MURRAY, GILBERT (1866- ) , British classical scholar, was born at Sydney, N.S.W., Jan. 2, 1866, but left Australia at the age of I1. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' school, London, and St. John's college, Oxford. At Oxford he won the Hertford and Ireland scholarships (1885), the Craven scholarship (1886), the prize for Latin verse (1886) and the Gaisford prizes for Greek verse and prose (1886-87). He was elected to a fellowship at New college, Oxford, in 1888, and next year to the professorship of Greek at Glasgow university, a posi tion he held till 1899. In 1908 he was appointed Regius professor of Greek at Oxford. In 1889 he had married Lady Mary Howard, daughter of the 9th earl of Carlisle. He contested Oxford uni versity several times in the Liberal interest, but it was a forlorn hope. He is a member of the British Academy and of many foreign learned societies.
Murray was a keen worker for international understanding, and after the World War he sat in the Foreign Office committee concerned with drafting the Covenant of the League of Nations. He attended the Assembly in 1921, 1922 and 1923 as a member of the South African delegation, and in 1924 as a member of the British delegation. He has been, from the beginning, the British member of the committee of intellectual co-operation, and was its president in 1928. Among other departments of the
work of the League he was specially interested in the protection of minorities. He was one of the promoters of the League of Nations Union, of which he was chairman from 1918 to 1919, and again from 1923 onwards.
Murray published a History of Ancient Greek Literature in 1897. He is best known to the general reader by his incomparable renderings of the plays of Euripides into English verse. Several of his versions were acted in England and America. Indeed he may be said to have brought Greek drama back to the modern stage. He also published The Rise of the Greek Epic (1907; 2nd ed., 1911, 3rd ed., 1924) and Four Stages of Greek Religion (1913, 2nd ed., under the title Five Stages . . 1925). Amongst his works on other subjects are The Foreign Policy of Sir Edward Grey (1915) ; Faith, War and Policy (1918) ; Religio Gram matici (1918) ; and Problem of Foreign Policy (1921) ; Euripides and his Age (1918) ; The Stoic Age (1915) ; The Classical Tradi tion in Poetry (1927) ; Ordeal of This Generation (1929), etc. He wrote for the present edition of the Encyclopcedia Britannica the articles : EURIPIDES, HOMER and DRAMA, Greek (in part).