Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro

Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro (born October 29, 1819 in Elgin , † March 30, 1885 in Rome ) was a British classical philologist .

Life

Hugh AJ Munro was the illegitimate son of art collector Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro of Novar (1797–1864). He attended Shrewsbury School , where he learned Latin and Greek with Benjamin Hall Kennedy . Munro then studied at Trinity College , Cambridge, where he then began his academic career. In 1843 he was made a Fellow and thus had a permanent position at the college. In 1869 he was appointed to the newly established chair for Latin studies , but in 1872 he retired. In 1878 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Munro's first publication was on the logic of Aristotle , on which he also gave his first lectures in Cambridge. However, he dedicated his life's work to Greek and especially Latin poetry (he also wrote elegant Latin poems himself). His most important work was the critical edition of the didactic poem De rerum natura by Lucretius , to which Munro collated numerous (partly previously unknown) manuscripts. He began with this work around 1849. The critical edition was first published in 1860, then four years later in a revised and expanded form (with critical and factual commentary and an English prose translation).

In the library of Trinity College Munro discovered a manuscript that contained the best text version of the pseudo-Virgilian poem Aetna to date . In 1867 Munro published an edition of the poem. His last book (1878) was the explanation and criticism of the poems of Catullus .

HAJ Munro died while staying in Rome and was buried in the Protestant cemetery .

literature

• John D. Duff : Munro, Hugh Andrew Johnstone . In: Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), Volume 39 (1894), pp. 307-309