Andrew Dalby

Andrew Dalby, FCIL (born 1947 in Liverpool) is an English linguist, translator and historian who has written articles and several books on a wide range of topics including food history, language, and Classical texts.

Dalby's first food history book, Siren Feasts, appeared in 1995 and won a Runciman Award; it is also well known in Greece, where it was translated as Seireneia Deipna.

Work on this also led to Dalby's first article for Gastronomica magazine, in which he traced the disastrous exploration of Gonzalo Pizarro in search of La Canela in eastern Ecuador, showing how the myth of the "Valley of Cinnamon" first arose and identifying the real tree species which was at the root of the legend.

[2] Dalby's light-hearted biography of Bacchus includes a retelling, rare in English, of the story of Prosymnus and the price he demanded for guiding Dionysus to Hades.

In an unfavorable review of Bacchus in The Guardian, Ranjit Bolt argues that Dalby's "formidable learning" overwhelmed his ability to offer the reader an appealing narrative.

[4] Dalby's Rediscovering Homer developed out of two academic papers from the 1990s in which he argued that the Iliad and Odyssey must be seen as belonging to the same world as that of the early Greek lyric poets but to a less aristocratic genre.

Dalby attributes the loss to the emergence of large centralised political groupings, the spread of communications technologies, and the hegemony of the English language.