ABSTRACT
Johann Heinrich Voss came to Gottingen when he was already twenty-one, self educated, a strong liberal, something of a free thinker, a fluent versifier if not a poet, and above all a fervid member of the Hainbund of literary revolutionaries. After reading philology, he became a schoolmaster, and long afterwards (1805) a Professor at Heidelberg. He was vigorous in the polemics of his day. Heyne, with whom he had not got on at Gottingen, was attacked for his mythological theories, and Georg Friederich Creuzer even more violently for the symbolical interpretation of ancient history which he was popularizing at Heidelberg.3 But Voss devoted most of his leisure to translations. Of these, more famous even than the Shakespeare which occupied his later years, was his translation of Homer, dum rerum nihil profuturarum thesauros colligit, sensu communi vacat; Philosophiae, quam vocant, expers penitus et imperitus. O audaciam! O impudentiam!. . . Quis enim, nisi cui indoles sit et natura divinior, facile a se impetraverit, ea ut persequatur, quae abjecta iacent?”
