WIDELY considered to be the finest Latinist of his time, D. R. Shackleton Bailey was foremost a textual critic and editor, who specialised in removing the errors accumulated in the repeated copying of ancient literature.

He produced editions or textual discussions on an astonishing variety of Latin authors — Horace, Statius, Lucan, Martial, Valerius Maximus, the Latin Anthology, some of Cicero’s speeches, the brief declamations transmitted under the name of Quintilian — as well as of Tibetan Sanscrit texts.

His exceptional skill lay in the precision and rigour of his Latin, his breadth of knowledge of the relevant literary and historical contexts and his brilliance in conjectural emendation. For example, in the 20th letter to Atticus (1.20), Cicero is apologising for his brother Quintus. The transmitted text is “a nobis atque nostris” — “on our part and that of those near me”; taking a hint from the humanist Corradus, Shackleton Bailey prints “a nobis adeo a atque nobis” — “on our part, or I ought rather to say on the part of those near to me” — restoring the idiom by which Cicero elegantly corrects himself.

His model was in many ways A. E. Housman, and he shared Housman’s flair and wit, and likewise his penchant for devastating criticism of critics who failed to meet his standards of competence.

In addition to his work on texts, he wrote brief, critical, yet sympathetic biographies of Cicero and Horace, guides to names in Cicero and studies of Roman nomenclature and of rhyme and near-rhyme in Latin dactylic verse. He published many books, and articles in scholarly journals (some reprinted in his Selected Classical Papers).

His masterwork was his edition of Cicero’s letters with translation and commentary. His contribution to the understanding of this central figure in Roman history, rhetoric and philosophy is hard to overstate. Not only was his scholarship superb, but his translations also unite accuracy with elegance and style, and in the Loeb and Penguin editions they will delight and assist students and general readers for many years to come.

His scholarship was indefatigable: he was still spending eight hours every day at his desk a few weeks before his death.

David Roy Shackleton Bailey was born in Lancaster in 1917, son of the Rev J. H. Shackleton Bailey, a mathematician and headmaster of the Lancaster Royal Grammar School. He attended his father’s school and then took his BA in classics at Gonville and Caius in 1939. Like many philologists, he made his contribution to the war effort as a code-breaker, and then returned to Cambridge (MA, 1943; DLitt, 1958).

He was Fellow of Gonville and Caius, 1944-55, praelector, 1954-55, Fellow of Jesus and director of studies in classics 1955-64, and returned to Gonville and Caius as Fellow and bursar in 1965, senior bursar 1965-1968. He was also university lecturer in Tibetan, 1948-68.

In 1967 he joined the faculty at the University of Michigan. In the same year he married Hilary Amis. The marriage ended in divorce in 1974.

In 1975 he went to Harvard as Professor of Greek and Latin, becoming Pope Professor of Latin Language and Literature in 1982. From 1978 to 1984 he edited Harvard Studies in Classical Philology. In 1988, after retiring from Harvard, he moved back to Ann Arbor and served as adjunct professor in classical studies, last teaching in 2002.

Shackleton Bailey was a celebrated eccentric, and it is not always easy to distinguish the reliable from the apocryphal among the innumerable anecdotes about him. He loved Wagner and cats: Letters to Atticus is dedicated “Dono Donorum Aeluro Candidissimo” — “gift of gifts, whitest of cats” — and it is said that he returned to Gonville and Caius from Jesus because Jesus would not permit him to have a cat flap cut in his 16th-century door.

His capacity for alcohol was vast, and he was a stalwart of the infamous party given at the annual meeting of the American Philological Association by the Petronian Society. He used to stand on his head at social events.

Only rarely did he remember the names of students, and many of his acquaintances suspected that he enjoyed his position as lecturer in Tibetan because students were so few. Nonetheless, many students treasured the opportunity to see his formidable intelligence at work and to experience the renowned personality.

Sometimes he seemed an exemplary unworldly scholar. When money could be saved, however, he was never in any confusion. During his Harvard years, a junior colleague was expected to drive him to New Hampshire at regular intervals so that he could buy liquor by the case at low prices.

His editions, prepared on a manual typewriter whose ribbons were changed as rarely as possible, were often typed on the clean side of proofs of his earlier works. He never touched a computer keyboard, but maintained extensive scholarly contacts through the traditional post. Although he knew and loved the canon of English literature up to the 19th century, he never read contemporary literature, preferring mysteries or German memoirs, which he often read during television commercials.

He received many honours: FBA in 1958; in 1977 membership in the American Philosophical Society; in 1978 the Goodwin Award of Merit of the American Philological Association; membership of the American Academy of Arts of letters in 1979; an honorary DLitt from Dublin in 1984; the Kenyon Medal of the British Academy in 1985; in 1999 an honorary membership in the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies; in 2000 an honorary fellowship at Gonville and Caius; and this year the College of Literature, Sciences, and the Arts at Michigan named a collegiate chair for him.

He is survived by his second wife, Kristine Zvirbulis, whom he married in 1994.

Professor D.R. Shackleton Bailey, Latinist, was born on December 10, 1917. He died on November 28, 2005, aged 87.