Helmut van Thiel

Helmut van Thiel (28 September 1932 – 19 October 2014) was a German classical scholar and university professor.

Biography Born in Essen, van Thiel studied Classics and Archaeology at the University of Cologne (PhD, 1959), spending research periods in Tübingen and Hamburg and at the German Archaeological Institute at Athens and Rome. In 1960/1961 he won a grant from the German Archaeological Institute, which was extended for two years, and undertook extended research trips in the Mediterranean area, working in the institute's branches at Athens and Rome.

Then he obtained a research grant from the University of Cologne and worked with Reinhold Merkelbach. He was habilitated to university teaching in 1969 and became Professor in Classical Philology in 1970. He retired in 1998 but continued working with the university.

He died in 2014 in Cologne.

Research activity Van Thiel graduated defending a thesis on the Greek Alexander Romance, and published monographs on Petronius, the lost Greek novel of Lucius (a major source of The Golden Ass, by Apuleius), and the Alexander Romance itself.

Starting from the 1980s, he researched the Homeric poems and published critical editions of both, including two online editions of the D scholia to the Iliad. Van Thiel used a neo-analytical approach, and suggested that both the Iliad and the Odyssey are made of shorter poems which underwent an editing process in several stages, which merged them into the epics that we have today. Accordingly, his books on the subjects were titled Iliaden und Iliad [Iliads and Iliad] and Odysseen [Odysseys]. In 2009, he published German translations of both the Homeric poems.

He also published handbooks of Greek and Latin palaeography, with Merkelbach.

Publications