Robert Angus Brooks

Robert Angus Brooks (October 16, 1920 – April 1, 1976) was an American scholar of Latin and under secretary at the Smithsonian Institution. He also served as Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations and Logistics under the Johnson Administration.

Brooks was born in Calcutta in India; his mother was Scottish and his father an American jute manufacturer. From the age of three, he attended school in Scotland. The family moved in 1934 to the United States, and Brooks accordingly moved to Roxbury Latin School in Massachusetts, from which he proceeded to Harvard College. He graduated summa cum laude in 1940, and was made a junior fellow of Harvard's Society of Fellows in 1942. Brooks's academic studies were interrupted by World War II, in which he served as an intelligence officer in the United States Army Air Forces. After the war he studied at Harvard for a PhD, which was granted in 1949 with a thesis on the Roman writer Ennius.

Brooks took an academic post at Harvard after receiving his doctorate, and began work on a study of the Golden Bough, an episode in Virgil's Aeneid. He was dismissed in 1951, but published the results of his research in 1953 as "Discolor aura: Reflections on the Golden Bough". The article became a founding text of the Harvard School, which challenged the view of the Aeneid as a heroic poem written to glorify the emperor Augustus. Upon leaving Harvard, he became an editor and analyst at Harbridge House, a Boston management consulting company. He was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations and Logistics in 1965, during the Vietnam War, and served in that capacity until 1969.

Following his government service, Brooks spent two years as president of Harbridge House, then became deputy under secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. During his time there he collaborated on a translation of Euripides's Children of Heracles and began writing a book on the ancient Museum of Alexandria. As well as his classical studies, Brooks was a prolific actor, often performing in Greek- and Latin-language versions of ancient plays, and a poet whose works were published in The New Yorker and The Atlantic.