Peter Green (historian)

Peter Green (born 1924) is a British classical scholar noted for his works on Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Age of ancient history, generally regarded as spanning the era from the death of Alexander in 323 BC up to either the date of the Battle of Actium or the death of Augustus in 14 AD. Green's most famous books are Alexander of Macedon, a historical biography first issued in 1970, then in a revised and expanded edition in 1974, which was first published in the United States in 1991; his Alexander to Actium, a general account of the Hellenistic Age, and other works. He is also the author of a translation of the Satires of the Roman poet Juvenal.

Biography

During World War II Green served with the Royal Air Force in Burma. In Firpo's Bar in Calcutta he met and became friendly with another future novelist, Paul Scott, who later used elements of Green's character for the figure of Sergeant Guy Perron in The Raj Quartet.

After the war, Green attended Trinity College of Cambridge University. He subsequently wrote historical novels and worked as a journalist. In 1963 he and his family moved to the Greek island of Lesbos, where he was a translator, and then to Athens, where he was recruited to teach classics for the College Year in Athens.

Green taught in Athens from 1966 to 1971, and at the University of Texas at Austin, where he became Dougherty Centennial Professor Emeritus of Classics in 1982. In 1986, he held the Mellon Chair of Humanities at Tulane University in New Orleans. He is now an adjunct professor at the University of Iowa and also has a visiting professorship at East Carolina University.

Bob Dylan used Green's translations of Ovid, found in The Erotic Poems (1982) and The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters (1994) as song lyrics on the albums "Love and Theft" (2001) and Modern Times (2006).

Works

• The Expanding Eye - A First Journey To The Mediterranean (1952) Illustrated with photographs.
• Habeas Corpus And Other Stories (1954) Eight Short Stories
• Achilles His Armour (1955) (historical novel about Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War).
• Cat in Gloves (Under pseudonym Denis Delaney) (1956), Gryphon Books
• The Sword of Pleasure (1957) (fictional memoirs of Sulla)
• Kenneth Grahame: A Biography: The Dramatic and Human Story of the Fascinating and Complex Man Who Wrote The Wind in the Willows (1959)
• Writers & their Work - Sir Thomas Browne (1959) Longman for the British Council
• Writers & their Work - John Skelton (1960) Longman for the British Council
• Essays in Antiquity (1960)
• The Laughter of Aphrodite: A Novel About Sappho of Lesbos (1965)
• The Year of Salamis, 480-479 BC (1970) (UK) = Xerxes at Salamis (1970) (USA)
• Alexander the Great (1970)
• Armada from Athens (1970)
• The Shadow of the Parthenon: Studies in Ancient History and Literature (1972)
• The Parthenon (1973)
• A Concise History of Ancient Greece to the Close of the Classical Era (1973)
• Alexander of Macedon, 356-323 B.C.; A Historical Biography (1974; reissue in U.S., 1991, as indicated below)
• Ancient Greece: An Illustrated History (1979)
• The Erotic Poems (1982)
• Classical Bearings: Interpreting Ancient History and Culture (1989)
• Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age (1990)
• Alexander of Macedon, 356-323 B.C.: A Historical Biography (1991)
• Andrei Tarkovsky: The Winding Quest (1993)
• The Argonautica by Apollonios Rhodios (translation)(1997)
• The Greco-Persian Wars (1996) (update of The Year of Salamis)
• From Ikaria to the Stars: Classical Mythification, Ancient and Modern (2004)
• The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters (2004)
• The Poems of Catullus (2005)
• Alexander The Great and the Hellenistic Age (2007)
• The Hellenistic Age: A Short History (2007)

Book Reviews

• "The Women and the Gods" The New York Review of Books 54/11 (28 June 2007) : 32-35 [reviews Joan Breton Connelly, Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece]

External links

• 2003 interview, with picture
• List of Green's contributions to The New York Review of Books