Harold Edgeworth Butler

Harold Edgeworth Butler (8 May 1878 – 5 June 1951) was a British Latin scholar. He studied at Oxford University and in 1899 won the Newdigate Prize for the Best Composition in English verse. He became a lecturer and fellow of New College, Oxford the same year. In 1909 he moved to University College London, and in 1911 he was appointed Professor of Latin in succession to A. E. Housman, a post he held until his retirement in 1942.

Butler was the son of the Rev. Arthur Gray Butler, the first headmaster of Haileybury College; the great-nephew of the novelist Maria Edgeworth; the second cousin once removed of the politician Rab Butler; and the father of Sir David Butler, a psephologist. He served as a lieutenant and then captain in the Royal Artillery during World War I but never saw action. In 1917 he married Margaret (Peggie) Lucy Pollard (daughter of his colleague A.F. Pollard, Professor of Constitutional History at University College London from 1903 to 1931) who had previously been one of his students. In 1919 the family moved to 16 Taviton Street in Bloomsbury to be within walking distance of his UCL office. Their four children were all educated at St Paul's School of which he was a governor. Upon retirement he and his wife moved to Dunraven, 27 St Johns Avenue, Leatherhead, Surrey.

Butler edited and translated a wide range of Latin authors in both verse and prose. On Butler's edition of Quintilian, it has been said that:Butler worked at a time when rhetoric was a little-studied subject and Quintilian was regarded as a distinctly minor (if loquacious) Latin prose-writer. Butler often felt the need to apologize for the technicality of Quintilian's subject-matter and to add explanatory phrases to his translation of the Latin text. His text and translation, which has substantially outsold Latin-only editions, was of the greatest importance in making Quintilian available to a wider audience, and it has provided numerous students of later rhetoric with a quick way to find passages which were quarried as sources by subsequent writers. Without Butler's translation, which Russell generously calls 'eloquent', Quintilian would not so rapidly have come to be seen as a major influence on Western rhetorical and educational thinking between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century.