Ivan Mortimer Linforth (15 September 1879,

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

– 15 December 1976,

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and E ...

) was an American scholar, Professor of Greek at

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

. According to the ''Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists'' he was "one of the great Hellenists of his time". He is best known for his book ''The Arts of Orpheus'' (1941). In it he analysed the body of texts dealing with

Orpheus Orpheus (; Ancient Greek: Ὀρφεύς, classical pronunciation: ; french: Orphée) is a Thracian bard, legendary musician and prophet in ancient Greek religion. He was also a renowned poet and, according to the legend, travelled with J ...

and the

Orphics Orphism (more rarely Orphicism; grc, Ὀρφικά, Orphiká) is the name given to a set of religious beliefs and practices originating in the ancient Greek and Hellenistic world, associated with literature ascribed to the mythical poet Orpheus ...

. He concluded that there was no exclusively 'Orphic' system of belief in Ancient Greece. Geoffrey Stephen Kirk, John Earle Raven,

Malcolm Schofield Malcolm Schofield, (born 19 April 1942) is a British classicist and academic, specialising in ancient philosophy. Having taught at Cornell University and the University of Oxford, he joined the University of Cambridge in 1972 as a lecturer in cla ...

, ''The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts'' (1983), p. 21.

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Obituary notice
1879 births 1976 deaths University of California, Berkeley faculty {{US-academic-bio-stub