Arthur Darby Nock was born on 21 February 1902 in Portsmouth, England. A classicist and theologian, he was a leading scholar in the history of religion. In 1926, the same year he was awarded an MA, he introduced and translated Sallustius’s text. Over the next few years, he published on almost every branch of classical learning, earning him an international reputation. Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge in 1923, he became Lecturer in Classics in 1926. He was appointed Frothingham Professor of History of Religion at Harvard in 1930, where he remained until his death.
Awarded honorary doctorates from Birmingham, Sorbonne Université, and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, he was also Fellow of the British Academy. Nock undertook a thirty-three-year editorship of the Harvard Theological Review, shaping it into a leading international journal. Prominent works include Sallustius: ‘Concerning the Gods and the Universe’, with Prolegomena and Translation (1926), Conversion (1933), and St. Paul (1938). The fourteen volumes of Cambridge Ancient History, published during the 1930s, contain two chapters by Nock and were said to be ‘small masterpieces of exposition’.
