Richmond Lattimore

Richmond Lattimore, born May 6, 1906 in Paotingfu, China, was an American poet and classicist. His parents, who served on the faculty of the Chihli Provincial College in Baoding, China, educated Lattimore at home until they moved to Berkeley, California. He received his BA from Dartmouth College in 1926 and, in 1929, studied at Christ Church, University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. In 1935, he received his PhD from the University of Illinois.

Lattimore is the author of two books of poetry: Poems from Three Decades (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972) and The Stride of Time (University of Michigan Press, 1966). He is known primarily for his translations of Greek classics, such as The Odyssey of Homer (Harper & Row, 1967) and The Iliad of Homer (University of Chicago Press, 1951). His other translations include The New Testament (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996); The Four Gospels and the Revelation (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979); and, in collaboration with professor of classics David Grene, Complete Greek Tragedies (University of Chicago Press, 1959), a four-volume set. 

Shortly after graduating with his doctorate, Lattimore joined the faculty of Bryn Mawr College where he would teach for more than thirty years. In 1971, he retired as emeritus professor of Greek. Among his other honors are the Bollingen Prize for Poetry from Yale University, awarded in 1962 for his translation of Aristophanes’s The Frogs (University of Michigan Press, 1962), a Fulbright Scholarship, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. In 1984, Lattimore was awarded the Academy of American Poets Fellowship.

Lattimore died of cancer on February 26, 1984, at his home in Rosemont, Pennsylvania.