R. B. Rutherford was appointed Tutor at Christ Church, Oxford in 1982 and has taught there since, covering Greek and Latin literature in tutorials and lectures. His published work ranges across Greek and Latin, prose and verse, epic, historiography and philosophic prose. Among other works Rutherford has published a Cambridge commentary on books 19 and 20 of the Odyssey (1992), a readable monograph on Homer (1996) and a survey of the whole of classical literature in less than 400 pages (2005). Greek tragedy was the focus of one of his earliest articles and has been a major interest to him ever