1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Nauck, Johann August

NAUCK, JOHANN AUGUST (1822–1892), German classical scholar and critic, was born at Auerstädt in Prussian Saxony on the 18th of September 1822. After having studied at Halle and held educational posts in Berlin, he migrated in 1859 to St Petersburg, where he was professor of Greek at the imperial historico-philological institute (1869–1883). He died on the 3rd of August 1892. Nauck was one of the most distinguished textual critics of his day, although, like P. H. 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, all of which deal with Greek language and literature (especially the tragedians) are the following: Euripides, Tragedies and Fragments (1854, 3rd ed., 1871); Studia Euripidea (1859–1862); Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (1856, last ed., 1889), his chief work; Index to the Fragments (1892); text of Sophocles (1867): revised edition of Schneidewin’s annotated Sophocles (1856, &c.); texts of Homer, Odyssey (1874) and Iliad (1877–1879); the fragments of Aristophanes of Byzantium (1848), still indispensable; Porphyrius of Tyre (1860, 2nd ed., 1886); Iamblichus, De Vita Pythagorica (1884); Lexikon Vindobonense (1867), a meagre compilation of the 14th or 15th century. See memoir by T. Zielinski, in Bursian’s Biographisches Jahrbuch (1894), and J. E. Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, iii. (1908), pp. 149–152.