Wilhelm Xylander

Wilhelm Xylander was a German classical scholar and humanist. He served as rector of Heidelberg University in 1564.

Biography

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, the editio princeps based on a Heidelberg manuscript now lost; a second edition in 1568 with the addition of Antoninus Liberalis, Phlegon of Tralles, an unknown Apollonius, and Antigonus of Carystus—all paradoxographers; 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.
He died on 10 February 1576 in Heidelberg.

Works

ed. and trans. by Xylander. Zurich: Andreas Gessner, 1558.