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_ Ludwig Ross _
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Introduction
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Ludwig Ross (22 July 1806 - 6 August 1859) was a German classical
archaeologist. He is chiefly remembered for the rediscovery and
reconstruction of the Temple of Athena Nike in 1835-1836, and for
his other excavation and conservation work on the Acropolis of
Athens. He was also an important figure in the early years of
archaeology in the independent Kingdom of Greece, serving as Ephor
General of Antiquities between 1834 and 1836.
As a representative of the "Bavarocracy" - the dominance by
northern Europeans, especially Bavarians, of Greek government and
institutions under the Bavarian King Otto of Greece - Ross
attracted the enmity of the native Greek archaeological
establishment. He was forced to resign as Ephor General over his
delivery of the Athenian "Naval Records", a series of inscriptions
first unearthed in 1834, to the German August Böckh for
publication. He was subsequently appointed as the first professor
of archaeology at the University of Athens, but lost his post as a
result of the 3 September 1843 Revolution, which removed most
non-Greeks from public service in the country. He spent his final
years as a professor in Halle, where he argued unsuccessfully
against the reconstruction of the Indo-European language family,
believing the Latin language to be a direct descendant of Ancient
Greek.
Ross has been called "one of the most important figures in the
cultural revival of Greece". He is credited with creating the
foundations for the science of archaeology in independent Greece,
and for establishing a systematic approach to excavation and
conservation in the earliest days of the country's formal
archaeological practice. His publications, particularly in
epigraphy, were widely used by contemporary scholars. At Athens, he
educated the first generation of natively trained Greek
archaeologists, including Panagiotis Efstratiadis, one of the
foremost Greek epigraphers of the 19th century and a successor of
Ross as Ephor General.
Early life
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Ross was born on 22 July 1806 in Bornhöved in the Duchy of
Holstein, then ruled by the Kingdom of Denmark. His paternal
grandfather, a doctor, had moved from northern Scotland to Hamburg
around 1750. His father, Colin Ross, married Juliane Auguste Remin.
When Ludwig was four years old, his father moved the family to the
Gut Altekoppel estate in Bornhöved, which he managed and later
acquired. The family's five sons and three daughters included
Ludwig's younger brother, the painter Charles Ross. Ludwig, like
Charles, campaigned for Holstein's independence from Denmark. He
did not consider himself Danish, and has generally been counted as
German in modern scholarship.
Ross grew up in Kiel and Plön. In 1825, he enrolled as a student at
the Christian-Albrechts-Universität in Kiel. He began to study
medicine, zoology and anthropology, but eventually settled upon
classical philology. His teachers at Kiel included the theologian
August Twesten, the historian Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann, and the
classical scholar Gregor Wilhelm Nitzsch. He was also taught by the
classicist , whose lectures focused largely on Greek and Roman
literature, including the Greek playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles
and Aristophanes, as well as philosophical studies of Cicero and
Lucretius. While at Kiel, Ross met his friend and future travelling
companion, the philologist Peter Wilhelm Forchhammer, and
befriended Otto Jahn, later known as a historian of ancient Greek
and Roman pottery.
Ross graduated on 16 May 1829 with a PhD on Aristophanes's play
'The Wasps', supervised by Nitzsch. He made an unsuccessful
application for a scholarship from the "Fund for the Public
Benefit" (), administered on behalf of the Danish Crown, to travel
in Greece. After his rejection, he worked as a private tutor in
Copenhagen. His employer, the merchant Friedrich Gotschalk, would
later be named the Greek consul to Denmark in 1835.
Ross applied again to the "Fund for the Public Benefit", with
Nitzsch's support, in October 1830; he was accepted the following
February. The fund provided him with an annual income of 600
(approximately twice a skilled worker's annual wage) for two years.
