Martin Ostwald

Martin Ostwald ( born January 15, 1922 in Dortmund, † April 10, 2010 in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania ) was a German -American classical scholar. Until his retirement in 1992 he taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Swarthmore College. His research interest was the political structure of ancient Greece.

Life

The son of a Jewish lawyer grew up in Dortmund, where he attended high school and Archi originally planned Rabbi to become. After Kristallnacht Ostwald and his father and his younger brother were arrested by the Gestapo. While his parents remained in Germany and were later deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, Ostwald was able to escape with his brother over the Netherlands to England. There he was, however, like many other German, arrested as a spy and taken to a detention center to Canada, where he became acquainted with the likewise fled from Germany Thomas G. Rosemeyer.

After his release Ostwald began a study of classical antiquity science at the University of Toronto, from which he graduated in 1946 with a Bachelor. Two years later, he makes his master's degree at the University of Chicago. He then began his doctoral studies under Kurt von Fritz at Columbia University in New York, he in 1952 with a thesis on "The unwritten laws and the constitution of ancient Athens ancestral " graduated.

In 1950 he received a teaching from Wesleyan University, a year later from Columbia University. In 1958 he finally moved to Swarthmore College, where he remained until 1992. In addition, he taught from 1968 regularly at the University of Pennsylvania. He also held visiting professorships at Princeton University, Balliol College, Oxford, the University of California, Berkeley and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

In 1991 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and two years later in the American Philosophical Society. Him an honorary doctorate from the University of Dortmund was awarded in 2001.

On April 10, 2010 he died of a heart attack.

Work (selection)

Ostwald was co-editor of the Cambridge Ancient History 1976-1992. Additionally, he has published numerous works on the Greek constitutional history.

  • The unwritten laws and the constitution of ancient Athens ancestral, New York, 1953.
  • Nomos and the beginnings of the Athenian democracy, Oxford 1969.
  • Autonomia. Its genesis and early history ( = American Classical Studies Vol 11), Chico in 1982. ISBN 0-89130-572-6
  • Anake in Thucydides ( = American Classical Studies Vol 18), Atlanta 1988. ISBN 1-55540-279-8
  • Oligarchia. The development of a constitutional form in ancient Greece ( = Historia monographs Vol 144 ), Stuttgart 2000. ISBN 3-515-07680-8
Thomas G. Rosenmeyer Historia (Antiquity journal) Integrated Authority File
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