E. V. Rieu

Emile Victor Rieu CBE (10 February 1887 – 11 May 1972) was a classicist, publisher, poet, and initiator and editor of the Penguin Classics series of books.

Rieu was born in London, youngest child of the Swiss Charles Pierre Henri Rieu (1820–1902), an Orientalist, and his wife Agnes, daughter of Julius Heinrich Hisgen of Utrecht. He was a scholar of St Paul's School and Balliol College, Oxford, gaining a first in Classical Honours Moderations in 1908. In 1914 he married Nelly Lewis, daughter of a Pembrokeshire businessman. They had two sons (one of them was D. C. H. Rieu) and two daughters. Rieu died in London in 1972.

Having worked for the Bombay branch of Oxford University Press, Rieu joined the publishers Methuen in London in 1923, where he was managing director from 1933 to 1936, and then academic and literary adviser.

Rieu became best known for his lucid translations of Homer and for a modern translation of the four Gospels which evolved from his role as editor of a projected (but aborted) Penguin translation of the Bible. Though he had been a lifelong agnostic, his experience translating the Gospels brought him to change and join the Church of England. His translation of the Odyssey, 1946, was the opener of the Penguin Classics, a series that he founded with Sir Allen Lane and edited from 1944 to 1964. According to his son, "[h]is vision was to make available to the ordinary reader, in good modern English, the great classics of every language."

The inspiration for the Penguin Classics series, initially faint, came early in the Second World War, while bombs were falling. Each night after supper, Rieu would sit with his wife and daughters in London and translate to them passages from the Odyssey. The Penguin editors are said to have been dubious about the commercial prospects for the book (1946), but it became recognised as a classic itself, celebrated for the smooth and original prose, and the forerunner of Penguin's successful series of translated classics.

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