Seth Benardete was born in Brooklyn on April 4, 1930. His intellectually formative years were spent at the University of Chicago (1948–55), where he studied with Leo Strauss. From Chicago, Benardete pursued his studies abroad, spending one year at the American School in Athens (1952–53), and the following year on a Ford Foundation fellowship in Florence (1953–54), where he wrote his dissertation on the Iliad. His first teaching position was as a tutor in the Great Books program at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland (1955–57). During this period he contributed translations of Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Maidens and The Persians to the Chicago University Press’s series of The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore. Invited to join the Society of Junior Fellows, Benardete went on to Harvard (1957-60), where he wrote his first book, Herodotean Inquiries, as well as his influential essay on Sophocles’ Oedipus. After several years of teaching at Brandeis University, Benardete returned to New York City in 1965, where he joined the Classics department at New York University and began a series of philosophy courses at the New School Graduate Faculty for Political and Social Science that continued for the duration of his career.

At NYU, Benardete taught the complete range of Greek and Latin poetry, history and philosophy. At the New School, his lectures included the pre-Socratic thinkers and Aristotle, while covering almost the entire corpus of Platonic dialogues.

From 1978-1988, Benardete taught beginning Greek and advanced (graduate-level) Greek and Latin at the Latin/Greek Institute of the City University of New York Graduate Center and Brooklyn College.

Benardete’s later publications include: The Bow and the Lyre: A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey, The Rhetoric of Morality and Philosophy: Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus, and Socrates’ Second Sailing: On Plato’s Republic; and translations, with commentary, of Plato’s Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman, Philebus and Symposium, and of Aristotle’s On Poetics, with Michael Davis. His essays have been collected in The Argument of the Action and the forthcoming volume, The Archaeology of the Soul.

Benardete’s research was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Earhart Foundation and the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung in Munich. He received an honorary degree from Adelphi University.

Seth Benardete died in New York City on November 14, 2001.

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Source: Seth Benardete papers collection guide, prepared by Susan Johnson and the Benardete Archive, Inc.