Wilhelm Xylander

Who was Wilhelm Xylander?

Wilhelm Xylander was a German classical scholar and humanist.

Born at Augsburg, he studied at Tübingen, and in 1558, when very short of money, he was appointed to succeed Jakob Micyllus in the professorship of Greek at the University of Heidelberg; he exchanged it for a chair of logic in 1562.

In Heidelberg church and university politics, Xylander was a close partisan of Thomas Erastus.

Xylander was the author of a number of important works, including Latin translations of Dio Cassius, Plutarch and Strabo. He also edited the geographical lexicon of Stephanus of Byzantium; the travels of Pausanias; the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius; and the chronicle of George Cedrenus. He translated the first six books of Euclid into German with notes, the Arithmetica of Diophantus, and the De quattuor mathematicis scientiis of Michael Psellus into Latin.