N. G. L. Hammond

Nicholas Geoffrey Lemprière Hammond, CBE, DSO, FBA (15 November 1907 – 24 March 2001) was a British scholar of ancient Greece and an operative for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) in occupied Greece during the Second World War.

N. G. L. Hammond

CBE DSO FBA
Born
Nicholas Geoffrey Lemprière Hammond

15 November 1907
Died24 March 2001(2001-03-24) (aged 93)
NationalityBritish
Children3 (including Caroline Bammel)
Academic background
Alma materGonville and Caius College, Cambridge
Academic work
DisciplineClassicist
Sub-discipline
Institutions
Military career
AllegianceUnited Kingdom
Service/branchSpecial Operations Executive
Years of service1940–1945
Battles/warsSecond World War
AwardsDistinguished Service Order
Order of the Phoenix (Greece)

Life and writings

Hammond studied classics at Fettes College[1] and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He excelled in his exams and also spent vacations exploring Greece and Albania on foot, acquiring knowledge of the topography and terrain, as well as fluency in Albanian. These abilities led him to be recruited by the Special Operations Executive during World War II in 1940. His activities included many dangerous sabotage missions in Greece (especially on the Greek island of Crete) as well as in Albania. As an officer, in 1944 he was in command of the Allied military mission to the Greek resistance in Thessaly and Macedonia.[2] There he came to know those regions thoroughly. He published a memoir of his war service entitled Venture into Greece in 1983; he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and the Greek Order of the Phoenix.

In the postwar period, Hammond returned to academia as senior tutor at Clare College, Cambridge. In 1954, he became headmaster of Clifton College, Bristol and in 1962 was appointed Henry Overton Wills Professor of Greek at Bristol University, a post which he held until his retirement in 1973. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1968[3] and an honorary member of the Centre des Nouvelles études de l'histoire, de la philosophie et des problèmes sociaux à Clermont-Ferrand in 1988.

His scholarship focused on the history of ancient Macedonia and Epirus,[2] and he was considered the leading expert on Macedonia.[4] He was also editor and contributor to various volumes of the Cambridge Ancient History and the second edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary. He was known for his works about Alexander the Great and for suggesting the relationship of Vergina with Aegae, the ancient Macedonian royal city, before the archaeological discoveries.

Personal life

Hammond was the father of two sons (both educated at Clifton College) and a daughter Caroline Bammel, a noted historian of the early church.[5]

Selected works
  1. A History of Greece to 322 B.C. (1959)
  2. Epirus: the Geography, the Ancient Remains, the History and Topography of Epirus and Adjacent Areas (1967)
  3. Migrations and invasions in Greece and Adjacent Areas (1976)
  4. ed. Atlas of the Greek and Roman World in Antiquity (1981)
  5. Philip of Macedon (1994)
  6. The Genius of Alexander the Great (1997)
  7. The Classical Age of Greece (1999)
  8. Poetics of Aristotle: Rearranged, Abridged and Translated for Better Understanding by the General Reader (2001)
  9. A History of Macedonia Volume I: Historical Geography and Prehistory (1972)
  10. A History of Macedonia Volume II: 550-336 B.C. (1979)
  11. A History of Macedonia Volume III: 336-167 B.C. (1988)
  12. Alexander the Great. King, Commander, and Statesman
  13. History of Macedonia
  14. Oxford Classical Dictionary (1970) (second edition)
  15. The end of Mycenaean Civilization and Dark Age: the literary tradition (1962)

Notes
  1. Distinguished Old Fettesians Archived 22 November 2007 at the Wayback Machine
  2. Borza, Eugene N. (1992). In the Shadow of Olympus. Princeton University Press. p. 16. ISBN 978-0-691-00880-6.
  3. British Academy Fellowship entry Archived 6 June 2011 at the Wayback Machine
  4. Chambers, Mortimer (2002). The Western Experience. McGraw-Hill. p. 101. ISBN 0072424370.
  5. Chadwick, Henry (1997). "Caroline Penrose Hammond Bammel 1940–1995" (PDF). Proceedings of the British Academy. 94: 285–291. Retrieved 9 March 2017.

References

Further reading
  • Clive Hodges. Cobbold & Kin: Life Stories from an East Anglian Family (Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2014) ISBN 9781843839545
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