Petrus Hofman Peerlkamp (Groningen, February 2, 1786 - Hilversum, March 28 1865) was a Dutch

classical scholar Classics or classical studies is the study of classical antiquity. In the Western world, classics traditionally refers to the study of Classical Greek and Roman literature and their related original languages, Ancient Greek and Latin. Classics ...

and critic.

Life

He was descended from a family of French refugees named Perlechamp, was born at Groningen. He was professor of ancient literature and universal history at

Leiden Leiden (; in English and archaic Dutch also Leyden) is a city and municipality in the province of South Holland, Netherlands. The municipality of Leiden has a population of 119,713, but the city forms one densely connected agglomeration wi ...

from 1822 to 1849, when he resigned his post and retired to Hilversum, where he died on 28 March 1865. He was the founder of the subjective method of

textual criticism Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and of literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants, or different versions, of either manuscripts or of printed books. Such texts may range in da ...

, which consisted in rejecting in a classical author whatever failed to come up to the standard of what that author, in the critic's opinion, ought to have written. His ingenuity in this direction, in which he went much further than Bentley, was chiefly exercised on the ''Odes'' of Horace (the greater part of which he declared spurious), and the ''

Aeneid The ''Aeneid'' ( ; la, Aenē̆is or ) is a Latin epic poem, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who fled the fall of Troy and travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of th ...

'' of

Virgil Publius Vergilius Maro (; traditional dates 15 October 7021 September 19 BC), usually called Virgil or Vergil ( ) in English, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He composed three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: th ...

. He also edited the ''Ars poetica'' and ''Satires'' of Horace, the ''Agricola'' of

Tacitus Publius Cornelius Tacitus, known simply as Tacitus ( , ; – ), was a Roman historian and politician. Tacitus is widely regarded as one of the greatest Roman historians by modern scholars. The surviving portions of his two major works—the ...

, the romance of

Xenophon of Ephesus Xenophon of Ephesus ( el, Ξενοφῶν ὁ Εφέσιος; fl. 2nd century – 3rd century AD) was a Greek writer.''Suda'' ξ 50 His surviving work is the '' Ephesian Tale of Anthia and Habrocomes'', one of the earliest novels as well as ...

, and was the author of a history of the

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

poets of the Netherlands (''De vita, doctrina, et facultate Nederlandorum qui carmina latina composuerunt'', 1838). See L Müller, ''Gesch. der klassischen Philologie in den Niederlandes'' (1869), and JE Sandys, ''Hist. of Class. Schol.'' (1908), ii. 276.

References

* Dutch classical scholars 1786 births 1865 deaths People from Groningen (city) Classical scholars of Leiden University Scholars of Latin literature {{Netherlands-bio-stub