Rudolf Carl Franz Otto Pfeiffer (20 September 1889 – 5 May 1979) was a German classical philologist. He is known today primarily for his landmark, two-volume edition of Callimachus and the two volumes of his History of Classical Scholarship, in addition to numerous articles and lectures related to these projects and to the fragmentary satyr plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles.
Early life and education
Pfeiffer was born in Augsburg on 20 September 1889. His parents were Carl Pfeiffer, the proprietor of a print-shop, and Elise (née Naegele). The boy's grandfather Jakob, also a printer, had purchased the house of the humanist Konrad Peutinger, and Pfeiffer would later consider it a special stroke of fate that he had been born and bred in the former home of a central figure from the golden age of humanism in Augsburg. He studied at the Gymnasium of the Benedictine St. Stephen's Abbey, where he was a pupil of Beda Grundl, OSB (1859-1915), a follower of Wilamowitz. Pfeiffer spent his leisure time with Beda Grundl reading Homer and a host of other Greek authors.
Upon passing the Abitur in 1908, Pfeiffer moved on to Munich where he was inducted into the Stiftung Maximilianeum and began studying classical and German philology at the University of Munich. There he studied under the Germanist Hermann Paul and Hellenist Otto Crusius. Although Pfeiffer would continue serious study of German literature while at the university, Crusius' influence upon him was great and set the stage for his later career as a scholar of Hellenistic poetry.
In 1913, under the direction of the literary historian Franz Muncker, Pfeiffer completed a dissertation on the 16th-century Augsburg Meistersinger and translator of Homer and Ovid, Johann Spreng, entitled Der Augsburger Meistersinger und Homerübersetzer Johannes Spreng, a revised version of which was published as a monograph in 1919. He dedicated his dissertation as an uxori carissimae sacrum, Latin for (roughly) "a gift of devotion to a wife most dear"—namely, Lili (née Beer), a painter from Hungary whom he had married earlier in 1913. In 1968 Pfeiffer would repeat this dedication in the first volume of History of Classical Scholarship, closing the preface with:
My first publication in 1914 bears the dedication "Uxori carissimae sacrum". I renew the words of the dedication with still deeper feeling for all that she has done for me in the course of more than half a century.
Lili died the next year; the couple had no children.
Academic career
Pfeiffer later remarked that his marriage to Lili was perhaps hasty, since his prospects for an academic position were still unclear. In 1912 he had taken up a position at the Universitätsbibliothek München which he would hold until 1921, but his academic career did not resume in earnest until, upon being wounded at Verdun in 1916, he decided to rededicate himself to scholarship. His first passion during this period of renewed activity was the steadily accruing papyri of Callimachus, several of which he had studied in Berlin before the war with Wilhelm Schubart, the foremost literary papyrologist of the age. In 1920 a promotion allowed Pfeiffer to take a year's leave and return to that city, where he made the acquaintance of Wilamowitz who recognized great potential in the young scholar and with whom Pfeiffer would have a lasting friendship. The following year Pfeiffer was habilitated into the University of Munich under the chairmanship of Eduard Schwartz, the successor to his former mentor Crusius. The work that earned him his Habilitation, Kallimachosstudien (1921), was soon followed by an edition of all the Callimachus papyri available at that time, entitled Callimachi fragmenta nuper reperta (1923).
Recognition of Pfeiffer's early work on Callimachus was swift, and in 1923, with Wilamowitz's endorsement, he was appointed to the professorship at Humboldt University of Berlin that had been vacated by Eduard Fraenkel when he moved on to the University of Kiel. Later in the very same year, Pfeiffer took over the position at Frankfurt that Karl Ludwig Reinhardt (1886-1958) had vacated at Hamburg, only to move on again in 1927 to Freiburg. Finally, in 1929 Pfeiffer returned to his alma mater as a professor alongside Schwartz at Munich.