidelberg. This medal was made by the engraver Ludwig Kachel.

With his lectures on archaeological topics, he established the tradition of this subject at the University of Heidelberg, from which the Archaeological Institute (now the Institute for Classical Archaeology and Byzantine Archaeology) emerged in 1866. In 1835, the archaeological collection Antiquarium Creuzerianum, named after Creuzer, was founded, which became part of the Archaeological Collection of the University of Heidelberg in 1848. On May 1, 1845, he retired at his own request.

Works

Creuzer's first and most famous work was his Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen (1810–12, 2nd ed. 1819, 3rd ed. 1837), in which he maintained that the mythology of Homer and Hesiod came from an Eastern source through the Pelasgians, and reflected the symbolism of an ancient revelation; as a reconciliation with Judeo-Christian religion, it was, Walter Burkert has said, "the last large-scale and thoroughly unavailing endeavor of this kind."

This work ran counter to the ideology of romantic nationalism, which held literature and culture to be intimately connected with a Volk, epitomized by Karl Otfried Müller's concept of a Greek Stammeskultur, a Greek "tribal culture". For this and the next generations, "origins and organic development rather than reciprocal cultural influences became the key to understanding."

Creuzer's work was vigorously attacked by Johann Gottfried Jakob Hermann in his Briefen über Homer und Hesiod, and in his letter, addressed to Creuzer, Über das Wesen und die Behandlung der Mythologie; by Johann Heinrich Voss in his Antisymbolik; and by Christian Lobeck in his Aglaophamus. It was briefly praised, however, by Hegel in his Philosophy of Right.

Creuzer's other works include:

• an edition of Plotinus
• a partial edition of Cicero, in preparing which he was assisted by Moser
• Epochen der griechischen Literaturgeschichte (1802)
• Die historische Kunst der Griechen (1803)
• Abriss der römischen Antiquitaten (1824)
• Zur Geschichte altrömischer Cultur am Oberrhein und Neckar (1833)
• Zur Gemmenkunde (1834)
• Das Mithreum von Neuenheim (1838)
• Zur Galerie der alten Dramatiker (1839)
• Zur Geschichte der classischen Philologie (1854).

See the autobiographical Aus dem Leben eines alten Professors (Leipzig and Darmstadt, 1848), to which was added in the year of his death Paralipomena der Lebenskunde eines alten Professors (Frankfurt, 1858); also Starck, Friederich Kreuzer, sein Bildungsgang und seine bleibende Bedeutung (Heidelberg, 1875).

References

• Blok, Josine H. (1994). "Quests for a Scientific Mythology: F. Creuzer and K. O. Müller on History and Myth," History and Theory, Vol. XXXIII, No. 4, pp. 26–52.
• Edmonds, Radcliffe G. (2013). Redefining Ancient Orphism: A Study in Greek Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-03821-9
• Gabrielli, Tiziana (2006). "Sous le signe de Dionysos Symbole, mythe et grécité chez Friedrich Creuzer," Archives de Philosophie, Vol. LXIX, No. 2, pp. 243–61.
• Lombard, C. M. (1956). "Creuzer's "Symbolik" as a Probable Source for Hinduism in Lamartine," The Modern Language Review, Vol. LI, No. 3, pp. 344–47.
• Momigliano, Arnaldo (1946). "Friedrich Creuzer and Greek Historiography," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. IX, pp. 152–63.
• Williamson, George S. (2004). The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: 

External links

• Works by Georg Friedrich Creuzer at Open Library