Oxford’s Battle for the Soul of Classics

TONY EASTLEY

Sam Baker has arrived and so we can begin. It’s

a great pleasure to preside over the last

seminar of the semester and I want to point out that next week

is the Christmas party and this is always a very jolly occasion. But there

is a slight change this year. It is six o’clock

here in the HRC downstairs and there will be a memorable

occasion. I also want to thank Paul Woodruff

for being willing to speak on such an interesting subject

this afternoon. I won’t try to describe Paul’s

various activities at the University of Texas, including the director of Planned to

program and the founding dean of the graduate undergraduate studies.

But I will say just a couple of things about the subject. Because

Dodds was such a famous person in Oxford that his name still

is mentioned around common tables and so on. Because in the First World War, he was

expelled rusticated because of his support for the Irish uprising.

Borah is a much more common name in the common rooms, and he’s mentioned

all the time because of his gaiety and his wit. But I was one time at a dinner

party with Bowers sitting across from him since I was introduced to him,

and he nodded. And then I waited for the whip and the sparkle, and

it just didn’t come. He complained about the soup. So I’m hoping that Paul

will bring him back to life. Paul would.

Thank you, Roger. Kate, can I be heard and back? Yes. Good.

My story begins with Rosalind, the radical Countess

of Carlisle, who could herself be a subject for a fascinating talk

in British studies. She was a pillar of the temperance movement. The manager of her husband’s vast

estates and a powerful advocate for women’s rights and women’s education

determined that women should marry men of intelligence rather than inheritors

of wealth or titles. She arranged with Benjamin Jo it

to handpick eligible young scholars from Oxford of a liberal bent. She

was the pillar of the Liberal Party to visit her from Oxford at Castle

Howard or Narberth Castle there to encounter her daughters, of whom she had an abundant supply.

There were four. One of them married the owner of a brewery, and she never spoke to her for 20

years after apparently her eldest daughter, Lady Maria Henrietta,

met and married a young scholar from Australia named Gilbert Murray, who

would later be made richest professor of Greek at Oxford in nineteen eighty eight.

After a brief career at the University of Glasgow and a stint outside academia together,

I had this story about Joe It from Gilbert Murray’s niece, Winifred Nicholson.

Nay Roberts, whose father, while an Oxford student, had been sent north by dry wit to mingle

with the Howards, the Howard family where their carlile’s. She was an artist, not

a classical scholar. That is Winifred. But she remembered vividly how Uncle Gilbert had told her

the ancient Greek myths and the tragic plays that were based on them and how they had

excited and inspired her in her artistic life. Gilbert Murray was a public

intellectual of the best kind. Through his translations of ancient Greek tragedies

which were said to have sold a half million copies. He made

English speakers worldwide. We’re not scholars acquainted with a rich load

of literature. And once British censorship was relaxed, his translations

were performed, increasing still further the range to which he carried the classics.

He was at the same time active in liberal politics. Like many of the Howards,

he was a supporter of Irish home rule. He backed the leak of good nations and other good

causes. In nineteen thirty six, he stepped aside from the professorship

and the contest. That is, my subject began. Who

could possibly succeed? Gilbert Murray. Should it be a great scholar?

Abella Trist, an influential teacher, a public intellectual, consider now

what Murray was and why he was so hard to replace, and Murray’s

translation, he shows himself a gifted poet in the late Victorian mode.

If you can read Greek tragedy in the original, you will know the quality

of those choral odes. They’re often magically lyrical.

Of course, they did not rhyme. Their lyricism shows itself in other ways,

but English lyrics do rhyme. Then, as now, our

ears demanded and popular lyrics continue to deliver rhyme.

Mary had a gift for rhyming translations that feel natural. Most translators

who try to rhyme come across as stilted and false stuffing in words that have no place

in the lines in order to make them rhyme. Not Mary. Here’s an

example from one of the most famous odes in Europe. It is Barcott.

The chorus is singing in distress over having been brought

out of the mountains where they cannot dance in worship of diron ISIS.

