University of Pennsylvania Finding Aids

William Nickerson Bates (1867-1949) was a professor of Greek Language and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania from 1895 to 1939. He wrote primarily on Attic tragedy, including two major volumes on Euripides and Sophocles, the manuscripts for which can be found in this collection. The volumes, Euripides, a student of Human Nature and Sophocles serve to acquaint the modern reader (one with little or no knowledge of ancient Greek) with the original meaning of the plays since, as Bates stated, no work had theretofore been published for such readers that dealt directly with the original Greek texts.