István Borzsák

Borzsák István ( Stefan Borzsák, born December 24, 1914 in Monor, † December 9, 2007 in Budapest) was a Hungarian classical philologist.

Life

After attending high school in the Reformed Church in Budapest Borzsák studied classical philology at the university of Budapest. His doctorate in 1936. From 1953 to 1956 he was Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Budapest. After the Hungarian uprising in 1956, he was deprived of his office. In April 1957, he participated in the provincial Roman archaeologist and historian András Mócsy in the founding of Eirene - Committee for the Promotion of Classical Studies in the socialist countries in Liblice and Prague. In 1963 he was rehabilitated and appointed professor at the University of Debrecen. In 1978 he returned as a professor at the University of Budapest, where he was also elected the first Chairman of the Department of Classical Philology. In 1985 he became Professor Emeritus.

Borzsák was one of the leading classical scholars of Hungary. He dealt particularly with the ancient authors Horace and Tacitus, but also with Latin literature from Hungary. He was a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen and the Academia Latina in Rome. For his life's work, he was in 1994 awarded the Herder Prize of the City of Vienna.