WISSOWA, GEORG

WISSOWA, GEORG (1859–1931), was a German philologist and historian of Roman religion. Georg Otto August Wissowa was born near Breslau, the son of a civil servant. His grandfather was a noted Tacitus scholar and the director of Breslau's Catholic Gymnasium, where Wissowa himself was educated, graduating with superior marks in 1876. That same year he entered the University of Breslau, where he studied under the classical philologist August Reiffersheid, who introduced him to the study of Roman religion. In 1880 Wissowa successfully defended his doctoral dissertation, "De Macrobii Saturnalium fontibus." He subsequently continued his studies in Munich under Heinrich von Brunn, then one of Germany's foremost students of Roman antiquities. From Brunn he gained an appreciation of the importance of art and monuments for the understanding of Roman religious life, and in 1882 he produced a habilitation thesis on the images of Venus in Roman art ("De Veneris simulacris romanis"). Through Brunn, Wissowa also met that towering genius of Roman historical studies, Theodor Mommsen, whose methods he later applied to the study of Roman religion.

Upon the acceptance of his thesis, Wissowa joined the faculty at Breslau as a privatdocent, but he spent his first year in that position doing research in Italy (his only trip to the homeland of Roman civilization). In 1886 he accepted a post as associate professor at Marburg, where he was promoted to professor ordinarius in 1890. In 1895 he left Marburg for the University of Halle (Saale), where he spent the remainder of his career.

During the early part of his career Wissowa wrote nearly a dozen articles dealing with Roman religious antiquities. There were, in fact, preliminary studies for what was to be his chief contribution to the science of religion, Religion und Kultus der Römer (1902; 2d ed., 1912). In this work he traced the development of Rome's religion and described in detail its gods and practices. The book's importance lies in Wissowa's successful identification of the several strata of Roman religion, his clarity and precision in delineating the nature of its various facets, and his masterful treatment of its evolution by adoption of foreign forms. He demonstrated once and for all the essential dissimilarity of Greek and Roman religion, emphasizing that the latter was highly legalistic and almost totally lacking in mythology. In an era dominated by the comparative approach to religion popularized by James G. Frazer's The Golden Bough, Wissowa anticipated more recent anthropology by insisting on the need to understand Roman religion on its own terms and as an organic unit (cf. his remarks on Frazer in Religion und Kultus, 2d ed., p. 248, n. 3). Religion und Kultus der Römer soon became the foundation for all subsequent work in its field. Though other general treatments of the subject have appeared since its publication, it remains a standard and indispensable authority.

Hardly less important for the study of religion was Wissowa's decision to take on the task of reediting August Pauly's Realencyclopädie der klassischen Altertums-wissenschaft. The resulting compendium, not completed until 1972, became a standard reference for all students of the ancient world. It naturally included numerous articles on ancient gods and cults, many of them written by Wissowa himself. He was, in addition, a contributor to W. H. Roscher's Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie and to James Hastings's Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics.

Wissowa continued to be an active author and teacher until 1923, when his health failed. He spent the last eight years of his life as an invalid. It is to be regretted that his physical condition prevented him from participating in the discussion of new archaeological evidence unearthed during the 1920s that was to prove of major significance for the history of Roman religion.

Bibliography

In addition to the works cited above, Wissowa wrote a collection of articles, Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur römischen Religions- und Stadtgeschichte (1904; reprint, New York, 1975), which supplement Religion und Kultus. Of his many other valuable articles, I would single out as particularly interesting "Zum Ritual der Arvalbrüder," Hermes 52 (1917): 321–347.

A bibliography of Wissowa's works (nearly complete, but add the articles listed in the index to the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, edited by James Hastings, Edinburgh, 1908–1927) may be found at the end of Otto Kern's obituary for Wissowa in the Biographisches Jahrbuch für Altertumskunde 60 (1934): 120–145. This article and Kern's Georg Wissowa: Gedächtnisrede (Halle, 1931) are the fullest treatments of Wissowa's life.

New Sources

See now the various contributions (by Johns Scheid, Fritz Graf, Mary Beard, among others) intended to form a sort of monographic section in Archiv f. Religionsgeschichte 5 (2003): 1–211; as well as Gert Audring, Gelehrtenalltag. Der Briefwechsel zwischen Eduard Meyer und Georg Wissowa (1890–1927) (Hildesheim, 2000).

Henry Jay Watkin (1987)

Revised Bibliography