Johann Gottfried Jakob Hermann

Johann Gottfried Jakob Hermann studied at University of Jena and Leipzig University. Training under Friedrich Wolfgang Reiz, Karl David Ilgen and Karl Leonhard Reinhold is recorded. Leopold von Ranke, Karl Friedrich Hermann and Friedrich Max Müller are recorded as having studied under Johann Gottfried Jakob Hermann. The recorded working language is German, Ancient Greek and Latin. The field of work recorded is classical philology. Employment is recorded with Leipzig University. Works named in the authority record are Elementa doctrinae metricae. Distinctions recorded are Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts order.

Hermann was born in Leipzig. Entering its university at the age of fourteen, he at first studied law, which he soon abandoned for the classics (it was Friedrich Wolfgang Reiz who introduced him to philology). After a semester at Jena in 1793–1794, he became a lecturer in classical literature in Leipzig, in 1798 professor extraordinarius of philosophy in the university, and in 1803 professor of eloquence (and poetry, 1809). His students included Leopold von Ranke. In 1840, on the occasion of his 50th doctoral anniversary, he received a medal. He died in Leipzig.

Hermann maintained that an accurate knowledge of the Greek and Latin languages was the only road to a clear understanding of the intellectual life of the ancient world, and the chief, if not the only, aim of philology. As the leader of this grammatico-critical school, he came into collision with August Böckh and Karl Otfried Müller, the representatives of the historico-antiquarian school, which regarded Hermann's view of philology as inadequate and one-sided.

Hermann devoted his early attention to the classical poetical metres, and published several works on that subject, the most important being Elementa doctrinae metricae (1816), in which he set forth a scientific theory based on the Kantian categories. He also wrote a Handbuch der Metrik (1798) and De metris poetarum graecorum et romanorum (1796), in which he first notes the avoidance of word break in hexameter now called Hermann's Bridge. His writings on Greek grammar are also valuable, especially De emendanda ratione Graecae grammaticae (1801), and notes and excursus on François Viger's treatise on Greek idioms. The principles of the new method he introduced are not only explicitly developed in De Emendenda Ratione Græcæ Grammaticæ, but are practically illustrated in his numerous editions of the ancient classics. His editions of the classics include several of the plays of Euripides; the Clouds of Aristophanes (1799); Trinummus of Plautus (1800); Poëtica of Aristotle (1802); Orphica, a collection of works of Orphic literature (1805); the Homeric Hymns (1806); and the Lexicon of Photius (1808). In 1825 Hermann finished the edition of Sophocles begun by Erfurdt. His edition of Aeschylus was published after his death in 1852. The Opuscula, a collection of his smaller writings in Latin, appeared in seven volumes in Leipzig between 1827 and 1839. These show his power of dealing with chronological, topographical, and personal questions, and also contain some poems.