Johannes Hendrik Thiel (27 January 1896 in Amsterdam - 19 May 1974 in Utrecht) was a Dutch classical philologist and ancient historian.
[citation needed] In the first phase of his academic work, Thiel focussed on ancient Greek legal sources.
[citation needed] Thiel was very shy and, even after 40 years of teaching, he still found it difficult to enter the lecture theatre every time.
[2] Despite his personal distance from his contemporaries, he was extremely popular and respected by secondary school pupils and college students, who, according to his obituary, were almost ‘lyrical’ about his way of lecturing.
[2] In the early 1960s, fellow historians may have turned up their noses at his statement that if he had lived in Julius Caesar's time, he would have joined his murderers ‘to give him his due’[2] - but this won him the respect and affection of the students.