Peter Green 1924-2024
Peter Green died last week at the age of 99. His many books include a Life of Alexander of Macedon, a history of the Hellenistic age, an account of the Sicilian expedition and translations of Homer, Apollonius Rhodius, Catullus, Ovid and Juvenal. Born in England in 1924, he spent the second half of his life in the US, where he taught at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Iowa. During the 1960s he lived and worked on Lesbos, where, as he later wrote in the LRB, he
kept coming up against things that reminded me of Sappho: above all, one magical evening, at dinner out on our terrace, when the moon that rose behind the wooded Lepetymnos mountain ridge above us was indeed, soon after sunset, as Sappho wrote, rhododaktylos, ‘rosy-fingered’, a curious physical phenomenon never experienced elsewhere, and not – it was suddenly clear – just a literary spin-off from Homer. In that brief moment we shared the unique vision of a poet who had seen, two and a half millennia ago, exactly what we saw now.
He wrote a dozen other pieces for the paper, on subjects including cartography, Greek love, Callimachus, Alcibiades (twice), Ancient Persia (also twice), Delphi and Pericles of Athens. In a piece ‘On Liking Herodotus’ from 2014, he wrote:
When, as a vaguely anti-authoritarian ex-service undergraduate, I first studied Herodotus seriously in the years immediately following the Second World War, my overriding impression was of a man both broad-minded and cosmopolitan.
He could have been describing himself. Green’s own translation of Herodotus’ Histories will be published next year.
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Then there were the reviews in the New Review of Books and the London Review of Books where every word was carefully and precisely modulated evoking a poetic temperament with great learning.
When I moved to Italy in 2015, I took with me his travelogue ‘The Expanding Eye’ where he described the quality of Italian light on arriving in Naples. He wrote that the “familiar travel-poster sky blazed down on us, reducing everything to a staccato palette of simple shapes and primary colours. The glare of yellow stone, off which the heat bounced viciously, hitting us in the face as we walked, was cut off by sharp broad bars of grape-coloured shadow, as uncompromising as a Calvinist moral issue. It was like a text for early Manichaeism; everything was light or dark, there were no half-tones.”
According to his Daily Telegraph obituary, Peter claimed to have taught himself Italian by reading a local edition of 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' on a slow train from Bari to Venice. I find that hard to believe. But then this formidable intellect, a product of Cambridge, who was one of the last remaining people to have served in the Royal Air Force in wartime Burma, did see out the remainder of his life in the barren American Midwest heartland of Iowa, as implausible as that sounds.
It had always been my ambition to meet with him. Sadly, that opportunity has gone.