Mervin Robert Dilts

Mervin Robert Dilts (born 26 February 1938) is an American classical scholar and emeritus professor at New York University.

Biography Born in Flemington, New Jersey, Dilts studied at Gettysburg College (BA, 1960) and at Indiana University Bloomington (MA, 1961; PhD, 1964), where he was advised by Aubrey Diller. He was assistant professor at Knox College and in 1965 moved to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he worked with Alexander Turyn and, later, with Miroslav Marcovich. In 1969, he was promoted to associate professor. From 1971 to 1979 he was a financial trustee of the American Philological Association.

In 1979, Dilts became professor in classics at New York University, where he taught until his retirement. He is currently emeritus professor at NYU and Murray Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, where he patrons the Dilts-Lyell Research Fellowship in Greek Palaeography.

Research activity Dilts is primarily a textual critic, with special focus on Ancient Greek orators. He defended a dissertation on the manuscript tradition of Aelian's Varia Historia and Heraclides Lembus' Politiae, publishing the latter in 1971 and, in 1974, the former in the renowned Bibliotheca Teubneriana. Dilts published four further Teubner editions, being the two-volume scholia on Demosthenes, the scholia on Aeschines, and the critical edition of his speeches — in the latter case, completing a line of research started by his former advisor Diller.

In the 2000s, his four-volume critical edition of Demosthenes' speeches appeared in the Oxford Classical Texts, followed, in 2018, by the speeches of Antiphon and Andocides.

Publications

— Dissertation.