My colleague and friend Keith Rutter, who has died aged 85 after a short bout of pneumonia, was a distinguished historian and numismatist of ancient Greece.
Since 1971, Keith had a distinguished career at the University of Edinburgh. He was a devoted servant of the university, an inspirational teacher, and an influential scholar who published widely on aspects of ancient history and historiography beyond numismatics. He was a passionate enthusiast of Greek culture in all its phases, and a huge source of support to generations of students and colleagues around the world.
Born in south Manchester, Keith had a very happy childhood; he was the son of Polly Faulkner and George Rutter, an engineer. After a scholarship to Manchester grammar school, he went to Queens’ College, Cambridge, in the late 1950s to study classics, where he discovered a love of rowing. He completed his PhD in 1969 and published the work on the coinages of ancient Naples and Campania in 1979. This remains the standard work, as does the volume of Historia Numorum covering the ancient Greek coinages of Italy (2001).
At his death, the next volume, about Sicily, was almost ready for publication. He also wrote a more general book, The Greek Coinages of Southern Italy and Sicily (1997), while two trips to Iran sparked an interest in Achaemenid coinage, the subject of another book that he had almost completed. He also had a wider interest in Greek coinage and the archaic and early classical Greek world; The Archaic and Early Classical Greek World: Using Coins as Sources is in the course of publication.
After he retired in 2004, Keith continued to teach and write. He spent time in Athens teaching and played a major role in securing funding for the biannual Leventis visiting professorship and conference at Edinburgh University. He learned Portuguese and visited Brazil three times, to teach numismatics in both São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. No one who knew him will forget his gentle, kind and convivial manner.
In 1969 he married Wendy Millen, a teacher whom he had met at primary school, and they enjoyed holidays in Iran, Syria and Central America. A gym-goer, rower and mountain walker, he completed the Munros in 1987. With his daughter, Catherine, he trekked in Pakistan, India, Tajikistan and Peru.
Wendy and Catherine survive him.
