Ivan Mortimer Linforth

Ivan Mortimer Linforth (15 September 1879, San Francisco – 15 December 1976, Berkeley, California) was an American scholar, Professor of Greek at University of California, Berkeley. According to the Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists he was "one of the great Hellenists of his time". He is best known for his book The Arts of Orpheus (1941), in which he analysed a large number of sources for Orphism and Orphic literature. His work is noted for its thoroughly sceptical approach to the evidence, attempting to the repudiate the notions of a coherent Orphism put forward by earlier scholars. His conclusion was that there was no exclusively "Orphic" system of belief in Ancient Greece. His work had an impact on the scholarship of Orphism, with Eric R. Dodds writing in 1951 that due to Linforth "[t]he edifice reared by an ingenious scholarship upon these foundations remains for me a house of dreams".

References

• Chrysanthou, Anthi, Defining Orphism: The Beliefs, the Teletae and the Writings, De Gruyter, 2020. ISBN 978-3-110-67839-0. Online version at De Gruyter.
• Edmonds, Radcliffe G., Redefining Ancient Orphism: A Study in Greek Religion, Cambridge University Press, 2013. ISBN 978-1-107-03821-9.
• Graf, Fritz, and Sarah Iles Johnston, Ritual Texts for the Afterlife: Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets, Routledge, 2007. ISBN 978-0-415-41550-7.

External links

• Ivan Mortimer Linforth at the Database of Classical Scholars
• Obituary notice