Enno Friedrich Wichard Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (22 December 1848 – 25 September 1931) was a German classical philologist. Wilamowitz, as he is known in scholarly circles, was a renowned authority on Ancient Greece and its literature. Life Youth Wilamowitz-Moellendorff was born in Markowitz (Markowice), a small village near Hohensalza (Inowrocław), in the then Province of Posen (now part of the Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship), to a Germanized family of distant Polish ancestry. His father, a Prussian Junker, was Arnold Wilamowitz, of Szlachta origin and using the Ogończyk coat of arms, while his mother was Ulrika, née Calbo. The couple settled in a small manor confiscated from a local noble in 1836. The Prussian part of their name, von Moellendorf, was acquired in 1813, when Prussian field marshal Wichard Joachim Heinrich von Möllendorf adopted Ulrich's ancestors. Wilamowitz, a third child, grew up in East Prussia. In 1867 Wilamowitz passed his Abitur at the renowned boarding school at Schulpforta. Studies Until 1869, he studied Classical Philology at the University of Bonn. His teachers, Otto Jahn and Hermann Usener, had a formative influence on him. Willamowitz's relationship with Usener was strained. He developed a lifelong rivalry with his fellow student Friedrich Nietzsche and a close friendship with his contemporary Hermann Diels. Together with Diels, he moved to Berlin in 1869, where he graduated as a Doctor of Philosophy cum laude in 1870. After voluntary service in the Franco-Prussian War, he embarked on a study tour to Italy and Greece. Conflict with Nietzsche and Wagner Even before he gained a professorial title, Wilamowitz was a member of a scholarly dispute about Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy that attracted much attention. In 1872–73, he published two unusually aggressive polemics (German: "Zukunftsphilologie", i.e. "Philology of the future"), which strongly attacked Nietzsche (then Professor at the University of Basel) and Professor Erwin Rohde (University of Kiel). Richard Wagner, whose views on art had influenced Nietzsche and Rohde, reacted by publishing an open letter and Rohde wrote a damning response. The issue at stake was the deprecation of Euripides, on whom Nietzsche blamed the destruction of Greek tragedy. Wilamowitz saw the methods of his adversaries as an attack on the basic tenets of scientific thought, unmasking them as enemies of the scientific method. His polemic was considered as Classical philology's reply to Nietzsche's challenge. At the age of 80 when Wilamowitz wrote his memoirs, he saw the conflict with Nietzsche less