WISSOWA, GEORG (1859–1931), was a German philologist and historian of Roman religion. Georg Otto August Wissowa was born near Breslau, the son of a civil servant. His grandfather was a noted Tacitus scholar and the director of Breslau's Catholic Gymnasium, where Wissowa himself was educated, graduating with superior marks in 1876. That same year he entered the University of Breslau, where he studied under the classical philologist August Reiffersheid, who introduced him to the study of Roman religion. In 1880 Wissowa successfully defended his doctoral dissertation, "De Macrobii Saturnalium fontibus." He subsequently continued his studies in Munich under Heinrich von Brunn, then one of Germany's foremost students of Roman antiquities. From Brunn he gained an appreciation of the importance of art and monuments for the understanding of Roman religious life, and in 1882 he produced a habilitation thesis on the images of Venus in Roman art ("De Veneris simulacris romanis...