Frederick Adam Wright

Frederick Adam Wright (16 February 1869, Gorleston-on-Sea  – 2 August 1946, Falmouth) was an English classical scholar known for his translations of Greek and Latin classics.

Life

He graduated from Great Yarmouth School and Magdalen College, Cambridge. He taught at schools in Brighton and Mill Hill (now in the London Borough of Barnet). From 1913 to 1935 held the chair of Classics at Birkbeck College (afterwards part of the University of London).

Works

Wright wrote A History of Later Latin Literature (1931); A History of Later Greek Literature from the Death of Alexander in 323 BC to the Death of Justinian in 565 AD (1932); a biography of Marcus Agrippa, Organizer of Victory (1937); and an essay on Plautus, Catullus and Ovid, Three Roman Poets (1938). In 1916, he published a collection of his own poetry, The House on the Hill, and Other Poems. Of particular interest is Wright's monograph Feminism in Greek Literature from Homer to Aristotle (1923), an essay on the place of women in ancient Greece based on literary sources, in which Wright concludes that the debased position of women was an important reason for the decline of Greek civilisation.

Wright translated the letters of Alciphron (1922); a collection of love poems from the Palatine Anthology, The Girdle of Aphrodite (1923) and The Poets of the Greek Anthology (1924); Ovid's Ars Amatoria, translated as The Lover's Handbook (1923); the collected poems of Meleager of Gadara (1924); select epigrams of Martial (1925); the works of Liutprand of Cremona (1930); and select letters of St. Jerome (1933), among others. In addition, he edited and partially rewrote Thomas Underdown's Elizabethan translation of Heliodorus's Aethiopica.

Further reading

• Alumni Cantabrigienses. Part II. Vol. 6. Cambridge University Press. 1922. p. 591.
• "Charge of Stealing and Receiving". Barnet Press. 14 October 1899. p. 2.
• "Wright, F. A. (Frederick Adam), 1869-1946". The Online Books Page.