Martin Litchfield West, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

Martin Litchfield West

British classical philologist

Date of Birth: 23-Sep-1937

Place of Birth: London

Date of Death: 13-Jul-2015

Profession: writer, translator, university teacher, classical scholar, musicologist, non-fiction writer, classical philologist

Nationality: United Kingdom

Zodiac Sign: Libra

Martin Litchfield West, (23 September 1937 – 13 July 2015) was a British philologist and classical scholar. He wrote on ancient Greek music, Greek tragedy, Greek lyric poetry, the relations between Greece and the ancient Near East, and the connection between shamanism and early ancient Greek religion, including the Orphic tradition.
This work stems from material in Akkadian, Phoenician, Hebrew, Hittite, and Ugaritic, as well as Greek and Latin. In 2001, West produced an edition of Homer's Iliad for Teubner, accompanied by a study of its critical tradition and overall philology, entitled Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad; a further volume on The Making of the Iliad appeared ten years later for Oxford University Press, and one on "The Making of the Odyssey" in 2014. In addition to the Near-Eastern connection, in 2007 he wrote on the reconstitution of Indo-European culture and poetry, and its influence on Greece, in the book Indo-European Poetry and Myth.
In recognition of his contribution to scholarship, he was awarded the Order of Merit in 2014.