KAIBEL, GEORG. – German philologist and epigraphist, born in Lübeck on 30 Oct. 1847, died in Göttingen on 12 Oct. 1901. He served as professor first at the University of Strasbourg, then at the University of Göttingen.
He is responsible for the three-volume edition (Leipzig 1887–90) of the Deipnosophistae («sophists or wise men at dinner») by Athenaeus of Naucratis (Egypt), of the imperial age, which constitutes a source of the greatest importance for knowledge of Greek culture in the Hellenistic period: it preserves fragments of Old and New Attic comedy, writings of Greek historians, and a great number of notices on the most varied subjects. K. also began the publication of the Comicorum Graecorum fragmenta (Leipzig 1890). He further edited (the first German edition) of Aristotle’s Res publica Atheniensium (Berlin 1893), discovered in 1891 and first published in London in the same year, and later republished in Germany (Berlin 1903, Leipzig 1909).
K.’s epigraphic work includes the Corpus inscriptionum Graecarum, the Inscriptions Graecae Siciliae et Italiae (Berlin 1890), and the collection Epigrammata Graeca ex lapidibus conlecta (ibid. 1878).