Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb (August 27, 1841 - December 9, 1905) was a British classical scholar and politician.

He was born in Dundee, Scotland. His father was a well-known barrister, and his grandfather a judge. He was educated at Charterhouse School and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He won the Porson and Craven scholarships, was senior classic in 1862, and became fellow and tutor of his college in 1863. From 1869 to 1875 he was public orator of the university; professor of Greek at Glasgow from 1875 to 1889, and Regius_Professor_of_Greek at Cambridge from 1889 till his death.

In 1891 he was elected member of parliament for Cambridge University; he was knighted in 1900. Jebb was acknowledged to be one of the most brilliant classical scholars of his time, a humanist and an unsurpassed translator from and into the classical languages. A collected volume, Translations into Greek and Latin, appeared in 1873 (ed. 1909). He received many honorary degrees from European and American universities, and in 1905 was made a member of the Order of Merit. In 1874, he married in 1874 the widow of General Adam J Slemmer , of the United States army; she survived him.

The most important of Jebb's publications are:

• The Characters of Theophrastus (1870), text, introduction, English translation and commentary (re-edited by JE Sandys, 1909)
• The Attic Orators from Antiphon to Isaeus (2nd ed., I893), with companion volume, Selections from the Attic Orators (2nd ed, 1888)
• Bentley (1882)
• Sophocles (3rd ed., 1893) the seven plays, text, English translation and notes, the promised edition of the fragments being prevented by his death
• Bacchylides (1905), text, translation, and notes
• Homer (3rd ed., 1888), an introduction to the Iliad and Odyssey
• Modern Greece (1901)
• The Growth and Influence of Classical Greek Poetry (1893).

His translation of the Rhetoric of Aristotle was published posthumously under the editorship of JE Sandys (1909). A selection from his Essays and Addresses, and a subsequent volume, Life and Letters of Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb (with critical introduction by AW Verrall) were published by his widow in 1907; see also an appreciative notice by JE Sandys, Hist. of Classical Scholarship, iii. (1908).

Reference

• This entry incorporates public domain text originally from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica.