Born at Keswick on October 13, 1844, Ernest James Myers received his education in classics at Cheltenham and Balliol College Oxford. He became a fellow of Wadham College in 1868, where he taught for three years, and then moved to London for twenty years to make his living as a translator and editor. Best known for his collaboration with Andrew Lang and Walter Leaf on books XVII-XXIV of Homer's Iliad (popularized in a Modern Library edition), Myers also translated Pindar, wrote on Aeschylus, and published five volumes of poetry in his lifetime, most modelled on Greek and Latin themes. These were The Puritans (1869), Poems (1877), The Defence of Rome (1880), The Judgement of Prometheus (1886), and Gathered Poems (1904). While in London, Myers wed Nora Margaret Lodge, and they had five children. He served as Secretary of the London Society for the Extension of University Teaching and worked as a volunteer for the Charity Organization Society and the Society for Protection of Women and Children. The Myers family left London for Chislehurst in 1891. His older son, who seems to be the subject of "Infant Eyes," died as a soldier in France in 1918. Myers died on November 25, 1918, in Etchingham, Sussex.
Bell, A. C. "Myers, Ernest James (1844–1921)." Rev. Megan A. Stephan. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004.
Homer. The Iliad of Homer done into English prose by Andrew Lang, Walter Leaf and Ernest Myers. London: Macmillan, 1883. PA 4025 .A2L3 Institute for Medieval Studies.