Edgar Lobel

Edgar Lobel (24 December 1888 – 7 July 1982) was a Romanian-British classicist and papyrologist who is best known for his four decades overseeing the publication of the literary texts among the Oxyrhynchus Papyri and for his edition of Sappho and Alcaeus in collaboration with Denys Page. His contributions to the fields of papyrology and Greek studies were many and substantial, and Eric Gardner Turner believed that Lobel should "be acknowledged as a scholar to be mentioned in the same breath as Porson and Bentley, a towering genius of English scholarship."

Lobel was born in Iași, Romania on 24 December 1888. As a youth he moved to Higher Broughton with his parents Amelia and Arthur Lobel, a shipowner. He was educated at Kersal School before moving on to Manchester Grammar School where he was head boy and won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford in 1906. Despite the fact that his father had been compelled by poverty to emigrate to the United States, Lobel took up his scholarship in 1907 and studied under several noted classicists, including the Lucretius scholar Cyril Bailey and A.W. Pickard-CambridgeIn 1911 he graduated having taken first class in Mods and Greats, in addition to winning the Gaisford Prize for Greek Verse and several other University honours. After a year's work as a professor's assistant, he continued his studies at Oxford, where he made close acquaintances of Gilbert Murray and his wife. But perhaps the most important friendship that he struck during this period was with the papyrologist A.S. Hunt, who introduced Lobel to the study of papyrology and induced him to travel to Berlin to study under Wilhelm Schubart in 1913 and 1914.

Detail of P.Oxy. X 1232, the papyrus which occasioned the first mention of Lobel in the Oxyrhynchus Papyri: "We are indebted to Mr. E. Lobel for several good suggestions on the text of this papyrus." This text would later stand as Sappho fr. 44 in the text of the Lesbian poets which Lobel prepared with Denys Page.

His edition of Sappho and Alcaeus, Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta (co-edited with Denys Page), appeared in 1955, and in the same year Lobel declined to be knighted.

The Oxryhynchus Papyri

Critical editions

• Σαπφοῦς μέλη: The Fragments of the Lyrical Poems of Sappho (Oxford, 1925)
• Ἀλκαίου μέλη: The Fragments of the Lyrical Poems of Alcaeus (Oxford, 1927)
• (with D. Page) Poetarum Lesbiorum fragmenta (Oxford, 1955)

Select occasional publications

• Greek Manuscripts of Aristotle's Poetics (London, 1933)