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Professor of Latin Literature in the Philosophic School of the University of Thessaloniki

Prof. Nicholas Petrochilos was born in Athens, but he comes from the island of Kythera (Ionian islands). He graduated from the Philosophic School of the University of Athens (1960) and taught as a secondary school teacher of Philology in the state schools of Greece.

Later (1968), he was selected among many other candidates for a two-year refresher course at Pedagogics (he graduated in 1970), and soon afterwards was awarded a scholarship from the State Scholarship Foundation of Greece for postgraduate studies in England. He studied Latin Literature at the University of London (Westfield College) for three years and obtained his Ph.D. in 1973.

His dissertation for his Ph.D. was published in 1974 under the title Roman Attitudes to the Greeks. It was translated into Greek (1984) by two scholars of the University of Thessaloniki. Many favourable reviews of his thesis were published in various classical periodicals all over the world.

In 1974 he was appointed Lecturer at the University of Athens, and in 1977 was unanimously elected Associate Professor of Latin Literature in the Philosophic School of the University of Thessaloniki. Three years later he was elected, unanimously again, Full Professor at the same University. He had an early retirement, in 1987, and was appointed Emeritus Professor.

Apart from his work as a translator and commentator of Latin Historical Texts into modern Greek [ Sallust and Suetonius, in all their works, have already been published in three volumes by the Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece, and the whole work of Tacitus (6 volumes) has been completed, and it remains to be published by the Cultural Foundation mentioned above ].

Professor Petrochilos continued his teaching career as a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Crete, Athens and Cyprus. His translations of Seneca's De vita beata (On happy life) (1996), De tranquillitate animi (On the tranquillity of the mind) (1997), and De brevitate vitae (On the brevity of life) (1997), as well as of Erasmos : De recta Latini Graecique sermonis pronuntiatione dialogus ( = on the right pronunciation of Latin and Greek), Athens 2000, pp. 253, have been all published by Patakis editions, at Athens.

He has also written and published various works on the cultural relations between the two most eminent peoples of the ancient world, the Greeks and the Romans, on Roman epic poetry --particularly on Virgil's Aeneid - as well as on many other areas of Roman culture and civilisation (drama, politics, everyday life, etc.). He has participated in many conferences, in Greece and abroad, and presided at many of them. He was President of the National Theatre of Greece (1989-1990) and is now a member of various Societies in Greece and abroad. He speaks English, German and Italian.


To see a full list of his published work, go to the entry concerning Nikos Petrochilos at People, subsection, High Achievers.