Will they ever come to me again? Ever again? The long, long dances on through the dark

till the dawn stars wane. Shall I feel the dew in my throat and the stream of wind

in my hair? Shall our white feet gleam in the dim expanses

of feet of a fallen to the green-wood fled alone in the grass and the loveliness

leape of the hunted. No more in dread.

Note the lovely half hidden rhyme of dances with expenses, important words that deserve

to rhyme. He has, however, missed one special detail we have in this hour.

The first use of a transferred epithet to be noticed by ancient Greek critics.

Here is Aerosmith’s version to the last few lines as a running phon might frisk

for the green joy of the wide fields, free from the fear of the hunt

green joy. That is the expression

that startled Euripides audience and his readers. Mary’s translations

have their detractors, of course, to 20th century tastes. They seem archaic and questions

about our accuracy arise. Mary had the talent

to see meanings that were not explicit in the Greek and to translate lines into

Greek that the Greek poets had never written, but nevertheless capture their meanings very

well. Mary was not a philological scholar.

Well, he was. I mean, he was much more than that for much of the 19th century.

Classical scholarship was something they did in Germany or perhaps Glasgow,

but not at Cambridge or Oxford. The greatest classical scholar of the mid eighteen hundreds was George

Grote, a banker and politician who had nothing to do with either Oxford or Cambridge.

By the end of the nineteenth century, fine scholars were emerging in Britain. The mark

of a great scholar was and is the ability to produce a convincing

text on the basis of manuscripts and two annotated in such a way that lesser scholars

such as I can write about the text intelligently. A.E. Houseman

comes to mind for Latin texts or Greek texts in this period. Richard Jebb was such a fine

commentator. Is it? Is his editions of Sophocles remained in use.

Gilbert Murray edited Aeschylus and Euripides poor Oxford classical texts and the work

was good enough for its time, but both have been superseded more recently

when Murray retired in nineteen thirty six. What did Oxford Classics

need most? Three candidates were under discussion. JD

Denniston 1887 to nineteen forty nine had an established reputation.

His book on Greek Particles, which came out 1934, has almost biblical

standing among scholars to this day. But he did

not have much of a chance. The other two are the subject of my paper. SASO

Boris Bo-Ra 1898 to nineteen seventy one, a fellow

of Lytham College known for his work on Pindar. He had been one of the

coeditors with Murree of the Oxford Book of Greek verse. He was a scholar

about interest and a poet, or at least he tried to be.

The other was an Irishman, E-R Dodds. Eighteen ninety three to nineteen seventy nine.

He had been Professor of Greek at the University of Birmingham since 1924.

He had shown his scholarly proficiency on authors not widely known, mainly

pro class. Platonist and was not part of the Oxbridge

academic establishment. He too had been a poet.

The appointment of Regis professor was to be made by the king, who apparently

consulted no one but Gilbert Murray, who were the winner be

at Oxford. Everyone was betting on Bo-Ra.

Now, both Bara and Dods wrote memoirs. Barra’s written in 1960,

set published in 67, covers the years from his birth to nineteen thirty nine

and is very thorough. It’s a it’s a big, heavy book. Dods a much lighter

book came out in 1977 and carries him lightly

from his first memories to his retirement on Borah. We now also have

a thorough biography by Leslie Mitchell, commissioned by Wadham College, and using

materials that no one I think had seen before. Wadham College released them to Mitchell,

including quite a bit of Bower’s poetry. Barrett was born in China just two years before the Boxer Rebellion,

which was his first experience of the dislocation of war. His father

was in the Chinese Customs Service. Young Balrog was taken to England

when he was five years old, and when his family returned to China, he stayed on

for his education. His public school was Cheltenham. His education was

interrupted between public school and university by military service,

after which he went to New College Oxford. As a more mature student than usual, and

there at New College, he began his career as the center of attention

in an academic environment. That was his favorite role in life.

Dods was born in Ireland. His father and all woman

died when Dods was 7. After a brilliant career in teaching that was cut

short by very serious alcoholism, his mother was Anglo

Irish from a vanishing class known as squiring small Anglo Irish landowner’s.

