Life was ripe for historical analogy whenever Cornelius Clarkson Vermeule III spoke. He invoked the Trojan War when musing about a Red Sox pennant race and gave his dogs names that conjured the spirit of ancient Roman emperors.

Past and present also mingled in each encounter at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he was senior curator and oversaw the department of classical art for 40 years. A strolling genealogist, he memorized the names of colleagues and swiftly spun out ancestral connections.

"He was like an African griot - the elder in the village who keeps all the oral history and passes it generation to generation," said Christine Kondoleon, the senior curator of Greek and Roman art at the MFA. "He carried the histories of these people."

Dr. Vermeule, who twice served as acting director during his tenure at the MFA, died at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge on Thanksgiving afternoon of complications from a stroke. He was 83 and lived in Cambridge.

Affable to everyone from the wealthiest donor to the custodian who dusted priceless statues, he was a mentor to prominent curators nationwide and was the person many private collectors and museums turned to for advice on which items to purchase.

"He was the leading curator of ancient art of his generation and the most beloved," Kondoleon said.

"One senses the end of an era of the great connoisseur curator who commanded worldwide respect and affection."

Although his bibliography of articles and books filled 60 printed pages, Dr. Vermeule may have been the least stuffy classicist to prowl the MFA's halls.

He was fond of draping plastic Hawaiian leis around the necks of centuries-old statues in his office and often wore what he called his "Dalmatian" sneakers. A friend, he explained, had painted spots on the shoes, and they were "the only work of contemporary art that has been seen in every gallery in the museum."

"Let's just say he felt no pressure to conform in what he wore, or in his mannerisms," said his son, Adrian of Cambridge. "He was highly intelligent, but surprisingly not academic. He wasn't didactic or pretentious at all."

Dr. Vermeule was quite serious about art, however. Among the many pieces the museum purchased under his guidance were two vases from the fifth century BC, decorated with images portraying the fall of Troy and the death of Agamemnon, who led Greek forces in the Trojan War.

Shortly before he retired in 1996, Dr. Vermeule told the Globe that his favorite acquisition was the last self-portrait by French artist Paul Cezanne, a painting that is considered a masterwork.

Malcolm Rogers, the MFA's director, said Dr. Vermeule was "obviously a great scholar, a great curator, and a great teacher, and he was also a great character. He was one of nature's real larger-than-life eccentrics."

Dr. Vermeule, he added, "wore very lightly his great scholarship and connoisseurship. He was so distinguished, and he made it look very easy, and it wasn't. He studied very hard and was terribly knowledgeable. He was in the tradition of the great antiquarians of the past."

At times, however, curatorial approaches of the past collided with the practices of the present. Dr. Vermeule's tenure began years before many museums, including the MFA, adopted guidelines recognizing the right of countries to protect the contents of grave sites from which many valued pieces of art have emerged. Two years ago, the MFA agreed to return an unspecified number of artifacts to Italy.

In an interview with the Globe in 1998, Dr. Vermeule said the MFA "tried to do due diligence" before each purchase. And in 1990, he spoke with the Globe about the torso of a statue whose lower half apparently was in a Turkish museum. The story of how art ends up in the marketplace, he said, is sometimes murky.

"I mean, they've been digging in these cities in southwest Turkey since the 1860s and '70s, and the Austrians - the Hapsburg Empire - used to send warships to southern Turkey and bring whole boatloads home," he said.

Born in Orange, N.J., Dr. Vermeule began collecting ancient Roman coins when he was 9, and years later he donated part of his collection to the MFA so that the museum could purchase a sarcophagus - a stone coffin dating to the late fourth century or early third century BC.

With a gift for languages, he interrupted his studies at Harvard during World War II to study Japanese and was stationed in the Pacific Theater.

He graduated from Harvard with a bachelor's degree in 1949 and received a master's in 1951. He then went to England, where he received a doctorate in 1953 from the University of London.

Dr. Vermeule taught at the University of Michigan and then at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, where he met Emily Dickinson Townsend, who became a respected archeologist and art historian and taught at Harvard. They married in 1957, the year after he started at the MFA. She died in 2001.

"They had this sort of wonderful partnership that involved trips to Greece and Turkey," said their daughter, Blakey of San Francisco. "My father was just very, very devoted to her and took wonderful care of her."

In New England, Dr. Vermeule was an adjunct or visiting professor at schools such as Harvard, Boston College, Boston University, Smith, Wellesley, and Yale.

Particularly after retiring, he corresponded by mail with all who sought his advice.

"He was the one always on call, always helping curators and collectors, saying, 'That's a good piece to buy,' or 'This would be perfect,' " Kondoleon said. "But he never wrote letters. He would write postcards in the most elaborate erudition, in this tiny handwriting, squeezed into the margins."

Fluent in the languages of France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, and Turkey, he slipped effortlessly from one to the next, sometimes using the sounds of foreign words to make puns in English.

"When you called him, he might answer in Japanese, he might answer in Turkish, he might answer in Greek," Kondoleon said. "It was a riot. You never knew what world he would be inhabiting and where he would take you."

Despite this intellectual range, "he was so open to people as they were and just very nonjudgmental," his daughter said. "I'm realizing more and more that that's very rare. I just loved him very much."

In addition to his son and daughter, Dr. Vermeule leaves a granddaughter and a grandson.