Also in 1831, he published his first scholarly work, a short
history of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. Ross's letters of
this period to Nitzsch reveal his intention to continue his studies
of Aristophanes, and to publish academic work to build his
scholarly reputation. Ross spent nine months in Leipzig, beginning
in the autumn of 1831, living with the school headmaster Karl
Hermann Funkhaenel and attending lectures on Greek culture. On 23
May 1832, he left to make his way to Greece, travelling overland to
Munich, Salzburg and Trieste before boarding a Greek ship, the ,
for Nafplion on 11 July.
Archaeological career in Greece (1832–1843)
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Ross arrived in Greece on , two weeks before the National Assembly
confirmed the appointment of Otto of Bavaria as King of Greece. He
was made deputy curator of antiquities at the Archaeological Museum
of Nafplion, then capital of Greece, in 1832, and was received by
the Greek National Assembly in the city on , presenting them with a
lithograph of Otto which he had brought with him from Trieste.
Ross travelled to the Mycenaean site of Tiryns on . On , he sailed
to the island of Aegina, on the way to Athens, in the company of
three British artists and John Black, an English civil servant
married to Teresa Makri, known as the inspiration for Lord Byron's
"Maid of Athens". Ross's first visit in the city was to the home of
Kyriakos Pittakis: the husband of Teresa's sister and a self-taught
archaeologist who would be appointed "custodian of the antiquities
in Athens" a few weeks later.
Otto arrived in Greece at Nafplion on . Ross travelled to meet him
with Forchhammer, who had joined him in Greece the preceding
October, and the architects Eduard Schaubert and Stamatios
Kleanthis. The party met Otto within a few months of their own
arrival, a few days after the king's, and travelled widely around
nearby archaeological sites such as Epidauros, Tiryns and Argos.
Like many German archaeologists and scholars, Ross found favour
with the young king, and he would later accompany Otto on
archaeological travels around Greece. Ross had been expected to
leave Greece in 1833, having unsuccessfully applied in 1832 for an
extension of his travel scholarship, and subsequently applied
successfully in May 1833 for 200 to help pay for his journey back
to Germany. In June 1833, the Bavarian architect Adolf Weissenberg
was appointed as ephor with overall responsibility for Greek
antiquities. Ross subsequently accepted the Greek government's
offer, in November 1833, of the post of "sub-ephor" () of
antiquities for the Peloponnese, alongside Pittakis for the rest of
mainland Greece and for Aegina. All three reported to Weissenberg.
During his tenure as sub-ephor, Ross lived in Nafplion and kept in
regular contact with Otto's regent, Josef Ludwig von Armansperg, to
whom he wrote about his dissatisfaction with the Greek government,
the dirtiness of Nafplion's streets and the quality of its housing.
Ross organised a series of sporting competitions, similar to the
ancient Olympic and Isthmian Games, on 4 March 1833, and encouraged
the Greek government, through the royal family, to issue an 1837
decree re-establishing the Olympic Games in Pyrgos. In January
1834, he travelled to Sparta, Mantineia and Tegea with Christian
Tuxen Falbe, the Danish consul-general in Greece, who complained
beforehand to the Danish prince Christian Frederik that Ross's
"zeal ... to keep everything for the state" would make it
impossible for him to acquire any artefacts for his own collection.
Afterwards, Falbe confirmed to Christian Frederik that he had
indeed secured almost nothing, thanks to Ross's consistency in
acquiring antiquities for the state, and the state's own insistence
upon bringing objects in private hands into its own collections.
Ross also carried out excavations at Menelaion, a sanctuary near
Sparta dedicated to the hero Menelaus and to Helen of Troy. In
January 1834, he excavated the site of ancient Tegea in Arcadia,
before travelling throughout Arcadia and Elis, including a
small-scale excavation at Megalopolis and visits to Lykosoura and
the Temple of Apollo at Bassae. In 1834, he assisted with the
planning of the modern city of Sparta.
