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David Binning Monro

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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DAVID BINNING MONRO (1836-1905), English Homeric scholar, was born in Edinburgh on the 16th of November 1836. He was a grandson of Alexander Monro, tertius (1773-1859), professor of anatomy in Edinburgh University, whose father, Alexander Monro, secundus (1733-1817), and grandfather, Alexander Monro, primus (1697-1767), both filled the same position. He was educated at Glasgow University, and Brasenose and Balliol Colleges, Oxford. In 1859 he was elected fellow, and in 1882 provost of Oriel, which office he held till his death at Heiden, Switzerland, on the 22nd of August 1905. He was a man of varied attainments, an excellent linguist, and possessed considerable knowledge of music, painting and architecture. His favourite study was Homer, and his Grammar of the Homeric Dialect (2nd ed., 1891) established his reputation as an authority on that author. He also edited the last twelve books of the Odyssey, with valuable appendices on the composition of the poem, its relation to the Iliad and the cyclic poets, the history of the text, the dialects, and the Homeric house; a critical text of the poems and fragments ( Homeri opera et reliquiae, 1896); Homeri opera (1902, with T. W. Allen, in Scriptorum classicorum bibliotheca oxoniensis); and an edition of the Iliad with notes for schools. His article on Homer, written for the 9th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, was revised by him for this work before he died. Mention may also be made of his Modes of Ancient Greek Music (1894), on which see Classical Review for December 1894, with author's reply in the same for February 1895.

See Memoir by J. Cook Wilson (Oxford, 1907).