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.