Jaan Unt was an Estonian Classical philologist, translator and literary scholar. He was the first editor of manuscript magazines in Tartu in the late 1960s. In the days when people gathered in someone's house on certain evenings, he also held a ‘salon’ in his home. Vaino Vahing, Aleksander Müller, Juhan Toming and others also held such salons. In 1968, he was expelled from the University of Tartu for editing manuscript magazines. After his military service in the Soviet army, he studied at Leningrad State University, from which he graduated as a Classical philologist. After returning to Tartu, he could not publish, and for a long time he struggled to find work. Only in 1985 did he obtain a place as a lecturer at the University of Tartu. He has translated works from Ancient Greek, Latin and Russian, and has also published textbooks.