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Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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SIR RICHARD CLAVERHOUSE JEBB (1841-1905), English classical scholar, was born at Dundee on the 27th of August 1841. His father was a well-known barrister, and his grandfather a judge. He was educated at Charterhouse and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He won the Porson and Craven scholarships, was senior classic in 1862, and became fellow and tutor of his college in 1863. From 1869 to 1875 he was public orator of the university; professor of Greek at Glasgow from 1875 to 1889, and at Cambridge from 1889 till his death on the 9th of December 1905. In 1891 he was elected member of parliament for Cambridge University; he was knighted in 1900. Jebb was acknowledged to be one of the most brilliant classical scholars of his time, a humanist in the best sense, and his powers of translation from and into the classical languages were unrivalled. A collected volume, Translations into Greek and Latin, appeared in 1873 (ed. 1909). He was the recipient of many honorary degrees from European and American universities, and in 1905 was made a member of the Order of Merit. He married in 1874 the widow of General A. J. Slemmer, of the United States army, who survived him.

Jebb was the author of numerous publications, of which the following are the most important: The Characters of Theophrastus (1870), text, introduction, English translation and commentary (re-edited by J. E. Sandys, 1909); The Attic Orators from Antiphon to Isaeus (2nd ed., 1893), with companion volume, Selections from the Attic Orators (2nd ed., 1888); Bentley (1882); Sophocles (3rd ed., 1893) the seven plays, text, English translation and notes, the promised edition of the fragments being prevented by his death; Bacchylides (1905), text, translation, and notes; Homer (3rd ed., 1888), an introduction to the Iliad and Odyssey; Modern Greece (1901); The Growth and Influence of Classical Greek Poetry (1893). His translation of the Rhetoric of Aristotle was published posthumously under the editorship of J. E. Sandys (1909). A selection from his Essays and Addresses, and a subsequent volume, Life and Letters of Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb (with critical introduction by A. W. Verrall) were published by his widow in 1907; see also an appreciative notice by J. E. Sandys, Hist. of Classical Scholarship, iii. (1908).