Arthur Fairbanks (1864-1944) was an American art historian, archaeologist and a great scholar of classical literature and mythology. From 1908 to 1925, he was director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Fairbanks was born November 13, 1864, in Hanover, New Hampshire. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1886 and attended the Yale Divinity School and the Union Theological Seminary. He also studied in Germany, receiving a Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg in 1890. He was on the faculty of Dartmouth College and Yale and Cornell Universities until 1900, when he became professor of Greek literature and Archaeology at the University of Iowa. In 1906, he was appointed professor of Greek and Greek Archaeology in the University of Michigan. He was appointed curator of Classical Art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1907, and in 1908 became director there. He supervised the museum's move to its current Fenway location. He retired in 1925. He was a member of many classical and learned societies. He died January 13, 1944, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Fairbanks was the author of important essays, including Introduction to Sociology (1896), The Mythology of Greece and Rome (1907), Handbook of Greek Religion (1910), and Greek Gods and Heroes (1915).
The Fairbanks' essay Aristophanes as a Student of Society, which today we propose to modern readers, was published in 1903 in The American Journal of Sociology. It is, undoubtedly, one of the best studies that have been written on the figure of Aristophanes, his personality and his works.