Born into a war-torn Germany, Sabine MacCormack had a peripatetic childhood, and she only learned to read and write when she was eight, finally settling at her grandmother’s home in Bavaria, where she attended a Catholic school. She completed her education in a gymnasium, which gave her a remarkable grounding in Latin and Greek that she would draw upon for the rest of her career. She studied classics and history at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, deepening her study of philology under the tutelage of the renowned scholar Hadwig Horner, who introduced her to the idea, so central to her future work, that Western antiquity was composed of both classical and Christian authors. She took a brief detour into modern history, receiving her BA in that field at Oxford in 1964, but then returned to the classical period, taking her D.Phil. from Oxford in 1974 with a dissertation on imperial art and...

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