Alan Cameron (classical scholar)
Alan Douglas Edward Cameron, was a British classicist and academic. He was Charles Anthon Professor Emeritus of the Latin Language and Literature at Columbia University, New York. He was one of the leading scholars of the literature and history of the later Roman world and at the same time a wide-ranging classical philologist whose work encompassed above all the Greek and Latin poetic tradition from Hellenistic to Byzantine times but also aspects of late antique art.Life
He was educated at St. Paul's School, London. He went on to New College, Oxford, earning a first class in Honour Moderations and Literae Humaniores.
Cameron began his academic career as a Lecturer at the University of Glasgow. He then became a Lecturer and then a Reader in Latin at Bedford College, London. From 1972-1977 he held the Chair of Latin at King's College London. He went to Columbia University as Charles Anthon Professor in 1977.
Cameron was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1975. He became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978 and a Fellow of the American Philosophical Society in 1992. In March 1997 he was awarded the American Philological Association's Goodwin Award. In 2005, he received Columbia University's Lionel Trilling Award.
In 2013, he was awarded the Kenyon Medal for Classical Studies and Archaeology of the British Academy. The award dedication read as follows:
Cameron also published about 200 scholarly articles on a wide range of subjects related to the ancient world.
He died on 31 July 2017 in New York.Selected works
Cameron's books include:
- Claudian: Poetry and Propaganda at the Court of Honorius
- Porphyrius the Charioteer
- Circus Factions: Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium
- Barbarians and Politics at the Court of Arcadius
- The Greek Anthology: From Meleager to Planudes
- Callimachus and his Critics
- Greek Mythography in the Roman World
- The Last Pagans of Rome
- Wandering Poets and Other Essays in Late Antique Poetry and Philosophy.
