Freytag, Gustav | Herbert W. Benario (essay date 2000)
Herbert W. Benario (essay date 2000)
SOURCE: Benario, Herbert W. “Tacitus, Gustav Freytag, Mommsen.” Classical and Modern Literature, 20, no. 3 (spring 2000): 71-79.
[In the following essay, Benario suggests that Freytag's novel of academic life, Die Verlorene Handschrift, was inspired by the author's relationship with the scholars Theodor Mommsen and Moriz Haupt.]
A few years ago, Professor Géza Alföldy published a splendid article in which he reexamined an inscription from Rome and identified the honoree as the historian Tacitus. The title is cryptic; it is “Bricht der Schweigsame sein Schweigen? Eine Grabinschrift aus Rom.”1 I did not understand the significance of the first part until it was pointed out to me that it invoked a novel by Gustav Freytag (1816-1895) entitled Die verlorene Handschrift.2 It is a vast work; in the edition which I used it covers 826 pages,3 while a...
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