William Henry Denham Rouse
1863 — 1950
Rouse was born in Calcutta, India on 30 May 1863. After his family returned home on leave to Britain Rouse was sent to Regent's Park College in London, where he studied as a lay student. In 1881 he won a scholarship to Christ's College, Cambridge. He achieved a double first in the Classical Tripos at the University of Cambridge, where he also studied Sanskrit. He became a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge in 1888.
Rouse was appointed headmaster of The Perse School, Cambridge, in 1902. He restored it to a sound financial footing following a crisis. He believed firmly in learning by doing as well as by seeing and hearing. Although the curriculum at the Perse was dominated by classics, he urged that science should be learned through experiment and observation. He was described by the archivist of The Perse School as the school's greatest headmaster: "Rouse was strongly independent to the point of eccentricity. He hated most machines, all bureaucracy and public exams." He retired from teaching in 1928.
In 1911 Rouse started a successful series of summer schools for teachers to encourage the use of the direct method of teaching Latin and Greek. The Association for the Reform of Latin Teaching (ARLT) was formed in 1913 as a result of these seminars.
Also in 1911 James Loeb chose W.H.D. Rouse, together with two other eminent classical scholars, T. E. Page and Edward Capps, to be founding editors of the Loeb Classical Library.
Rouse is known for his plain English prose translations of Homer's Odyssey (1937) and Iliad (1938). He is also recognized for his translations of some of Plato's dialogues, including The Republic, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo.
His translations of volumes II, IV and (with E. B. Cowell) VI of the Jātaka was reissued by the PTS some time after his death.
Biography and photo sourced from Wikipedia, which in turn cites Catalogus Philologorum Classicorum, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, A Cambridge Alumni Database, "Who's Who". Oxford University Press as sources; and citizendium.org/wiki
