author
David M. (David Moore) Robinson
1880–1958
A pioneering American classical archaeologist, he is best known for the excavations at Olynthus in northern Greece and for helping bring the ancient Greek world to modern readers. His career also included major teaching and museum work, leaving a lasting mark on classical studies in the United States.
1 Audiobook
Sappho and her influence
by David M. (David Moore) Robinson
About the author
Born in Auburn, New York, in 1880, David Moore Robinson became one of the best-known American classical archaeologists of his time. He studied at the University of Chicago, later taught at Johns Hopkins University, and built a reputation as a prolific scholar of Greek archaeology, art, and inscriptions.
Robinson is especially remembered for directing the excavations at Olynthus from 1928 to 1938. Those discoveries gave scholars an unusually rich view of daily life, housing, and urban planning in an ancient Greek city, and his published reports helped make the site central to the study of the classical world.
He also assembled a notable collection of classical art and antiquities, parts of which are connected with the University of Mississippi. Modern accounts of his life note both his major scholarly influence and serious criticism surrounding the treatment and crediting of student research, making his legacy important, productive, and complicated at the same time.