Work on the Acropolis of Athens (1834–1836)
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Ross was given responsibility for the archaeological work on the
Acropolis on . His control of the Acropolis passed over Pittakis,
who had been serving since 1832 as the unpaid "custodian of the
antiquities in Athens", and into whose sub-ephorate Athens fell by
the arrangement of 1833. In Athens, Ross worked mostly alongside
architects from northern Europe, particularly the Prussian
Schaubert, who was made Greece's chief architect in 1834; the
Danish Christian Hansen, who replaced the Greek Kleanthis on the
latter's resignation, shortly after work began; and the Dresden
native Eduard Laurent. The dominance of non-Greek scholars in the
excavation and conservation of Greek monuments provoked resentment
from the native Greek intelligentsia, and animosity between
Pittakis and Ross.
Tension existed between the Greek state's aim of conserving
Athens's ancient monuments, the Acropolis's role as a military
fortification, and the needs of the expanding city. Klenze had
envisaged that the area around the site would be kept clear of
buildings, creating an "archaeological park": the pressure on
housing created by a growing population, as well as the generally
chaotic nature of city government in this period, made this aim
impossible. In 1834, Ross was asked to compose a list of sites
around the Acropolis that were most in need of protection, so that
they could be acquired by the state. Working with Pittakis, he
identified thirteen, but was initially forced to reduce the list to
five, before the proposed initiative was abandoned altogether. In
1835, both to fund the restoration works and to control the number
of visitors, the Acropolis became the first archaeological site in
the world to charge an entrance fee. Ross's work was seen as part
of the broader project of building Athens as the capital of the new
Greek state: in 1835, Ross became a member, and subsequently the
chair, of the building commission responsible for the planning of
the city and of the government's imminent move there from Nafplion.
According to an anecdote related by the Danish writer Hans
Christian Andersen, who visited Ross in Athens in 1841, Ross
interceded to prevent the felling of a palm-tree scheduled to be
removed to allow the construction of Hermes Street; Andersen
therefore dubbed the tree, which remained in the middle of the
road, "Ross's Palm".
'Greeks Working in the Ruins of the Acropolis': 1835 watercolour
by [[Martinus Rørbye, showing the early stages of Ross's
restorations|alt=Painting showing several men working in the shadow
of large, ruined buildings]]His role in the planning of Athens's
redevelopment occupied Ross throughout 1834, leaving him too little
time for archaeological work. His work on the Acropolis began in
January 1835, and has been described as the first systematic
excavation of the site. Initially, the Acropolis was still occupied
by Bavarian soldiers, in defiance of the royal decree of the
previous August. Through the support of , a member of Otto's
regency council, Ross was able to arrange the soldiers' departure
in February and for guards for the archaeological works to be
posted in their stead. Klenze set out a series of principles for
the restoration, which included the removal of any structures
deemed to be of no "archaeological, constructional or picturesque"
() interest, reconstruction using fallen parts of the original
monuments (anastylosis) as far as possible, and the placement of
fragments deemed of aesthetic interest in "picturesque piles"
between the monuments.
Since shortly after 1822, Pittakis had been establishing a public
collection of the Acropolis's antiquities in the Church of the
Megali Panagia, which had become one of Greece's first
archaeological museums. Construction work on the church, which
began in 1834, necessitated the removal of its collection, by then
numbering 618 artefacts, to the Temple of Hephaestus (then known as
the ). Klenze's proposals advocated for the removal of some of the
Acropolis's remaining fragments of sculpture to be displayed in the
; from March to May 1835, Ross and Schaubert carried out rebuilding
and restoration work there to make it suitable for its new role as
a museum, which included the demolition of the apse constructed
during the monument's use as a Christian church.
