Ernest G. Sihler was born in 1853, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, one of nine children. His father, Wilhelm von Sihler (born in Silesia in 1801), had studied to become a lecturer in Modern Literature, but after teaching for a short time in Dresden and Riga chose to become a Lutheran pastor. He then immigrated to the United States in 1843 to serve as a missionary to Germans who had settled in the Midwest; in 1846 he married Susannah Kern and took over the directorship of the Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne. Ernest Sihler attended the Concordia Gymnasium of Fort Wayne, a Lutheran School of the German model, where he studied Latin, Greek and the Classics. He continued his studies at the Divinity School at St. Louis from 1869 to 1872, but decided to pursue a career in the Classics rather than Theology. He studied Classical Philology at the University of Berlin and the University of Leipzig from 1872 to 1875, and was a Fellow in Greek at John Hopkins University from 1876 to 1879, receiving a Ph.D. in 1878. In 1879 Sihler moved to New York City, where he taught at the Dr. Sachs Collegiate Institute and worked as a tutor. He married Emily Birkner in 1881. In 1891 he returned to the Midwest to teach at Concordia College in Milwaukee for one year, returning to New York in 1892 to take a professorship in Latin at New York University, where he remained until 1923. He died in New York in 1942.