Kurt Latte (9 March 1891, Königsberg – 8 June 1964, Tutzing) was a German philologist and classical scholar known for his work on ancient Roman religion.
After taking his doctorate at Königsberg in 1913 under Ludwig Deubner with a study on cultic dance in ancient Greece, he began work on an edition of the dictionary of Hesychius of Alexandria.
After service in World War I he was Assistent at the Institut für Altertumskunde of the University of Münster from 1920 to 1923, gaining his Habilitation there in 1920 with a study of Greek and Roman sacral law.
Having returned to Germany in 1937 from a visiting professorship in Chicago, Latte lived out the period of Nazi rule in Hamburg (where he was supported by Bruno Snell), Düsseldorf, and Osterode am Harz, where he had been invited by his erstwhile Greifswald colleague Konrat Ziegler, who hid him for a time.
[2] Latte rejected animism as having explanatory value for the study of Roman religion, but made some use of the concept of sympathetic magic, an approach criticized as inconsistent.