A History of Rome

Moses Hadas was an American teacher, one of the leading classical scholars of the twentieth century, and a translator of numerous works. Raised in Atlanta in a Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jewish household, he studied rabbinical training and took his doctorate in classics. Fluent in Yiddish, German, ancient Hebrew, ancient Greek, Latin, French and Italian—and well-versed in other languages—his most productive years were spent at Columbia University where he was a colleague of Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling. There he presented classics as worthy of study as literary works in their own right by combining his talent for languages with a popularizing impulse.