Lionel Casson
| Lionel Casson | |
|---|---|
| Born | Lionel I. Cohen July 22, 1914 Brooklyn, New York City |
| Died |
July 18, 2009 (aged 94) New York City |
| Occupation | classicist |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | New York University |
Lionel Casson (July 22, 1914 – July 18, 2009) was a classicist, professor emeritus at New York University, and a specialist in maritime history. He earned his B.A. in 1934 at New York University, and in 1936 became an assistant professor. He went on to earn his Ph.D. there in 1939. In 2005 he was awarded the Archaeological Institute of America Gold Medal.
He was born Lionel I. Cohen on July 22, 1914, in Brooklyn, and later changed his last name to "Casson". As a teenager he owned a sailboat that he would use on Long Island Sound. He attended New York University for all of his collegiate studies, earning a bachelor's degree there in 1934, a master's in 1936 and his Ph.D. in 1939 and was employed at NYU as an instructor. He served as an officer in the United States Navy during World War II, responsible for the interrogation of prisoners of war.
After completing his military service, Casson returned to NYU, where he served as a professor of classics from 1961 to 1979. The author of 23 books on maritime history and classic literature, Casson used ancient material ranging from Demosthenes's speeches and works by Thucydides to cargo manifests and archeological studies of ancient shipwrecks and the contents of the amphorae they carried to develop a framework for the development of shipbuilding, maritime trade routes and naval warfare in the ancient world.
In a 2005 speech to the Archaeological Institute of America accepting its Gold Medal, Casson recalled a trip to Southern France in 1953 when he had the opportunity to visit Jacques-Yves Cousteau, who was performing an investigation of an ancient shipwreck. Once he visited the warehouse with the hundreds of amphorae that had been brought to the surface, Casson said that he immediately knew that he "was in on the beginning of a totally new source of information about ancient maritime matters and I determined then and there to exploit it" and integrate this new trove of data with the information he had been able to assemble from ancient writings.
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