Johann August Nauck (September 18, 1822 - August 3, 1892), was a German classical scholar and critic born at Auerstadt in Prussian Saxony.

After studying at Halle and holding educational posts in Berlin, he migrated in 1859 to St Petersburg, where he became a professor of Greek at the imperial historico-philological institute.

Nauck was one of the most distinguished textual critics of his day, although, like PH Peerlkamp, he was fond of altering a text in accordance with what he thought the author must, or ought to, have written.

The most important of his writings and translations, all of which deal with Greek language and literature (especially the tragedians) are the following:

• Euripides, Tragedies and Fragments (1854, 3rd ed., 1871)
• Studio, Euripidea (1859-1862)
• Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (1856, last ed., 1889), his chief work
• Index to the Fragments (1892)
• text of Sophocles (1867)
• revised edition of Schneidewin's annotated Sophocles (1856, etc.)
• texts of Homer, Odyssey (1874) and Iliad (1877-1879)
• the fragments of Aristophanes of Byzantium (1848), still indispensable
• Porphyrius of Tyre (1860, 2nd ed., 1886)
• Iamblichus, De Vita Pythagorica (1884)
• Lexikon Vindobonense (1867), a meagre compilation of the 14th or I5th century.

See memoir by T Zielinski, in Bursian's Biographisches Jahrbuch (1894), and JE Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, iii. (1908), pp. 149-152.

This article incorporates text from the public domain 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica.