All Scholars

David Grene’s reputation as the foremost translator of Greek tragedy of his time arose from his early conviction that the classics are better read in translation than not at all. Trained in the severe philological exercises of his Irish schooling, he sought to bring the teaching of classics into the twentieth century and found a reception in the program of Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899-1977), president of the University of Chicago, where Grene would teach for over 60 years. 

Three formative influences in his childhood shaped the personal and professional interests of his lengthy career. The first was a childhood fascination with animals, mostly small animals at first, like mice, hamsters, and guinea pigs, which he kept in a “small zoo-like enclosure” at his home. Summers were spent on his cousin’s farm in Tipperary where he delighted in the larger animals and the tasks of caring for them. When his employment in America was secure, he bought a farm in County Wicklow. His contract with the University of Chicago allowed him to teach for half the year in America and tend his farm in Ireland for the other half.  Eventually his son took over the farm in Wicklow and Grene bought a 50-acre farm in Cavan. He summed up his devotion to farming thus: “What I wanted and want for animals is to share with them a world that is theirs, not mine.” (Of Farming, 35)

The second influence was his teacher at St. Stephen’s Green, a national (Catholic) School in Dublin, where the Greek master, “Dicky” Wood, instilled a passion for literature in his beginning Greek students by spending only two months learning forms and the remainder of the year reading actual literature. In his second year the class read Alcestis with each boy taking a role to read in Greek and English (Wood played the title character). Grene won a sizarship to Protestant Trinity College, where he was taught by the papyrologist Josiah Gilbert Smyly (1867-1948), the editor of Apollonius George Mooney, and Sir Robert William Tate (1872-1952) from whom he learned to translate passages of Shakespeare and Milton into Latin hexameters and elegiacs. Grene was thus brought up in the philological training that would, in no small part thanks to Grene himself, change much of classical instruction in the US. It was less to the strict philologists and more to Dicky Wood that he owed “my love and knowledge of Greek and Latin.” (60)

The third formative influence came about in 1924 when, at age 11, he saw Dame Sybil Thorndike (1882-1976) as Joan of Arc in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan and was filled with “excitement and fear.” A subsequent performance of Othello by Charles Doran (1877-1964) filled him with terror. Dublin was then a theatrical mecca with greats like Yeats, Sean O’Casey, Lady Gregory, and Mrs. Patrick Campbell associated with the repertory of the Abbey Theater. What struck Grene most was “the extraordinary blend of artificiality and realism that underlies most theatrical creations of the Western world.” (43-4) His early response to dramatic performance would inform his later effort to make Greek tragedy come alive for modern audiences.

       Advised by his friends George Thomson (1903-87), then at Galway, and Frank Adcock (1886-1968) Grene took a year in Vienna where he could study under Ludwig Radermacher (1867-1952), who was doing work on the folkloric background of Greek comedy. The year also showed him how differently classics was taught on the continent. In Vienna his friend Mark Brunswick (1902-71), composer and an associate of Sigmund Freud, advised him “much Greek literature could be communicated to those who did not know the language, providing that the translator himself was an adequate scholar and was and are without condescension that much subtlety must necessarily be lost in the translated script.” (93)

The value of translation served Grene well when he was recruited by a friend of Brunswick’s wife for a tutorship and a possible doctorate at Harvard. Grene emigrated to America in 1936 and after experiencing Irish and Austrian classics, found that although the great figures at Harvard raised his opinion of American classics, he nevertheless found both the institution and the instruction too formal and therefore stifling. Grene readily accepted Hutchins’s offer of an instructorship in classics. Among Hutchins’s many reforms was a grounding of the undergraduate curriculum in the Great Books. As Brunswick had earlier advised Grene, students do better if introduced to ancient literature in translation than not at all. Grene initially intended to get a doctorate under the professor of Greek philosophy and dean of the humanities, Richard McKeon (1900-85), a founder of the “Chicago School” of literary criticism, but he broke with McKeon in severe disagreement that Aristotle’s Poetics was the basis of all Western literature. In the end there was no dissertation for Grene, which meant that he lacked a basic credential for tenure, and because of his persistent objections to the tenets of the “Chicago School,” he was no longer allowed to be a member of the classics department.  Hutchins so admired Grene, however, that he was retained by the University as a founder of the University’s Committee on Social Thought (now the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought) along with other unorthodox professors. He remained with the Committee for 50 years.

Grene was an extraordinary teacher whose classes were filled with classics students like Seth Bernadete, James Redfield, and Allan Bloom, the Dostoevsky biographer Joseph Frank, theatre students like Mike Nichols and Elaine May, colleagues like the biologist James Watson and the philosopher Hannah Arendt. Following the approach of Dicky Woods, he read Greek plays, taking into account stage blocking, gesture, and direction. The subjects of his courses ranged from Aeschylus to Ibsen. To supply a need, he engaged Richmond Lattimore to help him enlist eminent American translators to produce new versions of all Greek drama. By the end of the twentieth century The Complete Greek Tragedies had sold over one million copies. 

Grene had an unorthodox arrangement with the University in that he would spend half the year teaching and half the year on his farm, first in Ireland, then after 1940 on his 80-acre farm in Lemont, IL and his farm in Cavan. He was a skilled huntsman and trainer of horses, but loved the hard work of the farm, ploughing and milking. In his posthumous memoir, he declared both small farming and classics to be on the decline. Nevertheless, he thanked America for having given him “A sense of being estimated and actually earning something on one’s own, on which one was judged and on which one acted.” (107)