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Georg Fabricius (1516- Meissen July 17, 1571), Protestant German poet, historian and archaeologist, was born at Chemnitz in upper Saxony on April 23 1516, and educated at Leipzig.
Travelling in Italy with one of his pupils, he made an exhaustive study of the antiquities of Rome. He published the results in his Roma (1550), in which the correspondence between every discoverable relic of the old city and the references to them in ancient literature was traced in detail. In 1546 he was appointed rector of the college of Meissen.
In 1549 he edited the first short selection of Roman inscriptions specifically focusing on legal texts. This was a key moment in the history of classical epigraphy: for the first time in print a humanist explicitly demonstrated the value of such archaeological remains for the discipline of law, and implicitly accorded texts inscribed in stone as authoritative status as those recorded in manuscripts.
In his sacred poems he affected to avoid every word with the slightest savour of paganism; and he blamed the poets for their allusions to pagan divinities.
Fabricius died at Meissen on July 17 1571.
Principal works:
- editions of Terence (1548) and Virgil (1551)
- Poëmatum sacrorum libri xxv. (1560)
- Poëtarum veterum ecclesiasticorum opera Christiana (1562)
- De Re Poëtica libri septem (1565)
- Rerum Misnicarum libri septem (1569)
Posthumous:
- Originum I illustrissiniae stirpis Saxonicae libri sepiem (1597)
- Rerum Germaniae magnae et Saxoniae universae memorabilium mirabiliumque volumina duo (1609).
A life of Georg Fabricius was published in 1839 by DCW Baumgarten-Crusius, who in 1845 also issued an edition of Fabricius's Epistolae ad W Meurerum et alios aequales, with a short sketch De Vita Ge. Fabricius de gente Fabriciorum; see also F Wachter in Ersch and Gruber's Allgemeine Encyclopädie.
This entry was originally from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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