Donald Mastronarde

Donald John Mastronarde ( ; born 1948) is an American classical scholar, known for his work on the Greek tragic playwright Euripides.

Biography Mastronarde was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1948. He studied at Amherst College from 1966, obtaining his BA in 1969, and then at Wadham College, Oxford, obtaining his BA there in 1971. He then studied at the University of Toronto from 1971 to 1973, obtaining his doctorate in 1974 with a dissertation titled "Studies in Euripides' Phoinissai", written under the supervision of Desmond Conacher.

Since 1973, he has worked at the University of California, Berkeley. From 1992 to 1996, he was the chief editor of the journal Classical Antiquity. He served as department chair from 1993 to 2000, and was named Melpomene Distinguished Professor of Classical Languages and Literature in 2001.

He retired in 2015, and since 2016 has served as Melpomene Professor Emeritus and Professor of the Graduate School. His recent research has focused on creating an online critical edition and translation of the scholia to Euripides. The first release, containing the scholia on the first 500 lines of Euripides' Orestes, appeared in 2020, followed by releases of the rest of the scholia on this tragedy in 2023 and 2025.

Selected publications

Monographs

Editions of ancient texts

Ongoing web project: Release 3, containing the scholia to Euripides' Orestes.

Textbook

Edited volume