The classical scholar and philologist Gottfried Hermann (1772–1848), professor of classics at Leipzig, was especially influential in the fields of Greek grammar and poetical metres. He was among the leading scholars who argued that an accurate knowledge of the Greek and Latin languages was crucial for understanding the intellectual life of the ancient world, and should be the chief aim of philology, the study of the development of languages. Only seven of the plays of Aeschylus, the father of Greek tragedy, survive in complete form, and Hermann's was the first critical edition to contain all of them. It was published in Leipzig in two volumes in 1852, four years after his death.