September 15, 2002

BY SCOTT FORNEK STAFF REPORTER

Looking at his intellectual credentials, it is hard to picture David Grene anywhere but the University of Chicago.

The classics professor was instrumental in founding the university's elite Committee on Social Thought, taught Allan Bloom, was admired by friend and colleague Saul Bellow, and co-edited an edition of Grene's and another scholar's translations of ancient Greek tragedies that has sold more than a million copies and is a staple in high school and college classrooms.

But for half a century, the famed intellectual spent part of each year on a dairy farm nestled among the hills in his native Ireland, milking cows, bargaining and cussing with his fellow farmers, hunting foxes and--until he finally surrendered to tractors--plowing the fields with horses.

"He was also famous for his boots," said Wendy Doniger, a divinity professor at the university who taught with Mr. Grene. "He had one pair of boots. And if he went to the farm, he wore them. If he went to class, he wore them. If he went to the opera that night, he wore them. And they were covered with cow s---.

"He was amazing. . . . He was kind of like Sinatra in the old song. He did it his way."

Mr. Grene, 89, who taught at the U. of C. for 55 years, died Tuesday at the University of Chicago Hospitals.

He was best known for translating the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and other Greek poets. Many of his versions were published by the University of Chicago Press in volumes from 1954 to 1959 in The Complete Greek Tragedies, which Mr. Grene co-edited with Richmond Lattimore.

His translation of The History by Herodotus, considered the father of historians, was published in 1987. Former United Nations diplomat and historian Conor Cruise O'Brien once wrote that reading Mr. Grene's "version is like listening to Herodotus telling the story."

He was indeed, by all accounts, one of a kind.

"Grene might have stepped out of the 18th century: white mutton chops, a wispy fringe of hair, craggy features that remind me of Edmund Burke," novelist James Atlas wrote in a New York Times essay in 1988. "Dawdling down the hall in a worn blue shirt, worn khakis, ancient heavy shoes, he could only be a member of the Committee on Social Thought, as he freely admits."

Doniger said: "He lived on meat--particularly bacon and steak--cheese, butter, eggs and Tanqueray gin. . . . He was a real person. He was bigger than life."

Born in Dublin, Ireland, Mr. Grene spent summers as a boy on a farm owned by a distant relative.

"There he developed his profound love of Irish farming, which never left him," said his daughter Ruth, 59, a professor of plant biology at Virginia Tech. "He told some of his students . . . that he was 15 years old when he knew he wanted to be a farmer and study Greek. And he did them."

Mr. Grene attended Trinity College, earning his master's degree in 1936. He joined the U. of C. the following year, and helped found the Committee on Social Thought in 1947. It was a graduate department known for its rigorous academic standards, its dedication to allowing a small number of especially gifted students to pursue various areas of study and the luminaries who were permanent faculty or occasional lecturers: Bellow, T.S. Eliot, Marc Chagall and German philosopher Hannah Arendt. It was in the committee that Mr. Grene taught Bloom, who went on to write The Closing of the American Mind.

Another of Mr. Grene's former students was James Dewey Watson, who went on to become a 1962 Nobel laureate for his role in discovering DNA. In a 1991 essay, Watson remembered Mr. Grene's "extraordinary imagination as well as a marvelous voice that made Shakespeare come alive and gave me a feeling for the beauty and power of the English language that I have never lost."

The novelist Bellow said, in a statement released by the university, that Mr. Grene "had an extraordinary way of throwing himself into the books he was teaching. . . . He was on a first-name basis with Sophocles and Aristophanes, that was how he made you feel."

Doniger remembers working with Mr. Grene on a translation of "Oresteia," by the Greek playwright Aeschylus, for a performance at the Court Theater at the university in 1986. At one point, she questioned his translation of a word, citing the definition provided by Liddell and Scott, considered the authoritative dictionary in Greek translation.

Mr. Grene told her that "Liddell and Scott are wrong," and then quoted the nine times the word appears in Greek literature, showing that its usage did not square with the dictionary's definition.

"That sure shut me up," she said.

Mr. Grene continued to teach at U. of C. after his "retirement" nearly 20 years ago, teaching for free for years, Doniger said. He lived in Hyde Park but continued to spend part of each year at his farm in Belturbet, County Cavan, Ireland, which he bought in 1961. "The farmers always thought he was on some extended vacation, off to the United States," his daughter said.

Other survivors include his first wife, Margerie; his second wife, Ethel; his companion, Stephanie Nelson; three sons, Nicholas, Andrew and Gregory, and 10 grandchildren.

Funeral services will be held in Ireland this coming week. A memorial service will be held at the University of Chicago this fall.