Gilbert Murray

Gilbert Murray (George Gilbert Aimé Murray), 1866-1957, British classical scholar, b. Sydney, Australia. In 1908 Murray was appointed regius professor of Greek at Oxford. He is best known as a Greek scholar and especially as a translator of Greek drama. His translations were rendered in heroic rhymes to preserve the rhythm of the originals. Among his works are History of Ancient Greek Literature (1897), The Rise of the Greek Epic (1907), Euripides and His Age (1918), The Classical Tradition in Poetry (1927), and Hellenism and the Modern World (1953). Murray was active in the cause of world peace. He was chairman (1923-38) of the League of Nations Union and first president of the general council of the United Nations Association. He wrote several books about international politics, including Liberality and Civilization (1938).

Bibliography: See J. Smith and A. Toynbee, ed., Gilbert Murray: An Unfinished Autobiography (1960).

Murray, (George) Gilbert (Aimé) (1866–1957), a brilliant Greek scholar; born in Sydney, Australia, he was Regius professor of Greek at Oxford 1908–36. His claim to brilliance lay in his ability to make the ancient world sensitively real to his contemporaries; and while he produced influential studies in Greek epic and drama, he is best remembered for his translations of Euripides. He was the model for Adolphus Cusins in Shaw's Major Barbara. Murray was an eloquent champion of women's rights and other liberal causes, and as chairman of the League of Nations Union (1922–38) he struggled without much hope to save Europe from war.

Murray, Sir (George) Gilbert Aimé (1866–1957), English classical scholar, poet, humanist, and philosopher, whose verse translations of the plays of Euripides were staged in London at the beginning of the 20th century. Though they have now been superseded, they were in their day superior theatrically to anything heard previously, and revealed the beauties of classical tragedy to those who had no Greek. The first, under the direction of Harley Granville-Barker at the Royal Court Theatre, was Hippolytus in 1904. It was followed by the Trojan Women in 1905 and Electra in 1906. Medea was seen at the Savoy Theatre in 1907, the Bacchae, in which Lillah McCarthy played Dionysus, again at the Court, and Iphigenia in Tauris, with McCarthy in the title-role, at the Kingsway. The Alcestis and the Rhesus have had only amateur productions. Murray also translated Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus, and Aeschylus' the Oresteia, the Suppliant Women, Prometheus Bound, the Persians, and the Seven against Thebes, somewhat less successfully; but his versions of Aristophanes' the Birds, the Frogs, and the Knights were eminently actable, as were his reconstructions of Menander's Perikeiromenê as The Rape of the Locks in 1941 and of the Epitrepontes as The Arbitration in 1945.