[5] Arrowsmith is remembered for his translations of Petronius's Satyricon (1959) and Aristophanes' plays The Birds (1961) and The Clouds (1962), as well as Euripides' Alcestis, Cyclops, Heracles, Orestes, Hecuba, and The Bacchae, and other classical and contemporary works.
He was the general editor of the 33-volume The Greek Tragedy in New Translations (Oxford, 1973) and of Nietzsche's Unmodern Observations (Yale, 1989).
Arrowsmith also translated modern works, including The Storm and Other Things (Norton, 1985) by Eugenio Montale, the Nobel laureate Italian poet; Hard Labor (Grossman, 1976) by Cesare Pavese, for which he won the U.S. National Book Award in category Translation (a split award);[6] and Six Modern Italian Novellas (Pocket Books, 1964).
[8] He blamed "the hideous jungle of academic bureaucracy" for making the humanities irrelevant to modern life and sacrificing education to trivial research, "the cult of the fact" and career training.
[4] Later he served on a National Endowment for the Humanities panel that issued a report in 1984 voicing similar views.