1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Passow, Franz Ludwig Carl Friedrich

PASSOW, FRANZ LUDWIG CARL FRIEDRICH (1786–1833), German classical scholar and lexicographer, was born at Ludwigslust in Mecklenburg-Schwerin on the 20th of September 1786. In 1807 he was appointed to the professorship of Greek literature at the Weimar gymnasium by Goethe, whose acquaintance he had made during a holiday tour. In 1815 he became professor of ancient literature in the university of Breslau, where he continued to reside until his death on the 11th of March 1833. His advocacy of gymnastic exercises, in which he himself took part, met with violent opposition and caused a quarrel known as the “Breslauer Turnfehde.” Passow’s great work was his Handwörterbuch der griechischen Sprache (1819–1824), originally a revision of J. G. Schneider’s lexicon, which appeared in the fourth edition (1831) as an independent work, without Schneider’s name (new ed. by Crönert, 1901). It formed the basis of Liddell and Scott’s lexicon. Other works by him are Grundzüge der griech. und röm. Literatur- und Kunstgeschichte (2nd. ed., 1829) and editions of Persius, Longus, Tacitus Germania, Dionysius Periegetes, and Musaeus. His miscellaneous writings have been collected in his Opuscula academica (1835) and Vermischte Schriften (1843).

See Franz Passow’s Lehen und Briefe (1839), by L. and A. Wachler, which contains a full bibliography.