Classicist Bernard Knox Passes Away

Celebrated classicist Bernard M.W. Knox once tossed his ten-year-old son a dog-eared translation of Thucydides, urging the boy to not miss the ancient author’s belief that his work was a “treasure for all time.”

“That phrase from twenty-four hundred years ago summarized my father’s view of what scholarship should be,” recalled his son, Bernard M.B. “MacGregor” Knox ’67.

The elder Knox, a prolific scholar acclaimed for his contributions to ancient Greek scholarship and to the early development of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies, has left behind a valuable legacy of his own. Knox passed away on July 22 at his home in Maryland. He was 95.

Knox, a noted Sophocles specialist, served as the founding director of the Center for Hellenic Studies, a research institute located in Washington, D.C. Established in 1962, the Center sought to transcend Harvard as an institution of national, rather than local, prominence. To that end, Paul Mellon and the other philanthropists inspired to create the Center actively recruited the best faculty, even outside of the University.

Enter Knox, then a popular Yale professor, who possessed a “strong vision” about the “ever present” need to communicate the Greek civilization to the wider world, according to the Center’s current director Gregory Nagy.

“Knox had a very strong sense of communicating literature—a knack for making literature come alive,” Nagy said. “If you read his articles from the mid-20th century, he makes Greek tragedy come alive in ways that are still reverberating today. His interpretations of Sophocles are still very much with us.”

Knox’s obituary in The New York Times notes that his first book, “Oedipus at Thebes: Sophocles’ Tragic Hero and His Time,” although initially released in 1957, remains in print today along with several other of his works—a rarity for academic work.

According to Nagy, Knox is the reason that academics now refer to Sophocles’ tragic masterpiece as “Oedipus Tyrannus” instead of “Oedipus Rex,” a title that fails to suggest the similarities between Oedipus and an Athenian politician from the fifth century, when the play was written.

Nagy, a classical Greek literature professor who had known Knox since the 1970s, said that the former director maintained an active role in the Center’s proceedings, even in the years following his retirement in 1985.

Despite his scholastic accomplishments, Knox nevertheless maintained a sense of humor in the Ivory Tower. “He found it hard to say the word ‘academic’ without an ironic grin,” said MacGregor Knox, now a professor of international history at the London School of Economics.

Beyond academia, the elder Knox survived combat in the Spanish Civil War and World War II, receiving France’s prestigious Croix de Guerre award and a decoration from the U.S. Army. Knox brought back “by far the best war stories of anyone I’ve ever met, either in civilian life or in the U.S. Army,” his son said. “He told them brilliantly.”

—Staff writer James K. McAuley can be reached at mcauley@fas.harvard.edu.