Hase’s Ancient Greek diary was known previously only from a series of short excerpts, but it has long been acknowledged as a document of extraordinary significance for the above-mentioned areas of historical and philological research (Ancient Greek philology, History of Classical and Byzantine Scholarship and the History of Philhellenism).

The nine surviving complete diary volumes comprise 2252 pages in total. They record daily entries from ten years. Hase wrote almost exclusively in a form of Ancient Greek. At a rough average, Hase’s autograph entries in the nine volumes comprise 90 words of Ancient Greek per day. He frequently transposed words from other languages into the Greek alphabet and used very occasionally the Latin alphabet for names of people and places, as well as for fixed expressions and exclamations in German, Latin and French.

The diary volumes he used are standardized and remarkably homogeneous. Hase bought ready-made volumes for each year from stationers in Paris. He wrote predominantly in black ink, occasionally in pencil, and sporadically made small sketches of buildings, scenes and other objects as part of his diary entries. Alongside detailed comments on his work, ideas, colleagues, and travel, Hase kept detailed records of his personal affairs. These include everything from the food he ate, the restaurants and bars of 19th-century Paris which he frequented, his financial situation, his love affairs, his escapades into the Parisian nightlife, events in his dreams and his encounters with intellectual culture in France’s capital.

This project will make the surviving text of the diary along with the existing excerpts available to scholarship for the first time in a digital edition. Building on this philological groundwork, the project will undertake a series of detailed studies designed to advance our knowledge in the three areas of scholarship that have already acknowledged their need of access to the document.