December 31, 2025
David D. Mulroy was born in Madison, WI. He received his AB in Classics magna cum laude from Georgetown University in 1965 and his PhD in Classics at Stanford University in 1971. He taught at Princeton University as a lecturer and assistant professor before joining the Classics faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1973. He retired as a full professor of Classics at UWM in 2012.
A guiding conviction of David’s teaching and scholarship was that the classics endure because they provide aesthetic and intellectual enjoyment. An avid softball and soccer player, David liked to say that the Greeks and Romans left us with “the greatest line-up in world literature,” and he took great pleasure throughout his career in helping students enjoy classical texts as much as he did. With remarkable energy and versatility David eventually taught nearly every course offered by the Classics program, from classical mythology to graduate courses in Greek and Latin authors, and he generously directed numerous independent studies besides.
David’s favorite approach to teaching classical authors was the Great Books seminar, in which the teacher joins the students in investigating and discussing primary texts. Rather than try to lead students to predetermined answers about what the authors were saying, David preferred posing questions that were genuinely open. He was an approachable and humane teacher who set students at ease with his low-key style and abundant sense of humor. Never afraid to share his own uncertainty or perplexity, he valued and learned from his students’ insights. He established the Certificate Program in the Study of the Liberal Arts through Great Books at UWM in 1996. In the same year he founded with Max Yela the now venerable Great Books Roundtable at Golda Meir Library, a monthly discussion group open to members of the public who share an enthusiasm for reading classic texts of all kinds, ancient and modern.
In the 1990s David began to feel that students’ grasp of sophisticated writing was in decline and suspected that the trend away from teaching formal grammar in the schools was to blame. Over the course of two years (1999-2001) he put his extensive research and thinking on the topic to the test by giving weekly tutorials in English grammar and sentence diagramming to local elementary school students. In 2003 he published The War Against Grammar, a lively and learned plea for the restoration of grammar to the curriculum that found a wide and sympathetic audience. Another focus of David’s outreach in those years was the Odyssey Project, a Bard Clemente Course in the Humanities designed to introduce low-income adults to the humanities, for which he served as course director and instructor for five semesters (2001-2003).
David was a gifted and prolific translator of Greek and Latin poetry. He undertook the challenge of making the ancient texts speak directly to modern readers in a lively and elegant contemporary idiom. His efforts resulted in a series of highly praised volumes, including Early Greek Lyric Poetry (1992); Horace’s Odes and Epodes (1994); The Complete Poetry of Catullus (2002); Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (2011), Antigone (2013), and Oedipus at Colonus (2014); Aeschylus’ The Oresteia: Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, and The Holy Goddesses (2018); and Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (2020).
David’s contributions to classical philology were published in journals that include Transactions of the American Philological Association, Hellas, Arethusa, Classical World, Classical Bulletin, and Phoenix. He was also a frequent presenter at meetings of the American Philological Association and the Classical Association of the Middle West and South. His writings and presentations encompassed a broad range of topics in both Greek and Latin literature and expressed the same open-mindedness and independence of judgment that characterized his teaching. He was fearless in questioning some of the field’s long-held assumptions, as when he argued that Pindar had a sense of humor or that the Minos and Hipparchus are authentic dialogues of Plato intended to be read alongside the philosopher’s Laws.
Whenever we in the Classics program meet former students and friends of David’s in the community, we are reminded of the many lives he touched. He had an especially productive friendship with Milwaukee businessman and amateur classicist Richard Johnston. The two read Greek together for many years and co-authored two scholarly articles: “Simonides’ Use of the Term Tetragonos” (Arethusa, 2004) and “The Hymn to Hermes and the Athenian Altar of the Twelve Gods” (Classical World, 2009). In gratitude for David’s mentoring and friendship, Johnston generously donated funds to establish the David Mulroy Scholarship at UWM. The scholarship has been awarded annually since 2018 in support of students pursuing studies in ancient Greek culture and language. We can think of no more fitting tribute to our colleague and friend than one ensuring that enjoyment of the classics will continue.
