According to the Time obituary, Knox was deployed during the Second World War by the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.) for service in Northern Italy. He found himself in an abandoned villa and chanced upon a copy of Virgil's Georgics. "As we ran and crawled through the rubble I thought to myself, 'If I ever get out of this, I'm going back to the classics and study them seriously."
To remember Knox, here is his translation of the Chorus's enigmatic musing on mortality -- which some claim was not written by Sophocles but rather added at a later time -- contained in the last lines of Oedipus the King:
Citizens who dwell in Thebes, look at Oedipus here, who knew the answer to the famous riddle and was a power in the land. On his good fortune all the citizens gazed with envy. Into what a stormy sea of dreadful trouble he has come now. Therefore we must call no man happy while he waits to see his last day, not until he has passed the border of life and death without suffering pain.
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