Miroslav Marcovich

Miroslav Marcovich (March 18, 1919 – June 14, 2001) was a Serbian-American philologist and university professor. the former, he also translated in Italian in 1968 and has been reprinted without alterations in 2017. A prolific author, he published two collections of papers on ancient philosophy and religion—in 1965 and 1988.

He had an uncommon breath of interests. At the beginning of his career, he edited the Davidiad by Marko Marulić (1957) and the Latin poems by Dalmatian poet and humanist Franjo Božičević (1958), both in first edition, and translated (in Spanish) and commented the Bhagavad-Gītā, one of the holy scriptures of Hinduism (1958). In 1968, he published a critical edition of Hippolytus' "Refutation of All Heresies", in which he revised the text published at the beginning of the century by Paul Wendland and for the first time welcomed unpublished conjectures by Hermann Fränkel, that certain passages in the codex unicus of Hippolytus' text are displaced.

In 1984 he published a monograph on Greek tragic trimeter, and some years later two collection of studies on Greek poetry (1991 – a second one in 2002) and on textual criticism of Patristic texts (1994).

Starting from his time in Cambridge, he became increasingly interested in Greek philosophy and Christianity, contributing to the Pauly-Wissowa with a monographic article on Heraclitus (1965) and editing, as mentioned before, Hippolytus' treatise "Refutation of All Heresies" (1968). He remained prolific in his late years after retirement, producing a series of critical editions, mainly of Christian authors: Prosper of Aquitaine ("De providentia Dei", 1989), Athenagoras of Athens ("Legatio pro Christianis", 1990; "De resurrectione mortuorum" [sp.], 2000), Justin the Martyr ("Cohortatio ad Graecos", "De monarchia" and "Oratio ad Graecos" [all sp.], 1990; "Apologiae pro Christianis", 1994; "Dialogus cum Tryphone", 1997), Tatian ("Oratio ad Graecos", 1995), Theophilus of Antioch ("Ad Autolycum", 1995), Origen ("Contra Celsum", 2001) and Clement of Alexandria (“Protrepticus”, 1995; "Paedagogus", 2002 [published posthumously]). At the same time, he edited and commented the Alcestis Barcinoensis (1988) and produced three Teubner editions: Theodore Prodromos' "De Rhodante et Dosiclis amoribus" (1992), Diogenes Laërtius' "Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers" (2-volumes set, 1999, which included unpublished Byzantine paraphrases; Hans Gärtner edited a volume of indexes in 2002) and Eustathios Makrembolites' "De Hysmines et Hysminiae amoribus libri XI" (2001 [published posthumously]).

During his lifetime, Marcovich wrote and edited more than 30 books (not including the various issues of Illinois Classical Studies) and wrote 253 articles and essays in Spanish, German, Latin, Italian, French and Serbo-Croatian. At the beginning of his career, Marcovich also worked as a translator from German and Russian to Serbo-Croatian and published some textbooks (including Engels' The Evolution of Socialism).

Honours Marcovich received an honorary doctorate degree in humanities from the University of Illinois in 1994; two Festschriften were published as monographic issues of the journal he founded, Illinois Classical Studies:

Other honors include the Silver Cross of Mount Athos (1963), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1983), a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship (1990) and an Albert Einstein Visiting Fellowship by the Israel Academy of Sciences (1993). and David Sansone published obituaries in his honor, and so did Fernando Báez, adding one in the reprint of Marcovich's edition of the Bhagavad-Gītā. Marcovich wrote his own epitaph in English, which scholars translated in several languages including Ancient Greek and Latin (J. K. Newman), Hebrew (Howard Jacobson), Sahidic Coptic and Sanskrit (Gerald M. Browne) and Syriac (Sebastian Brock).

Personal Marcovich died on 14 June 2001 at the Carle Foundation Hospital, Urbana, Illinois.

Critical editions Entry no. 6 is an Italian translation of no. 5.

[†] [†] [†] [†] [†] [†]

Monographs

[†]

Translations and textbooks

Selected articles All entries are arranged chronologically and, for each year, alphabetically.