Wendell Clausen

Wendell Vernon Clausen (April 2, 1923 – October 12, 2006) was an American classicist, who specialized in the poetry of Vergil. After undergraduate studies in English and Latin at the University of Washington, he took a PhD in classics from the University of Chicago in 1948, and moved to teach classics at Amherst College in Massachusetts. From 1959 until his retirement in 1993. he taught Greek, Latin, and later comparative literature at Harvard University.

Most of Clausen's publications were in the field of Latin poetry. He was the first American to edit a volume of the Oxford Classical Texts, releasing a 1959 volume in the series of the Roman satirists Persius and Juvenal. The main focus of his work was Vergilian poetry, particularly the pastoral poems known as the Eclogues. Clausen's 1964 article "An Interpretation of the Aeneid" is considered a foundational text of the Harvard School, which interpreted Vergil's Aeneid as containing subtle messages expressing discomfort with the Roman emperor Augustus and his imperialistic ideology.