Walter Headlam

Walter George Headlam (15 February 1866 – 20 June 1908) was a British classical scholar and poet, perhaps best remembered for his work on the Mimes of Herodas.

[3] On leaving Harrow Headlam studied at King's College, Cambridge from 1884 to 1887 where he gained a First in the Classical Tripos, as well as receiving a number of other academic awards including seven Browne medals for Greek and Latin odes and epigrams and the Porson Prize.

[4] Deeply interested in textual criticism, "in order to elucidate difficult passages he read exceptionally widely in Greek texts of the classical and post-classical periods".

[6] In addition, Walter Headlam wrote articles for the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, signing his work "W. G. H." A friend was Virginia Woolf, with whom he had a "brief flirtation".

[3] The classical scholar John Edwin Sandys, in his A History of Classical Scholarship (1908), wrote of Headlam, "Only nine days before his death, he had the pleasure of meeting Wilamowitz, who, in the course of his brief visit to Cambridge, said of some of Walter Headlam's Greek verses that, if they had been discovered in an Egyptian papyrus, they would immediately have been recognised by all scholars as true Greek poetry".

[10] Martin Litchfield West wrote of Headlam, "Many of his conjectures were injudicious, but at their best they have a profundity and elegance that Wilamowitz seldom if ever achieved".