Johann August Nauck

Johann August Nauck

Johann August Nauck (September 18, 1822 – August 3, 1892) was a German classical scholar and critic.

Nauck was born at Auerstedt in present-day Thuringia. After studying at the University of Halle and holding educational posts in Berlin, he immigrated in 1859 to St Petersburg, where he became a professor of Greek at the Imperial Historico-Philological Institute.

Nauck was one of the most distinguished textual critics of his day, although, like PH Peerlkamp, he was fond of altering a text in accordance with what he thought the author must, or ought to, have written.

The most important of his writings and translations, all of which deal with Greek language and literature (especially the tragedians) are the following:

• Euripides, Tragedies and Fragments (1854, 3rd ed., 1871)
• Studio, Euripidea (1859–1862)
• Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (1856, last ed., 1889), his chief work
• Index to the Fragments (1892)
• Text of Sophocles: Sophokles. Erstes Baendchen: Allgemeine Einleitung. Aias. Philoktetes (Berlin 1860 4th ed.); Sophoclis Tragoediae (Berlin 1867); Sophokles. Erstes Baendchen: Allgemeine Einleitung. Aias.(Berlin 1877, 7th. ed., 1882, 8th ed.).
• revised edition of Schneidewin's annotated Sophocles (1856, etc.)
• texts of Homer, Odyssey (1874) and Iliad (1877–1879)
• the fragments of Aristophanes of Byzantium (1848)
• Porphyrius of Tyre (1860, 2nd ed., 1886)
• Iamblichus, De Vita Pythagorica (1884)
• Lexikon Vindobonense (1867), a meagre compilation of the 14th or I5th century.

References

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press 

Further reading

• Memoir by T Zielinski, in Bursian's Biographisches Jahrbuch (1894), and JE Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, iii. (1908), pp. 149-152.