StephenGoranson wrote: ↑Mon Apr 17, 2023 5:28 am
Maybe that identification is correct, though fwiw the article seems the product of considerable work for a 19 year old, and that publication might appear to be an unlikely outlet to accept a pseudonym. Again, I don't claim to know for sure.
Valid points, Stephen. I initially assumed 'he' must be a middle-aged scholar. The article is indeed audacious: could a brilliant 19yo have produced it? Given the confirmed evidence from Eduard Meyer's publishing history, I believe it is quite possible and entirely plausible that he did so.
Even Arnaldo Momigliano indicates Meyer's biography is 'mysterious.' He produced over 500 works between 1875 and ~1930, 55 years, about 9 articles, monographs, etc. per year on average. You must admit:
he was extraordinarily prolific. However, I see only a couple works in the first few years of that period. And how old was he, then?
February 1875: Set-Typhon: Eine religionsgeschichtliche Studie (Leipzig, 1875) 64pp. ____________
Completed at Age 20.
January 1877: Geschichte von Troas (Leipzig, 1877) 112pp. __________________________________
Completed at Age 22.
November 1878: Geschichte des Königreiches Pontos (Leipzig, 1879), 109 pp. ___________________
Completed at Age 23.
Another book, "Geschichte des alten Aegyptens, von Johannes Dümichen (also credited to Eduard Meyer)" (Berlin 1879) 322pp. was perhaps merely a later collaboration/revision c.1885? Again, it also suggests Meyer would have had excellent familiarity with the subject matter of "Die Sieben vor Theben und die chaldäische Woche". If "Die Sieben vor Theben" (estimated 21,150 words) was published as a book in the typical E.Meyer format (~300 words per page), it would have been a monograph of ~75pp. Given that "Die Sieben vor Theben" is dated "1875" yet was apparently published in January, the essay must have been received by Zeitschrift für Ethnologie in October 1874 at the latest. This, his first published work, would have been supervised by
Georg Ebers in 1873 (at Age 18); that connection may have warranted its publication (i.e. of his young protégé) in a serious journal, under such unusual circumstances.
IF Eduard Meyer is the true author ("
K. E. Meyer"?) at 19yo, had he produced anything else so precociously, before?
Perhaps:
At the age of twelve he wrote a tragedy in five acts: "Brutus oder die Ermordung Cäsars"; the play was inspired by Shakespeare, but its details were based on the author’s own study of sources (chiefly Plutarch). The Johanneum in Hamburg—a school designed to educate scholars and at that time a center of research on Thucydides—gave the highly gifted pupil a philological training that was at university level.
Also,
this:
In 1879 Meyer habilitated in ancient history in Leipzig with
a study on the history of Pontus, the foundations for which he had laid in a paper written while he was still a schoolboy. In the same year
the twenty-four-year-old Privatdozent accepted a proposal from the publisher Cotta to write a Handbuch and textbook on ancient history.
Text analysis (by software) could probably settle the little mystery here.