About the Translator

Ian C. Johnston was born in Valparaiso, Chile, and educated at McGill University (BSc, Geology and Chemistry, 1959), University of Bristol (BA, English and Greek, 1968), and the University of Toronto (MA, English, 1969). In addition he has certificates from the Ontario College of Education, Heidelberg University, and the Jarvis School of Welding.

Johnston is the author of The Ironies of War: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad, published by the University of America Press in 1987 (for a brief review of this book consult the following link: Review). He also wrote and produced a number of satirical musical revues for a theatre company he organized (the Yes Mac Players).

Johnston has developed and maintains the web site johnstonia, a resource for teachers, students, and general readers, which has had over 11 million visitors since its inception.. The site contains a wide range of materials: lectures on Great Books, handbooks on grammar, on statistics, on essay writing, and on the history of science, a number of translations from Greek, French, German and Latin, book reviews, and essays. These materials are freely available to anyone who wishes to download them (other than for commercial book publication).

Professor Johnston has had over 25 titles released in the last several years, including The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Iliad [Abrdged], The Odyssey [Abridged, The Oresteia, Antigone, Oedipus the King, Philoctetes, Ajax, Bacchae, Medea, Orestes, Birds, Clouds, Frogs, and Lysistrata, Knights, Peace, Nietzsche's  Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, Birth of Tragedy, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life and Kant's Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, Descartes' Discourse on Methods and Lucretius' On the Nature of Things, as well as the Metamorphosis and other short stories of Kafka all of which are available on this website.  He is currently retired as a university-college instructor and lives in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada with this wife.