Peter Morris Green (born 22 December 1924)[1] is a British
classical scholar and novelist noted for his works on the Greco-Persian Wars,
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.[2] 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 the author of a translation of the
Satires of the Roman poet
Juvenal, now in its third edition. He has also contributed poems to many journals, including to Arion and the Southern Humanities Review.[2]
Biography
Green went to school at
Charterhouse. During
World War II, he 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.[3]
After the war, Green attended
Trinity College, Cambridge, where he achieved a Double First in Classics, winning the Craven Scholarship and Studentship in 1950. He subsequently wrote
historical novels and worked as a
journalist, in the capacity of fiction critic for the Daily Telegraph (1953–63), book columnist for the Yorkshire Post (1961–62), television critic for The Listener (1962–63), film critic for John O'London's (1961–63), as well as contributing to other journals.[1]
In 1963, he and his family moved to the
Greek island of
Lesbos, where he was a
translator and independent scholar. In 1966 he moved to Athens, where he was recruited to teach classics for
College Year in Athens, and published Armada from Athens, a study of the
Sicilian Expedition of 415–3 BC (1970), and The Year of Salamis, a history of the Greco-Persian Wars (1971).
In 1971 Green was invited to teach at the
University of Texas at Austin, where he became Dougherty Centennial Professor of Classics in 1982, emeritus from 1997.[2] 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 held visiting appointments at
Princeton University and at
East Carolina University in
Greenville,
North Carolina.
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).[4][5][6][7][8]
^Richard F. Thomas,
"Shadows are Falling: Virgil, Radnóti, and Dylan", in Michael Paschalis (ed.), Pastoral Palimpsests: Essays in the Reception of Theocritus and Virgil, Rethymnon Classical Studies, Vol. 3, 2007, Crete University Press, p. 205.