Christian Frederick Matthaei [SEP] date of birth
Christian Frederick Matthaei
Christian Frederick Matthaei (4 March 1744 in Mücheln – 26 September 1811), a Thuringian, palaeographer, classical philologist, professor first at Wittenberg and then at Moscow.
Life.
He was rector of the University of Halle-Wittenberg. In 1803 he was appointed to the Professorship of Classical Literature at Moscow University. In Moscow he found a large number of Greek manuscripts, both Biblical and Patristic, originally brought from Athos, quite uncollated, and almost entirely unknown in the West Europe. He
tales illustrative of the situation.
Although a few of the 27 stories that appear there concern animals, the main protagonists of the majority are humans. This proportion was reversed in "The Fables of Syntipas", a Syriac fable collection also translated by Andreopoulos which accompanied the Syntipas romance in some manuscripts. A Latin version of these was published in 1781 by Christian Frederick Matthaei, drawing the attention of scholars interested in the transmission of Aesop’s Fables. Eventually it was demonstrated that most had been translated into Syriac from an old