Christian Tobias Damm
{{Short description|German classical philologist (1699–1778)}}
Christian Tobias Damm (9 January 1699 – 27 May 1778) was a renowned German Classical philologist, and the less than orthodox theologian who was rector (1730) and prorector (1742) of the Köllnische Gymnasium, the oldest in Berlin, but prematurely pensioned off in 1766, in the wake of scandalized accusations of trends towards Socianian doctrines in some of his work, to his lasting bitterness.Alexander Hay Japp, German Life and Literature in a Series of Biographical Studies, 1880:525f.
Life
Damm was born in Geithain, Electorate of Saxony. He studied at Halle.Japp 1880:525. and was the author of a herculean"opus Herculei laborum; in quo utinam Pindarica seorsum ab Homericis vulgâsset!", Heyn, Praefatio ad Pind. Carm., the epigraph of Henry Huntingford's edition, Dammii Lexicon Pindaricum (London, 1814). etymological dictionary of those words of ancient Greek represented in his concordances of both Homer and Pindar,Damm, Novem lexicon Graecum etymologicum et reale, cui pro basi substratae sunt concordantiae et elucidationes homericae et Pindaricae (Berlin, 1765); the Lexicon was among those consulted for John Jones's Tyro's Greek and English Lexicon: or a compendium in English of the celebrated lexicons of Damm, Sturze, Schleusner, Schweighæuser... (2nd ed., London, 1825). both of whom he had translated, and a Compendium historiae fabulosae or Handbuch der Mythologie der Griechen und Römer, that applied euhemerist interpretations of Greek mythology in the Christian and Enlightenment traditions; the work remained standard through the 19th century. His essay on the Epistle of James was published in Berlin, 1747. His prose translation of Homer (1769 and 1777),Damm, Des Homerus Werke aus dem Griechischen neu übersezt und mit einigen Anmerkungen erlaütert competing with verse translations by Bürger and Stolberg (for the Deutsches Museum), raised the witty obituary in the Bibiothek der schönen Wissenschaften: "Homer, Greek poet, dead in Berlin!""Homer, ein griechischen Dichter, in Berlin getödtet!"; noted in Jane V. Curran, "Wieland's Revival of Horace", International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 3.2 (Fall 1996:171-184) p. 175. As a philologist, he urged that, on rational grounds, the letter h be dropped from German orthography in cases in which it appeared in final position in a word,[https://books.google.com/books?id=1bWu_M-IML4C&dq=%22Christian+Tobias+Damm%22+%22letter+H%22&pg=PA109 John Betz, "After Enlightenment: the post-secular vision of J.G. Hamann"] as "an unfounded practice that appears barbaric in the eyes of foreigners and thus insulting to our nation",Damm, Betrachtungen über die Religion (Berlin, 1773:233), quoted in Sheehan 1998:35. for which Johann Georg Hamann, friend of Kant and teacher of Herder, took him to task,Jonathan Sheehan, "Enlightenment Details: Theology, Natural History, and the Letter h", Representations (Winter, 1998:29-56) p. 35; defending the h on human terms, as speaking "with a human voice"; purging language of such irrationalities, the proto-Romantic Herder asserted, was an "assault on the colour, beauty, texture, character, virility, history, and even spirituality of language", as Graeme Garrard has expressed it, in one of the first shots of the Counter-Enlightenment.Garrard, Counter-Enlightenments: from the eighteenth century to the present, "First shots", 2006:34.
Damm was a teacher (in 1735) and later a correspondent of Johann Joachim Winckelmann and a friend of Moses Mendelssohn, who called him "the Greek oracle of Speestadt".
He died in Berlin, aged 79.
Notes
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Category:People from Leipzig (district)
Category:People from the Electorate of Saxony
Category:German classical philologists
Category:German lexicographers
Category:18th-century German Christian theologians
Category:German male non-fiction writers
Category:18th-century German writers