Richmond Lattimore's Conversion

A short eulogy written for Richmond Lattimore, perhaps the most famous modern English translator of Homer, by Father George Rutler, the priest who baptized him in the Catholic faith. Excerpt:

After the monumental translation of The Odyssey and even more transporting Iliad, he Englished the four Gospels, the Book of Acts and Epistles, and the Revelation whose author he did not think was the Apostle John. There was one evangelist he preferred for his elegant Greek, and when recovering in hospital from surgery he said that his doubts about the Faith had disappeared "somewhere in Saint Luke." He announced that he would be baptized at Easter. At the public baptism, with closed eyes and head uplifted, Dick solemnly recited the Creed whose Greek was his vernacular. He instructed that at his funeral this story be told to all his academic colleagues.