On the Acropolis, Ross's initial works of 1835 focused on the
Parthenon and on the western approach to the Acropolis, around the
Pedestal of Agrippa and what was then known as the Tower of Athena
Nike. The so-called "tower" was the former parapet of the Temple of
Athena Nike, most of which had been dismantled during the Venetian
siege of 1687 and whose surviving parapet was serving as a gun
emplacement. Ross hired eighty workers, split between the Parthenon
and the sites to the west. The first tasks were to demolish the
modern bastion near the Tower of Athena Nike and the mosque inside
the Parthenon, which Ross justified in his letters to Klenze as
necessary to prevent the re-militarisation of the Acropolis, both
structures having previously been used by the military garrison. A
lack of heavy lifting equipment limited Ross's progress in the
Parthenon, making the full demolition of the mosque impossible, but
the excavations revealed the first evidence for the Older Parthenon
which predated the Periclean temple, as well as fragments and items
of statuary from the Classical temple. At some point in 1835, Ross
sent casts of part of the Parthenon Frieze to Falbe, who had them
sent to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.alt=Painting
of a ruined Greek buildingAt the Tower of Athena Nike, Ross's
demolition of the bastion revealed the Disjecta membra of the
former temple, which has been described by the archaeological
historian Fani Mallouchou-Tufano as "one of the greatest moments in
the history of the Acropolis in this period". Ross and his
collaborators carried out the reconstruction of the temple between
December 1835 and May 1836, under the direction of the architect
Laurent. They arranged the excavated fragments of the temple, as
well as other remains of nearby monuments, including the Propylaia,
on top of the surviving crepidoma and column bases with little
regard for their individual situation. The restoration was hailed
at the time as the first full reconstruction of a Classical
monument in Greece, but later observers criticised the haste in
which the work was undertaken, the incongruity of the use of modern
materials where ancient fragments could not be found, and the lack
of correspondence between Ross's reconstruction and any plausible
original design of the temple.
Throughout his excavations on the Acropolis, Ross published his
results in both the academic press and in reports to German
newspapers. At a time when relatively few Greek archaeologists
worked outside Athens, Ross organised archaeological collections
throughout the Cyclades, and conducted excavations on Thera in
1835. On Thera, he unearthed twelve funerary inscriptions, which he
divided between Thera, the regional museum on Syros (which he had
ordered to be established in 1834-1835), and the Central Museum in
Athens. He remained closely connected with the Ottonian court, and
guided Otto's father Ludwig I of Bavaria and the German nobleman
Hermann von Pückler-Muskau during their respective visits to
Greece. He also corresponded closely with the British antiquarian
William Martin Leake, who had travelled extensively through Greece
in the early nineteenth century. Leake's final account of his
travels, 'Travels in Northern Greece', was published in 1835 and
became the period's standard introduction to the archaeology and
topography of Greece.
"Naval Records Affair" and resignation as Ephor General
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Ross had a long-running feud with Kyriakos Pittakis, one of the
first native Greeks employed by the Greek Archaeological Service.
In the first years of the independent Greek state, tensions existed
between native Greek archaeologists and the mostly Bavarian
scholars who, on the invitation of King Otto, dominated Greek
archaeology. In 1834 and 1835, excavations in the harbour of the
Piraeus uncovered a series of inscriptions known as the "Naval
Records", which gave information on the administration and
financing of the Athenian navy between the 5th and 4th centuries
BCE. Ross studied the inscriptions and sent sketches to the German
scholar August Böckh for the , his compilation of ancient Greek
inscriptions, despite having not yet received approval to publish
them.
The Greek authorities asserted that Ross's actions were illegal:
Pittakis attacked Ross in the press, which largely sided against
Ross, thanks to Pittakis's service in the War of Independence and
xenophobia towards Ross as an ethnic German. Public pressure forced
Ross's resignation as Ephor General on , though the Education
Minister unsuccessfully petitioned Armansperg, then prime
minister, to refuse it. Eleven days later, Ross attempted to return
to the Acropolis to study the inscriptions unearthed during his
excavations there, but Pittakis denied him entry.
