Otto Ribbeck

Johann Carl Otto Ribbeck (23 July 1827, Erfurt – 18 July 1898, Leipzig), was a German classical scholar. His works are mostly confined to criticisms of Latin poetry and to classical character sketches.

He was born at Erfurt in Saxony. In early life he went to Berlin, where he studied under Karl Lachmann, Franz Bopp and August Böckh, and from there to Bonn where he was a close student of the methods of Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker and Friedrich Ritschl. Having received his degree in Berlin and traveled for a year through Italy, in 1853 he returned to Berlin, where he entered Böckh's school. He then taught at Elberfeld and Bern. Having held professorial appointments at Kiel and Heidelberg, he succeeded Ritschl in the chair of classical philology at Leipzig, where he died.

Ribbeck was the author of several standard works on the poets and poetry of Rome, the most important of which are the following: Geschichte der römischen Dichtung (“History of Roman poetry,” 2nd ed., 1894-1900); Die römische Tragodie im Zeitalter der Republik (“Roman tragedy during the time of the republic,” 1875); Scaenicae Romanorum Poesis Fragmenta, including the tragic and comic fragments (3rd ed., 1897).

As a textual critic he was distinguished by considerable rashness, and never hesitated to alter, rearrange or reject as spurious what failed to reach his standard of excellence. These tendencies are strikingly shown in his editions of the Epistles and Ars Poetica of Horace (1869), the Satires of Juvenal (1859) and in the supplementary essay Der echte und unechte Juvenal (“Genuine and fraudulent Juvenal,” 1865). In later years, however, he became much more conservative.

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