Adolf Holm


Adolf Holm was a German historian of antiquity.

Biography

Adolf Holm was the son of a producer and distributor of tobacco in Lübeck and was born in a house located between Braunstraße and Holstenstraße by the Trave. He studied at Leipzig and Berlin and obtained a doctorate in 1851. Immediately thereafter he was employed by the Katharineum, a grammar school in Lübeck founded in 1531 for the study of ancient languages. He worked on history and geography of ancient Sicily and Greece and wrote a work in several volumes on the History of Sicily in ancient times. At Lübeck he held several conferences with members of the Gesellschaft zur Beförderung gemeinnütziger Tätigkeit and the Verein für Lübeckische Geschichte und Altertumskunde. The collection of plaster casts of ancient sculptures in the cathedral museum was created in large part at his initiative. He was one of the founders of the Verein der Kunstfreunde and was its president until he departed for Sicily. Subsequently he was editor of the Lübeckische Blätter.
In 1876, on account of his publications, he was named Professor Extraordinary of Universal History at the University of Palermo, at the initiative of the Sicilian historian and former Minister of Public Education Michele Amari. There he produced a number of works concerned with the ancient history of Sicily. In 1884 he was invited to take up a post at the University of Naples, where he worked until 1897. He spent the rest of his life in Freiburg im Breisgau.
Reviewing his legacy, Franco De Angelis concludes that "Holm was a product of his time and environment. Like so many German-trained scholars then, he adhered to a positivistic approach, generally avoiding interpretations in favor of collecting evidence. These were immensely useful and pioneering efforts, which some scholars openly acknowledged, and are not without interest to social and economic historians today."

Works