Nigel Guy Wilson (born 23 July 1935) is a British scholar, emeritus fellow and tutor in Classics,
Lincoln College, Oxford
Lincoln College (formally, The College of the Blessed Mary and All Saints, Lincoln) is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford, situated on Turl Street in central Oxford. Lincoln was founded in 1427 by Richard Fleming, the ...
. His field of research is
ancient Greek
Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic peri ...
history,
language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...
and literature, and culture, art and archaeology of the
Byzantine
The Byzantine Empire, also referred to as the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantium, was the continuation of the Roman Empire primarily in its eastern provinces during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, when its capital city was Constantinopl ...
world. Since retiring in 2002 he has continued his researches into Greek
palaeography
Palaeography (American and British English spelling differences#ae and oe, UK) or paleography (American and British English spelling differences#ae and oe, US; ultimately from grc-gre, , ''palaiós'', "old", and , ''gráphein'', "to write") ...
, textual criticism and the history of classical scholarship. In the series of
Oxford Classical Texts
Oxford Classical Texts (OCT), or Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis, is a series of books published by Oxford University Press. It contains texts of ancient Greek and Latin literature, such as Homer's ''Odyssey'' and Virgil's ''Aeneid'', ...
his edition of
Aristophanes
Aristophanes (; grc, Ἀριστοφάνης, ; c. 446 – c. 386 BC), son of Philippus, of the deme
In Ancient Greece, a deme or ( grc, δῆμος, plural: demoi, δημοι) was a suburb or a subdivision of Athens and other city-states ...
appeared in 2007, and a new edition of
Herodotus
Herodotus ( ; grc, , }; BC) was an ancient Greek historian and geographer from the Greek city of Halicarnassus, part of the Persian Empire (now Bodrum, Turkey) and a later citizen of Thurii in modern Calabria ( Italy). He is known f ...
for the same series appeared in 2015. Another substantial piece of work was a contribution to the study of the famous
Archimedes Palimpsest
The Archimedes Palimpsest is a parchment codex palimpsest, originally a Byzantine Greek copy of a compilation of Archimedes and other authors. It contains two works of Archimedes that were thought to have been lost (the ''Ostomachion'' and the ' ...
, which was sold at auction in New York in 1998 for $2,000,000; the results of a collaboration lasting ten years and involving experts in various fields appeared in ''The Archimedes palimpsest'' (Cambridge University Press 2011), which was described by the reviewer in the '' TLS'' as "the most beautiful book produced in this century".Lincoln College, University of Oxford /ref>
Published works
*1963 ''Manuscripts of Byzantine chant in Oxford'' (with D. I. Stefanovic)
*1968 (4th ed. 2014) - ''Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature'' (Oxford University Press) (with L. D. Reynolds)
*1969 ''Scholia in Aristophanis Equites'' (with D. Mervyn Jones)
*1971 - ''An Anthology of Byzantine Prose'' (De Gruyter)
*1972–3 (2nd ed. 2014) - ''Mediaeval Greek Bookhands: Examples Selected from Greek Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries'' (Medieval Academy of America)
*1975 - ''St Basil on Greek literature''
*1975 - ''Scholia in Aristophanis Acharnenses''
*1981 - ''Menander Rhetor'' (with Donald A. Russell)
*1983 (2nd ed. 1996) - ''Scholars of Byzantium'' (The Johns Hopkins University Press)
*1990 - ''Sophoclis Fabulae'' (Oxford Classical Texts of Sophocles, with