On Ross's resignation, Pittakis was appointed ephor of the Central
Public Museum for Antiquities, making him the most senior
archaeologist employed by the Greek Archaeological Service and its
head. He received the title of Ephor General in 1843. Until 1838,
Pittakis and others continued to write hostile articles against
Ross, accusing him of allowing foreign journals privileged access
to Greek inscriptions, of improperly giving away antiquities to von
Pückler-Muskau during his visit, and of plotting to flee the
country with antiquities in his possession. Ross continued to
dispute the allegations in the press until April 1838, but made no
further response after an article written by Pittakis in May,
entitled "Final Answer". The archaeological historian Nikolaos
Papazarkadas has argued that Pittakis's opposition to Ross's
actions was personal rather than principled, pointing out that
Pittakis made no protest against the copying of several thousand
Greek inscriptions by French epigraphers from 1843 onwards, a
project supported by the prime minister, Ioannis Kolettis.
Professorship at Athens (1837–1843)
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The regent Armansperg promised to restore Ross's status as Ephor
General, but failed to do so, which cooled relations between
himself and Ross. When Otto came of age in 1837, he founded the
Othonian University of Athens (known since 1932 as the National and
Kapodistrian University of Athens), which was inaugurated on . Ross
was granted the inaugural professorship of archaeology, one of the
first such chairs in the world. Ross's professorship has generally
been attributed to Otto's personal favour towards him: it has been
suggested that the chair was created specifically for him. Ross was
one of 7 Germans out of 23 teaching staff, paid 350 drachmae a
month.
Ross gave the university's first lecture on , on the topic of
Aristophanes, before an audience of around thirty. During his
professorship, he lectured widely on Ancient Greek and Latin
literature, on the history of Classical Athens and Sparta, and on
the topography of Athens, largely basing his course on inscriptions
that he had discovered himself. In the 1840-1841 academic year,
Ross offered a course in Greek epigraphy, marking the first time
that epigraphy had been taught as a distinct discipline in Greece.
His students included the future epigrapher and Ephor General
Panagiotis Efstratiadis.
Ross was elected as a member of the university's nine-member
senate, where he supported the introduction of German-style ,
so-called "private lecturers" teaching without the status or rights
of full professors. In 1834, he had published the first volume of
(), a compendium and edition of the Greek inscriptions he had
discovered; this was the first epigraphical volume to be published
in Greece. He was criticised on its publication for writing in
Latin rather than Greek; this criticism may have been part of the
reason why he delayed the publication of the second volume, which
had been expected in 1835, until 1842.
Ross toured the Cycladic islands in the 1830s, including a visit to
Ios in 1837, where he was shown the contents of Early Bronze Age
graves and correctly identified figurines from them as predating
classical Greek civilisation, several decades before the Aegean
Bronze Age was recognised in scholarship. Between May and October
1838, he travelled in Italy, Austria and Germany, staying with the
classicist Friedrich Thiersch in Munich and visiting his family in
Bornhöved for the first time since his departure for Greece. He
spent July in the spa town of Bad Kissingen in Bavaria, where he
sought a spa cure for an illness. In 1839, he published the results
of his excavations at the Temple of Athena Nike, in a volume
illustrated by Hansen and Schaubert.
In 1841, Ross published his 'Handbook of the Archaeology of the
Arts', written in Greek. The Greek archaeologist Olga Palagia has
described the 'Handbook' as both "a model of the scientific method
for its time" and "a monument to the Greek language". In the
volume, Ross promoted neoclassicist ideals, by which he argued that
art and architecture should adapt and imitate the models of
classical antiquity, placing comparatively little emphasis on
historical questions about the development of Greek architecture.
Ross also argued for the dependence of Ancient Greek culture on
that of Egypt and the ancient Near East, which contrasted with the
then-fashionable view of Classical "purity" advanced by Johann
Joachim Winckelmann and his successors, such as Antoine-Chrysostome
Quatremère de Quincy and Karl Bötticher.alt=Photograph of a
sand-coloured house with a fence outside and palm trees growing in
the garden
During his tenure at Athens, Ross travelled widely throughout
Greece, including a journey to Marathon in 1837 with his brother
Charles and Ernst Curtius, the future excavator of Olympia.
