MICHAEL GRANT was one of the few classical historians to win respect from academics and a lay readership. Immensely prolific, he wrote and edited more than 50 books of nonfiction and translation, covering topics from Roman coinage and the eruption of Vesuvius to the Gospels and Christ.

“I have always wanted people to be better informed,” he once wrote, “and having absorbed over the years a certain, limited amount of information myself, I have wanted to pass it on as palatably as I can — first through academic channels, of which I have had the good fortune to be able to avail myself, and then through my own publications.” Such a prescription found shape in his books and in his career outside writing; he was for many years active in the British Council’s project to promote British culture overseas, and he taught classics at the universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh.

Michael Grant was born in 1914. Educated at Harrow, he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1933 to read classics. After graduating, he took up a research fellowship to write the thesis that he would publish as his first book, From Imperium to Auctoritas, in 1946. Perhaps surprisingly, he began his writing career in academic numismatics. Over the ensuing decade he wrote four books on Roman coinage, arguing that the conflict between imperatorial eccentricity and the traditionalism of the Roman mint made coinage, used as propaganda and currency, a unique social record. Later he would become president and honorary fellow of the Royal Numismatic Society.

In 1939 the war interrupted his Cambridge career. After training, during which his closest associate was a fellow Trinity student, the spy Anthony Blunt, he joined the War Office in London. He spent a year in the capital on intelligence work. After a brief spell in Paris, whence he returned on the eve of German occupation, he was called for interview by Lord Lloyd, the chairman of the British Council. On the basis of the “little Turkish” which Grant had mentioned on his enlistment, he was appointed the British Council’s first representative to Turkey. “No one else seems to know any Turkish at all,” Lloyd told him. After a spell in Cairo to learn the ropes, Grant arrived in Ankara in September 1940.

The British Council had a brief to promulgate British culture and education, and Grant was pleased to be able to install many British teachers in Turkish schools. He later related that he had been partly responsible for getting his friend Steven (later Sir Steven) Runciman, the historian, his position at Ankara University.

On the day that Turkey broke off diplomatic relations with Germany and Japan, Grant was married, to Anne-Sophie Beskow.

In 1945 the couple returned to London with Grant’s collection of almost 700 Roman coins, which subsequently passed to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. His first book was published the next year.

Back in London he became deputy director of the British Council’s European division. The immediate postwar years were a time of great growth for the council, and he was called upon to travel in Austria, Hungary and Berlin.

In 1948, however, he returned to Cambridge with his family. He stayed there a year before applying for the vacant chair of humanity (Latin) at Edinburgh University, a position he held from 1948 to 1959, with a two-year leave of absence to act as Vice-Chancellor at the University of Khartoum. In those nine years, he brought out seven works of classical scholarship — four on coins, two overviews (Ancient History and Roman Literature) and a survey of the reign of Tiberius — and produced translations of Tacitus and Cicero.

Already Grant’s approach to classical history was beginning to divide critics. Numismatists felt that his academic work was beyond reproach, but some academics balked at his attempt to condense a survey of Roman literature into 300 pages, and felt (in the words of one reviewer) that “even the most learned and gifted of historians should observe a speed-limit”. The academics would keep cavilling, but the public kept buying.

In 1956 Grant left for two years of fruitful but contentious administration at the University of Khartoum, an institution set up after Sudan’s independence. Though the Suez crisis did nothing for Britain’s image, and there were upsets during Grant’s tenure — such as a visit by Lady Baden-Powell, who told ministers “You chaps need your heads knocking together” — he performed the task of handing over the university to the Sudanese with dedication and verve.

Between 1959 and 1966 he was Vice-Chancellor of Queen’s University, Belfast. While there he wrote four more books, among them his approachable and concise edition of the Myths of the Greeks and Romans (1962). After that he retired from academic life to write full time. He moved with his wife to Gattaiola, a village near Lucca in Tuscany, where he lived until his death.

Grant’s work ethic was prodigious; rarely two years went by without a new volume appearing, and as he grew older, so his remit widened. At liberty to pursue almost any avenue of inquiry that he wished, he wrote both generally (The Ancient Mediterranean, 1969; Roman Myths, 1971) and specifically (The Gladiators, 1967; The Roman Forum, 1970). He produced biographies of Julius Caesar (generally considered his best), Cleopatra, Herod the Great, Nero, Jesus, St Paul, St Peter and Constantine, as well as works on Greek and Roman literature, architecture, art and biblical study. Gladiators (1967) was reprinted in the wake of Ridley Scott’s film Gladiator (2000): Grant wrote that a realistic consideration of the gladiatorial phenomenon was more than ever necessary in the 20th century, since it was “one of the extremely few epochs of human history to have achieved cruelty on a scale as numerically lavish as Ancient Rome.”

His belief that popularising the classics depended on not talking down to the reader extended to his translation. He made many selections from his versions of Cicero’s speeches and letters, and his translation of Tacitus’s Annals of Imperial Rome is one of the standard translations of the work. He was insistent that classicists should pay an ancient writer “the compliment of assuming that he has something to say to us today, and therefore of quoting him from a translation which does just this,” and his translations paid the same compliment, making Tacitus’s frequently barbarous Latin into an elegant and readable work of modern history.

Grant’s most recent work was Sick Caesars (2000). A reflective autobiography, My First Eighty Years (1984), proffered some of the contemporary political judgments from which he had refrained in his work.

His wife and two sons survive him.

Michael Grant, historian, was born on November 21, 1914. He died on October 4, 2004, aged 89.