Alfred Denis Godley was a classical

Classics

Classics is the branch of the Humanities comprising the languages, literature, philosophy, history, art, archaeology and other culture of the ancient Mediterranean world ; especially Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome during Classical Antiquity Classics (sometimes encompassing Classical Studies or...

 scholar and author of humorous poems. From 1910 to 1920 he was Public Orator at the University of Oxford

University of Oxford

The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...

, a post that involved composing citations in Latin for the recipients of honorary degrees. One of these was for Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy, OM was an English novelist and poet. While his works typically belong to the Naturalism movement, several poems display elements of the previous Romantic and Enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural.While he regarded himself primarily as a...

 who received an Honorary D. Litt. in 1920, and whose treatment of rural themes Godley compared to Virgil

Virgil

Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English , was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid...

.

He is mainly remembered today for his humorous verse, including macaronic pieces such as The Motor Bus, which playfully mixes Latin declensions with English.

Godley's published works include:

• Verses to Order (1892)
• Aspects of Modern Oxford (1894)
• Socrates and Athenian Society in His Day (1896)
• Lyra Frivola (1899)
• Second Strings (1902)
• Oxford in the Eighteenth Century (1908)
• The Casual Ward (1912)
• Reliquiae A. D. Godley (1926)

He also published a translations of Herodotus

Herodotus

Herodotus was an ancient Greek historian who was born in Halicarnassus, Caria and lived in the 5th century BC . He has been called the "Father of History", and was the first historian known to collect his materials systematically, test their accuracy to a certain extent and arrange them in a...

 (1921) and Horace

Horace

Quintus Horatius Flaccus , known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus.-Life:...

's Odes (1898).

Godley was a first cousin of the Under-Secretary of State for India John Arthur Godley, 1st Baron Kilbracken.

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