Karl Ludwig Lehrs 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.

Born at Königsberg

Königsberg

Königsberg was the capital of East Prussia from the Late Middle Ages until 1945 as well as the northernmost and easternmost German city with 286,666 inhabitants . Due to the multicultural society in and around the city, there are several local names for it...

, he was of Jewish extraction, but in 1822 he converted to Christianity

Christianity

Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...

. In 1845 he was appointed professor of ancient 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;...

 philology

Philology

Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...

 in Königsberg University, which post he held till his death.

His most important works are:

• De Aristarchi Studiis Homericis (1833), which laid a new foundation for Homeric exegesis
  Exegesis
  Exegesis is a critical explanation or interpretation of a text, especially a religious text. Traditionally the term was used primarily for exegesis of the Bible; however, in contemporary usage it has broadened to mean a critical explanation of any text, and the term "Biblical exegesis" is used...
  
   (on the Aristarchean lines of explaining Homer
  Homer
  In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...
  
   from the text itself) and textual criticism
• Quaestiones Epicae (1837)
• De Asclepiade Myrleano (1845)
• Herodiani Scripta Tria emendatiora. Accedunt Analecta (1848)
• Populäre Aufsätze aus dem Altertum (1856, 2nd much enlarged ed., 1875), his best known work
• Horatius Flaccus (1869), in which, on aesthetic grounds, he rejected many of the odes as spurious
• Die Pindarscholien (1873).

Lehrs was a man of decided opinions; his enthusiasm for everything Greek caused him to insist on the undivided authorship of the Iliad

Iliad

The Iliad is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles...

; comparative mythology and the symbolical interpretation of myths he regarded as a species of sacrilege.