Alongside archaeology, he took an interest in modern Greek
ethnography and folklore, including the spread of the Greek
language, which he spoke sufficiently fluently that Greeks often
mistook him for a native. In August and September 1837, he
travelled through the Greek islands, visiting Sikinos, Sifnos,
Amorgos, Kea, Kythnos, Santorini and Ios, accompanied by the German
geographer Carl Ritter and the Scottish historian George Finlay.
Ross published his explorations on Sikinos as 'The Archaeology of
the Island of Sikinos'. His archaeological description of Sifnos
was described by the American archaeologist John H. Young in 1956
as "still the best account of the island we possess ... for more
than a hundred years of archaeological research has still produced
no better guide to the islands than Ross".
Ross subsequently travelled through the Greek islands and Asia
Minor, making him one of the first Europeans to explore the
interior of Caria and Lycia, in 1841 and 1843. He published an
account of his travels as 'Journeys on the Greek Islands of the
Aegean Sea' in 1843 and 1845. He took leave of absence for about
half of 1839 and all of 1842, during which he visited Germany and
Italy, and did not teach at all during the academic year 1841-1842.
He regularly accompanied King Otto on archaeological travels during
his time at Athens, including a tour of the Peloponnese with Queen
Amelie in May-June 1840, which Ross considered one of his most
successful journeys. He was appointed to the Prussian Academy of
Sciences in 1836, and as a corresponding member of the Bavarian
Academy of Sciences in 1837.
By the late 1830s, negative comments in the Greek press about the
so-called "Bavarocracy" had become common, and the dominance of
northern Europeans in Greek academia, archaeology and architecture
had become a source of considerable unrest. The appointment of
Alexandros Mavrokordatos, who opposed the presence of foreigners in
Greek public life, as Prime Minister in 1841 caused Ross concern,
and he entered a severe depression during this period which
continued for the remainder of his life. By 1842, he was
dissatisfied with his lectures at the university, frustrated by the
continued hostility of Pittakis and his supporters, and keen to
leave Greece. He unsuccessfully applied for an academic post in
Dresden and for a travel grant from the Danish government to travel
in southern Europe. In March, he resigned from his post at the
University of Athens, intending to stay in Greece for a few months
before moving to Germany. He also wrote to Moritz Hermann Eduard
Meier at the University of Halle in the German state of Saxony,
then ruled by Prussia, asking for a post there.
During his Aegean travels of 1843, Ross received news of the
military coup that had taken place on of that year and had forced
Otto to dismiss almost all of the non-Greeks in public service.
Ross was succeeded as Professor of Archaeology at Athens by the
Constantinople-born Greek archaeologist and polymath Alexandros
Rizos Rangavis in 1844.
Professorship at Halle (1843–1859)
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Through the support of his friend, the German polymath Alexander
von Humboldt, Ross was appointed to the professorship of
archaeology at Halle shortly after the 1843 revolt. The beginning
of his employment was delayed by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of
Prussia, who granted him a two-year travel stipendium, allowing him
to spend time in Smyrna, Trieste and Vienna. During the winter of
1844-1845, he organised excavations, led by Eduard Schaubert, near
Olympia. The project was financed by the Prussian Ministry of
Culture and Friedrich Wilhelm, to whom Humboldt had recommended it.
Schaubert's excavations investigated a site reputed to be the grave
of Coroebus of Elis, the supposed victor of the first Olympic Games
in 776 BCE, hoping to assess the origins of the Olympic Games and
the historicity of Coroebus. The excavations were concluded in
1846, having found the remains of a grave of uncertain date, with
traces of ashes, animal bones and pottery sherds, as well as bronze
vessels and a bronze helmet, which Schaubert interpreted as remains
of a hero cult on the site.
