Evelyn Abbott

Evelyn Abbott (born March 10, 1843 in Epperstone , Nottinghamshire , † September 3, 1901 in Great Malvern , Worcestershire ) was an English classical scholar .

Life

Evelyn Abbott was the third of five sons of a farmer of the same name and his wife Mary Lambe. After attending high school in Lincoln and Somerset College, Bath , he graduated in 1862, his further education at Balliol College of Oxford University . In 1864, at the age of 21, he won the Gaisford Prize for Greek Poetry. He distinguished himself not only as an academic, but also as an athlete. It was not until he was 23 that he had an unfortunate fall in a hurdle run in 1866, injured his spine and suffered incurable leg paralysis because the injury was not treated for too long. First he was a private tutor, then in 1870 a teacher at Clifton College . In 1873 he was able to complete his studies at Balliol College, where he initially taught primarily Latin and Greek literature, and later Greek history . He died in 1901 at the age of 58 at Knotsford Lodge in Great Malvern and was buried in Redlands Cemetery near Cardiff .

Abbott's literary works include Elements of Greek Accidence (1874), his translation of the History of Antiquity by the German historian Maximilian Duncker, entitled History of Antiquity (6 volumes, 1877–1881), and above all his History of Greece (3 volumes, 1888-1900). He considered Homer's Iliad and Odyssey to be of purely poetic origin. Together with the Scottish classical philologist Lewis Campbell , he also wrote a two-volume biography of his lifelong friend, the English theologian and philologist Benjamin Jowett, under the title Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett in 1897 .

literature

• James Leigh Strachan-Davidson: Abbott, Evelyn . In: Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), Supplement Volume 1 of 1912, pp. 3-4 ( online ).
• MC Curthoys: Abbott, Evelyn . In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), Vol. 1 (2004), p. 45 (slight revision of the DNB article by Strachan-Davidson).