Walter Burkert

He has influenced generations of students of religion since the 1960s, combining in the modern way the findings of archaeology and epigraphy with the work of poets, historians, and philosophers. He was a member of both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He published books on the balance between lore and science among the followers of Pythagoras, and more extensively on ritual and archaic cult survival, on the ritual killing at the heart of religion, on mystery religions, and on the reception in the Hellenic world of Near Eastern and Persian culture, which sets Greek religion in its wider Aegean and Near Eastern context. Burkert was born in Neuendettelsau. He married Maria Bosch in 1957, and they had three children, Reinhard, Andrea and Cornelius. He studied classical philology, history, and philosophy at the University of Erlangen and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (1950–1954), and obtained his doctorate in philosophy at Erlangen in 1955. Following his marriage, he became an assistant in course teaching at the University of Erlangen for five years (1957–1961) and, then returned to his former university as lecturer for another five years (until 1966). From early 1965 he worked as a junior fellow in the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C. for one year.