He and his single mother were left on the edge of poverty. He had good

schooling nonetheless, and nurtured a rebellious streak from a young

age. He was at Campbell’s College of Public School in Belfast in 1910

when his class was told. The news represented by his masters is very sad news

that King Edward the Seventh had died. The Masters

expected the boys to show grief. Dods

believed in always saying what he felt or thought. So he asked.

But it wasn’t he a very bad man and not a particularly good king.

This did not go down well with the Masters, who were all sturman after all.

And as Don said, we’re more royalist than the king.

He was later expelled from this secondary school for writing

a letter to the headmaster, explaining where the headmaster had gone wrong.

The letter was probably entirely accurate. But the headmaster was insulted and went to the governance

of the school and said either he goes or I go, and I think the masters at the school would have preferred

the headmaster to go. But Gilbert, I’m sorry, Dods went.

Luckily, he had already been admitted to Oxford University College. I think

he had set his heart on Balliol. But he wasn’t his. His exam

or interview wasn’t quite good enough for Balliol. But he went to Oxford

where he would meet and make a very powerful impression on Gilbert Murray.

And Murray made a powerful impression on him. At Oxford, he experimented with

cannabis. He was ahead of his time.

He did well in Honour’s moderations and the Tarahumara t.r.’s known as greats.

The Classics degree and of course, he was expelled, as

you know, essentially sent down for insulting the crown

by protesting the execution of the leaders of the Easter Rising.

So first, I want to talk about the two men and their relation to poetry.

Then a little bit about the war and then about their scholarship.

Both Dodds and Barra were passionately fond of poets

and poetry, but their taste differed. Dodds

was very close to both Western Ordan and Louis McNiece, whose

literary executor he was to be. Barra

despised Ordan. He viewed Ordan as a as an impure

poet with no vision who would teach the young that poetry was only about

rumpled bedclothes. Bower believed

that a poet should be an heroic and outstanding

figure, somehow connected with the aristocracy. Dodds believed

that anybody had a poet in him and brought up to poetry the

originality of himself. Any. And he oh, he wrote quite interestingly

about that. Barbara’s favorite poet

from the ancient world was Pen da Pindar made a career celebrating the aristocratic lineage

of victorious athletes. That is the families that

could reward a poet for celebrating their athletes,

Pindar said. Balrog was more sublime than any poet in the world’s sublime by sheer

poetry. Bower saw poets as like prophets.

He adored and was adored by Edith Sitwell and was friends with W.B.

Yates. And also, we will see, Todd was a friend

of Yates. Barbara wrote a great deal about poetry, but his greatest

contribution to poetry was not as a literary critic, but as what his biographer

Mitchell calls an honest broker of poetry across linguistic

boundaries. He read Russian fluently and introduced Russian poetry

to English readers. He advocated for Anna Akhmatova and became quite

close to the sisters of Boris Pasternak, who lived in exile in an Oxford suburb.

Through them, he brought pasternak’s poetry to the attention of English readers

and formed a close, long distance friendship with the great Russian poet.

Long before he was well known in the West. As for literary criticism.

Barra was a maverick. He. Hated

the fashionable work of FDR, leave us and Edmund Wilson proposing that such critics

should have continual prodding with a poisoned dung fork.

He was collegial with its Starkey, whose work on the French poets he admired. But he

was often at odds with her over her campaigns on behalf of candidates for the famous

professorship of poetry at Oxford. He almost always disagreed with her.

He. Barbara wanted desperately to be a poet, but by the time he was 30, he’d recognized

that he would never achieve distinction in that way.

From reading Mitchell. And from looking at his poetry, I suspect that his terrible

experiences in World War One left him with memories on which he would have to

draw. As a poet if he were going to be honest. But which for human survival,

he had to keep deeply buried. He spoke lightly about his war experience

at high table when he did speak of it, probably to hide the inner wounds.

