Eva Sachs

Eva Henriette Sachs (13 April 1882 – September 1936) was a German classical philologist, whose dissertation reconceptualized the relation between Theaetetus and Plato.

Life and career

Eva Sachs was born in Berlin on 13 April 1882. Daughter of the Jewish couple Immanuel Sachs and Minna Sachs (Lachmann),

Between 1898 and 1902 she attended the Victoria-Lyzeum. Then, in 1904, she enrolled at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Berlin, studying Plato. She had classes with great classicists such as Ernst Cassirer, Otto Hirschfeld, Eduard Meyer and Friedrich Paulsen. However, her great mentor was Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, who between 1904 and 1914 offered several lectures and seminars on Plato and inspired her to produce her dissertation under his supervision, with Hermann Diels as second reader.

In her dissertation, De Theaeteto Atheniensi Mathematico, promoted in 1914, she re-conceptualized the relation between Theaetetus, the mathematician, and Plato. In this way, the Suda is responsible to causing the confusion of transforming the same Theaetetus into two. She also persuasively argued that the battle of Corinth (Pl. Tht. 142a) in which Theaetetus died was the one on 369 B.C., and not 394 B.C.