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 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)
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) In July 1834, the architect Leo von Klenze arrived in Athens to advise Otto on the development of the city. Klenze suggested that the Acropolis, which was at that point a military fortress occupied by Bavarian troops, should be demilitarised and designated an archaeological site. A royal decree to this effect was issued on . Weissenberg's reputed lack of interest in antiquities, as well as his political opposition to Armansperg, led to his dismissal from office in September. On Klenze's recommendation, Ross was appointed Ephor General of Antiquities, with charge of all archaeology in Greece: his appointment was decided in royal decrees of and made official by announcement in the Government Gazette of . He was paid a salary of 3,000 drachmas: a comfortable income at a time when manual workers earned an average of 175 drachmas per year.
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".