A man named "L. Ross" was referenced by the Arabist Otto Blau as
visiting the archaeological site of Petra, Jordan, in 1845. Blau
describes "Ross" as an Englishman, but the archaeologist David
Kennedy has argued that Blau may have mistaken the nationality of
the Scottish-descended Ludwig Ross, which would make Ross one of
the earliest scholars to visit the site.
Ross eventually took up his professorship at Halle in 1845. He was
an isolated figure in German academia, partly due to his criticism
of well-respected scholars like the philologist Friedrich August
Wolf and the historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr. His
then-unfashionable emphasis upon the links between Greek and Near
Eastern civilisation placed him in conflict with the views of the
prominent classicist Karl Otfried Müller, who had argued for the
autochthonous nature of Ancient Greek culture. Ross's views were
supported by the historian Julius Braun in Germany and by the
archaeologist Desiré-Raoul Rochette in Paris. During a debate at
Halle over the layout of its museum of art, Ross proposed that
exhibits should be displayed on four walls, giving equal prominence
to objects from Greece, Rome, Egypt and Asia.
He published the third volume of in 1845, and a treatise on the
demes of Attica with his colleague Eduard Meier in 1846. In 1848,
he published 'Italics and Greeks: Did the Romans Speak Sanskrit or
Greek?', in which he argued that Latin was a linguistic descendant
of Greek in the same way that the Romance languages are descended
from Latin, rejecting the emerging discoveries in the field of
Indo-European studies. In 1850, he co-founded a monthly literary
journal, the , with the historian Johann Gustav Droysen and the
publisher , Ross's father-in-law. The journal ceased publication
after only a few years.
Ross intended to publish his excavations of the Parthenon and the
area of the Propylaia, complementing his 1839 publication of the
Temple of Athena Nike, but had been forced by 1855 to abandon the
project, partly due to financial constraints and partly due to the
difficulty of collaborating with his co-authors Hansen and
Schaubert without being physically present in Greece. Both Müller
(in 1843) and the French archaeologist Philippe Le Bas (in 1847)
had already published some of the discoveries from the Temple of
Athena Nike, relying on drawings made by others.
Personal life, death and legacy
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Early in 1847, Ross married Emma Schwetschke, the daughter of his
future collaborator Carl Gustav Schwetschke. Shortly thereafter, he
developed the beginnings of a health condition, which gradually
reduced his strength and mobility and caused him increasing pain
and discomfort. He attempted, unsuccessfully, to treat his
condition with spa cures. He may have suffered from syphilis,
evidence of which the archaeological historian has traced to
Ross's letters of early 1842. He continued to suffer from the
depression which had begun to affect him in the later years of his
time in Greece.
Ross died by suicide in Halle on 6 August 1859. He was buried in
Bornhöved, alongside his brother, Charles, who had died of typhus
the previous year.
Ross's reflections on his career in Greece, 'Reminiscences and
Communications from Greece', were published posthumously in 1863,
with a foreword by his friend Otto Jahn. In the volume, which
consisted largely of Ross's diaries and letters from his time in
Greece, Ross alleged that technological backwardness and
governmental incompetence had held back the development of Greece,
and criticised both Otto's government and native Greek politicians
for their "localism" and the alleged weakness and lethargy of the
royal administration.
Ross has been praised as one of the greatest figures in Greek
epigraphy and as an important force in its beginnings as an
academic discipline. Haugsted has described him as "one of the most
important figures in the cultural revival of Greece". Ross's work
was used heavily by August Böckh in his own influential
epigraphical works, a debt which Böckh acknowledged in the subtitle
of his 1840 work 'Documents on the Maritime Affairs of the Athenian
State': "with eighteen panels, containing the copies made by Mr.
Ludwig Ross." Though the execution of his restoration of the Temple
of Athena Nike has been criticised, his excavation and restoration
work has been praised for its systematic approach and for beginning
a long trend of similar endeavours on the Acropolis. He has
generally been viewed as a competent and successful Ephor General,
whose service and resignation had considerable consequences for the
development of Greek archaeology.
Bibliography
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