All Scholars

Richmond Lattimore, poet and Greek scholar, was chiefly known for his verse translations of Homer, Hesiod, and other Greek poets. Born in China, he was educated at home by his father till he was fourteen, when he attended high school in Berkeley, CA. During his college and graduate years Lattimore wrote stories, poems, and reviews both for various Dartmouth College and University of Illinois publications and for the "little" magazines. Some of his poems also appeared in anthologies of college verse. The year 1934 saw the publication of his first scholarly article and his first formal translation. Thereafter, articles and reviews as well as poems came thick and fast. His scholarly work ranged widely at first but increasingly concentrated, as the years went by, on Greek poetry, epic, lyric, and tragic. Rapidly increasing too were his translations, which were not only from the Greek; thus in 1951, in addition to The Iliad of Homer, translations from the poetry of Gérard de Nerval and Leconte de Lisle appeared in the Hudson Review, as did original poems in the Saturday Review. Other magazines in which his poems and translations appeared include poetry, Harper's Bazaar, the Kenyon Review, the New Yorker, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Republic, and the Antioch Review. His more purely scholarly activity resulted in many articles and reviews which appeared in both Festschriften and a variety of journals.This brief survey bears witness to Richmond Lattimore's notable achievements as both writer and scholar. His success as a teacher cannot be documented in the same way, but there is the living testimony of generations of students who came through him to an understanding of ancient Greek thought and learned to appreciate the simple directness and clarity of his approach to humane studies. Active as he was with teaching, writing, and research, he still had time for people and was the kindest, most considerate, and gentlest of men.