Harold Edgeworth Butler

Harold Edgeworth Butler was a British Latin scholar, born on 8 May 1878 and died on 5 June 1951. He studied at Oxford, won the Newdigate Prize in 1899, and began his academic career as a lecturer and fellow of New College, Oxford.

He later moved to University College London, where he became Professor of Latin in 1911, succeeding A. E. Housman, and remained in the post until 1942. Alongside his university work, he built a lasting reputation as an editor, translator, and critic of classical literature.

Readers are most likely to know him for translations and editions of writers such as Apuleius, Propertius, and especially Quintilian, whose Institutio Oratoria he translated for the Loeb Classical Library. He also wrote original scholarship, including Post-Augustan Poetry from Seneca to Juvenal, showing the same mix of learning and readability that makes his work still useful today.