Downes

Downes [D(o)unaeus], ANDREW (c. 1549-1628), English classical scholar, was born in the county of Shropshire. He was educated at Shrewsbury and St John’s College, Cambridge, where he did much to revive the study of Greek, at that time at a very low ebb. In 1571 he was elected fellow of his college, and, in 1585, he was appointed to the regius professorship of Greek, which he held for nearly forty years. He died at Coton, near Cambridge, on the 2nd of February 1627/1628. According to Simonds d’Ewes (Autobiography, ed. J. O. Halliwell, i. pp. 139, 141), who attended his lectures on Demosthenes and gives a slight sketch of his personality, Downes was accounted “the ablest Grecian of Christendom.” He published little, but seems to have devoted his chief attention to the Greek orators. He edited Lysias Pro caede Eratosthenis (1593); Praelectiones in Philippicam de pace Demosthenis (1621), dedicated to King James I.; some letters (written in Greek) to Isaac Casaubon, printed in the Epistolae of the latter; and notes to St Chrysostom, in Sir Henry Savile’s edition. Downes was also one of the seven translators of the Apocrypha for the “authorized” version of the Bible, and one of the six learned men appointed to revise the new version after its completion.

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