Wilhelm Henzen

Who was Wilhelm Henzen?

Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Henzen was a German philologist and epigraphist born in Bremen.

He studied philology at the Universities of Bonn and Berlin, afterwards traveling to Paris and London, where he furthered his education by becoming fluent in French and English. With Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, he undertook archaeological investigations in Italy and Greece, and in 1842 settled in Rome, where in 1856 he succeeded August Emil Braun as first secretary of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut. From 1876 he was a member of the Accademia dei Lincei.

Henzen was a leading authority on Latin epigraphy. With Theodor Mommsen and Giovanni Battista de Rossi, he was co-editor of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. Also, he provided a supplemental volume to Johann Caspar von Orelli's collection of Latin inscriptions, Inscriptionum latinarum collectio.