KERÉNYI, KÁROLY (1897–1973), was a Hungarian-born scholar of classical philology, the history of religions, and mythology. He was born in the southeastern corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the town of Temesvár (now Timisoara, Romania). Growing up in a Roman Catholic family of small landowners, Kerényi learned Latin and was drawn to the study of languages. Classical philology was his major subject at the University of Budapest; his doctoral dissertation (1919) was entitled "Plato and Longinus: Investigations in Classical Literary and Aesthetic History." He spent several years as a secondary-school teacher, traveled in Greece and Italy, and undertook postdoctoral studies at the universities of Greifswald, Heidelberg, and Berlin, under Hermann Diels, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Eduard Norden, Eduard Meyer, and Franz Boll. To Boll he dedicated his first book, Die griechisch-orientalische Romanliteratur in...