Wilhelm Xylander (December 26, 1532 – February 10, 1576) was a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 classical scholar and humanist.

Born at Augsburg

Augsburg

Augsburg is a city in the south-west of Bavaria, Germany. It is a university town and home of the Regierungsbezirk Schwaben and the Bezirk Schwaben. Augsburg is an urban district and home to the institutions of the Landkreis Augsburg. It is, as of 2008, the third-largest city in Bavaria with a...

, he studied at Tübingen, and in 1558, when very short of money (caused, according to some, by his intemperate habits), he was appointed to succeed Jakob Micyllus

Jacob Micyllus

Jacob Micyllus, was a German Renaissance humanist and teacher, who conducted the city's Latin school in Frankfurt and held a chair at the University of Heidelberg, during times of great cultural stress in Germany....

 in the professorship of Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

 at the University of Heidelberg; he exchanged it for a chair of logic

Logic

In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...

 (publicus organi Aristotelii interpres) in 1562.

In Heidelberg church and university politics, Xylander was a close partisan of Thomas Erastus

Thomas Erastus

Thomas Erastus was a Swiss physician and theologian best known for a posthumously published work in which he argued that the sins of Christians should be punished by the state, and not by the church withholding the sacraments...

.

Xylander was the author of a number of important works, including Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

 translations of Dio Cassius

Dio Cassius

Lucius Cassius Dio Cocceianus , known in English as Cassius Dio, Dio Cassius, or Dio was a Roman consul and a noted historian writing in Greek...

 (1558), Plutarch

Plutarch

Plutarch then named, on his becoming a Roman citizen, Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus , c. 46 – 120 AD, was a Greek historian, biographer, essayist, and Middle Platonist known primarily for his Parallel Lives and Moralia...

 (1560–1570) and Strabo

Strabo

Strabo, also written Strabon was a Greek historian, geographer and philosopher.-Life:Strabo was born to an affluent family from Amaseia in Pontus , a city which he said was situated the approximate equivalent of 75 km from the Black Sea...

 (1571). He also edited (1568) the geographical lexicon

Lexicon

In linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. A lexicon is also a synonym of the word thesaurus. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes. Coined in English 1603, the word "lexicon" derives from the Greek "λεξικόν" , neut...

 of Stephanus of Byzantium

Stephanus of Byzantium

Stephen of Byzantium, also known as Stephanus Byzantinus , was the author of an important geographical dictionary entitled Ethnica...

; the travels of Pausanias

Pausanias (geographer)

Pausanias was a Greek traveler and geographer of the 2nd century AD, who lived in the times of Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. He is famous for his Description of Greece , a lengthy work that describes ancient Greece from firsthand observations, and is a crucial link between classical...

 (completed after his death by Friedrich Sylburg, 1583); the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (1558, the editio princeps

Editio princeps

In classical scholarship, editio princeps is a term of art. It means, roughly, the first printed edition of a work that previously had existed only in manuscripts, which could be circulated only after being copied by hand....

based on a Heidelberg manuscript now lost; a second edition in 1568 with the addition of Antoninus Liberalis

Antoninus Liberalis

Antoninus Liberalis was an Ancient Greek grammarian who probably flourished between AD 100 and 300.His only surviving work is the Metamorphoses, , a collection of forty-one very briefly summarised tales about mythical metamorphoses effected by offended deities, unique in that they are...

, Phlegon of Tralles

Phlegon of Tralles

Phlegon of Tralles was a Greek writer and freedman of the emperor Hadrian, who lived in the 2nd century AD.His chief work was the Olympiads, an historical compendium in sixteen books, from the 1st down to the 229th Olympiad , of which several chapters are preserved in Eusebius' Chronicle, Photius...

, an unknown Apollonius

Apollonius

Apollonius may be:Historical people:* Apollonius Cronus , philosopher of the Megarian school* Apollonius of Rhodes , librarian and poet...

, and Antigonus of Carystus

Antigonus of Carystus

Antigonus of Carystus , Greek writer on various subjects, flourished in the 3rd century BC. After some time spent at Athens and in travelling, he was summoned to the court of Attalus I of Pergamum...

--all paradoxographers

Paradoxography

Paradoxography is a genre of Classical literature which deals with the occurrence of abnormal or inexplicable phenomena of the natural or human worlds.Early surviving examples of the genre include:* Palaephatus' On Incredible Things...

); and the chronicle of George Cedrenus (1566). He translated the first six books of Euclid

Euclid

Euclid , fl. 300 BC, also known as Euclid of Alexandria, was a Greek mathematician, often referred to as the "Father of Geometry". He was active in Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemy I...

 into German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 with notes, the Arithmetica of Diophantus

Diophantus

Diophantus of Alexandria , sometimes called "the father of algebra", was an Alexandrian Greek mathematician and the author of a series of books called Arithmetica. These texts deal with solving algebraic equations, many of which are now lost...

, and the De quattuor mathematicis scientiis of Michael Psellus into Latin.

Works

• Marcus Aurelius, De seipso, seu vita sua, libri 12 ed. and trans. by Xylander. Zurich: Andreas Gessner, 1558.

External links

• Works of Xylander available at the Munich Digitisation Centre (MDZ)