We have some we have from his youth a sort of conventional complaint about the war

and the interests it serves, which I’m pretty sure he wrote before he actually

served in the war. Parapets stocked with the moldy dead

to keep the wine and the wine glass red. Boys bayoneted in the night

to keep official buttons bright. People lashed to a wheel of fire to satisfy

a fool’s desire. Fields sliced to shreds and cities sacked to keep

a Moorthy creed intact. Lithe bodies full of sap shot down

to gold, the glory of a crown. Here is anger and with enough.

But it’s not really the stuff of poetry. And it comes before his actual experience

of combat. He was only 18 when he wrote this. But if we we have seen

very young poets such as Keith Douglas, who whose work I hope, you know, produce masterpieces

of poetry at a very young age from the experience of war.

Love might have brought out the best in Barra as a poet, but it was a subject he found

painful and on which after his adolescence, he was silent.

Homosexuality was scandalous during most of his lifetime. Acting on it was illegal

and deemed immoral as well. Barbara went out of his way not to be identified as

homosexual to the extent of going out of his way

to avoid having any contact with an Andre g.d when he was awarded an honorary

degree at Oxford. Owing to Enid stock, his efforts g.d being

known as a public defender of pederasty. We know

that Barra had one affair of the heart, a mysterious one in Petrograd shortly

before his military service. There he met a Russian brother, a guardsman,

and that the guardsman’s sister and evidently fell hard

in love for one or both of them. We’re not sure of which or both.

And in this period, he wrote this little poem is called Nocturne Again. He’s

about 18 writing this. It’s very impressive. For 18 diems shadowed

in a silvery mist, the city lies the moon as though to swooning kist

upon her lies. The river from her source is locked in rest

and holds a single trembling star within her breast alone in

perfect quietness. I wait for the. And soon shall feel thy loveliness

grow one with me. This is lovely. If conventional and creditable work for

an adolescent. Bauer went on to produce many elegant verse translations,

especially of Russian poets. He believed in translating rhyme and meter.

So here’s an example of a translation of a poem by Phil at to church.

Have a poet I have read in Russian who does sound

roughly like this. This is short poem on the horizon

rises holy night and day who comforts us day whom we love withdraws her coverlet

of golden light that covered the abysses from above and vision like the outer

world has gone man like an orphan to his homelessness stands naked.

All his force and strength for done face to face over that obscure abyss.

A dream that long ago passed out of sight seems all that light in living brilliance.

And in the strange, inexplicable night he learns the faded legacy of chance.

Now that’s Barbara’s translation to to Jeff, and you see how he’s doing it. It is. These

are rhyming a BHB quatrains with a pretty steady meter.

Dogs would have none of this activity. By contrast, he held a Frost’s

dictum that poetry is precisely what cannot be translated. Dodds

was opposed to teaching classics of poetry in translation. He wrote. You cannot

undress a poet’s meaning and re clothe it in a new suit of words like a tailor’s dummy.

It has no suit but its birthday suit, and to strip it of that is to

destroy it. As poetry or at best, to turn it into a different poem on the same

subject, let students read poetry in languages they

know, he said, even if the poetry in languages they know is not so great.

A live dog, he said, is better than a dead lion. He loved poetry too

much to translate it. I love poetry enough to translate

it. So does Kurt. We disagree with Dods on this. Does begin

writing poetry at a fairly early age in Ireland. He met George

Russell, known as a key, and through a he. He

met Yates. Are you still a teenager now? Who later said that he liked

the young man’s poetry, but not the young man? And I could see why he

liked the poetry. I could see why he didn’t like the young men. Dodds

was outspoken, as you’ve already heard. He said what he thought, and so he felt it his duty

to contradict Yates. And now I quote, When the great poet talk nonsense,

as it appeared to me, he often did, when Yates said

that the English were a nation of shopkeepers with no imagination. Dodds brought up Shelley

and Blake and asked if they had no imagination. The great poet was not amused.

Nevertheless, they did work together on various pro Irish projects.

