Philology and the Politics of Self-Promotion: F. A. Wolf’s Symposium (1782) as Critical Edition and School Text

In 1782, Friedrich August Wolf published an edition of Plato’s Symposium that scaffolded the Greek text with a scholarly apparatus in German—not Latin. Wolf argued that this was necessary to make Plato more accessible for students. Yet his paratexts simultaneously made the labor of classical philology visible to readers by underscoring both Wolf’s philological acumen and his expertise as a scholar. Wolf’s Gastmahl is thus an anomaly in the context of his overwhelmingly Latinate oeuvre, containing works predominantly written either for peers or for students. Rather than simply explaining this incongruity, however, by adopting an infrastructural perspective this article achieves much more. For in revealing how this text functioned as a strategic act of self-promotion for Wolf and why it was successful as such, the article also illuminates the broader political, professional, and pedagogical infrastructures that influenced the development of (classical) philology in late-eighteenth-century Germany.