1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Creech, Thomas

CREECH, THOMAS (1659–1700), English classical scholar, was born at Blandford, Dorsetshire, in 1659. He received his early education from Thomas Curgenven, master of Sherborne school. In 1675 he entered Wadham College, Oxford, and obtained a fellowship in 1683 at All Souls’. He was headmaster of Sherborne school from 1694 to 1696, and in 1699 he received a college living, but in June 1700 he hanged himself. The immediate cause of the act was said to be a money difficulty, though according to some it was a love disappointment; both of these circumstances no doubt had their share in a catastrophe primarily due to an already pronounced melancholia. Creech’s fame rests on his translation of Lucretius (1682) in rhymed heroic couplets, in which, according to Otway, the pure ore of the original “somewhat seems refined.” He also published a version of Horace (1684), and translated the Idylls of Theocritus (1684), the Thirteenth Satire of Juvenal (1693), the Astronomicon of Manilius (1697), and parts of Plutarch, Virgil and Ovid.