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Nicholas Geoffrey Lemprière Hammond (born November 15 1907; died March 24 2001) was a Greek a classical scholar of great accomplishment and an operative for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) in occupied Greece during World War Two.

Hammond studied classics at Fettes College and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He excelled in his exams and also spent vacations exploring Greece and Albania on foot, acquiring unrivalled knowledge of the topography and terrain, as well as fluency in Albanian. These abilities led him to be recruited by the SOE during World War Two in 1940. His activities included many dangerous sabotage missions in Greece, Albania, and Crete. In 1944 he was temporarily in command of the Allied military mission to the Greek resistance. He published a memoir of his war service - Venture into Greece in 1983; he was awarded the order of the DSO and the Greek Order of the Phoenix.

In the postwar period, Hammond returned to academia as senior tutor at Clare College, Cambridge. In 1954 he became headmaster of Clifton College, Bristol and in 1962 was appointed professor of Greek at Bristol University, a post which he held until his retirement in 1973. He was elected a member of the British Academy in 1968.

His scholarship focused on the history of ancient Macedonia and Epirus.

Selected Works

1. Migrations and invasions in Greece and adjacent areas (1976).
2. A history of Greece to 322 B.C. (1986).
3. Philip of Macedon (1994).
4. The genius of Alexander the Great (1997).
5. The classical age of Greece (1999).
6. Poetics of Aristotle: rearranged, abridged and translated for better understanding by the general reader (2001).

References

• Richard Clogg in The Guardian 5 April 2001.

• Classical scholars