Orpheus Philologus

This is print on demand publication. Though Theodor Mommsen was probably unaware of it, from the time of the first appearance of his influential and successful “Romische Geschichte” (1854), he was the object of the passionate and enduring hatred of an obscure Swiss philologist in the provincial city of Basle. Johann Jacob Bachofen is still not well known in the English-speaking world. He receives a brief mention in most histories of anthropology for his contribution to the popular 19th-cent. theory of “matriarchy,” and his studies of relations in matrilinear societies. Classical scholars know of Bachofen’s original contributions to the study of Greek myth and tragedy through George Thomson, whose interpretation of Athenian tragedy owes much to Bachofen.