As a student at Oxford, a Dodds ran into a young man at Merton

who was writing a thesis on FH Bradley, an American who’d come there for the

purpose of finding that he and the American had a shared interest in poetry. Dodds

invited him to join a group that called a coterie of the coterie,

read each other their poems, and tore them apart critically and at evening meetings.

The American came to one of their meetings and read them a poem he had been working on, and

for once the members of the country were silenced.

They could not tear apart the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock,

which was then presented to an audience for the first time and which simply amazed them,

they had heard nothing like it, except that the closest thing

would be the French symbolist. The American continued to come to meetings of the Kothari, but

said little, though the little, he said, apparently was worth hearing. Aldous Huxley

was also a member, or at least a friend of thought.

After leaving Oxford,

Dodds was given a professorship at the University of Birmingham following a brief period at Redding,

which didn’t have a university yet they had the seeds of a university where he taught for a few years

and met the woman he would marry and whom he called Pat,

who was the love of his life. They went to Birmingham in 1924

and they had a terrible disappointment. It turned out

that for bed pregnancy was life threatening, she would suffer from eclampsia

whenever she became pregnancy and after two episodes of that led to abortion.

Abortions to save her life. They realized that they would never have children. She grieved terribly

over this, and I believed that her grief was the subject of this poem,

which I’m going to read. This is the one poem of dogs that I’m going to read. I found it in the HRC.

The Dods published his his poetry. Up

with a wonderful premise. Preface. Arguing on behalf of the unprofessional

poet in which he does say there is a poet and everybody. If

anybody can find enough to bring himself into it.

Here’s the poem. The title is Son Like Romar Your Rep. You may recognize the reference to

Virgil. At sunset, from their old Atlantic bases,

chilled from the islands of the western death, strange mists, sea

bred, alien, unheralded creep suddenly with salt, the numbing breath

on the safe inland places. Even so, strangely,

from the earthbound years in that cold purgatory at the roots of the mind, a thin,

marginal, a thin, magical rain steals over heart and brain of one

I love. And suddenly her eyes are blind with some

dead woman’s tears.

I think he was a good poet, actually. I really had a splendid time

in the HRC reading room working through his book of poetry, 32

poems. That’s the title of the book, 32 poems with an essay

on nonprofessional poetry. In 1930,

Dods had an opportunity to hire a junior college at Birmingham, a young muthoni in the

strongly recommended to him as a scholar who was also a poet. And of course, that

appealed to Dodd’s highly impressed by the young man. Dods was on tenterhooks

till the young man had finally taken his exams for grades, and the results

came out. He had indeed earned a first class degree with a

trivial viva. And so Louis McNiece came to Birmingham

and became one of Dods closest friends.

If you love poetry, I hope you know Louis McNiece. He’s a wonderful poet.

If you if you don’t read anything else, read Autumn Journal. It’s

a long. It’s a brilliant, long poem written in 1938.

Louis McNeese had been isolated as a student at Martin. He was too much

an artist to mingle with the Hartleys athletes at Oxford,

and he was too heterosexual to move with the artistic set at that disadvantage

in Dods. He found an ideal older companion for travel conversation

and simply feeling at home. It was to dogs that he left his poetry

on his untimely death, Dods with his literary executor, Dods, edited

the first complete edition of his works. And it’s I think it’s a fine addition, though it has now been superseded.

Here’s one poem by Louis McNiece that I think was written about T

in Dods Salon in Birmingham, which faced his beloved garden through a bay window.

Dods loved his garden.

The room this is the poem is called Snow and obviously written in

winter and they have plants inside and outside the room is suddenly rich

and the great bay window was spawning snow and pink roses against it. Soundlessly

collateral and incompatible world is Southerner. Then we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think. Incorrigibly plur.

I appealed and portion a tangerine and spit the pits and feel the drunkenness

of things being various and the fire flames with a bubbling sound

for world is more spiteful and gay than one supposes. On the tongue,

on the eyes, on the ears, in the palm of one’s hands,

there is more than glass between the snow. And the huge

Russ’s. You may need to read that more than one time

in Birmingham, along with his friendship for McNiece

dogs, became a close friend of Wisden Auden, whose father was a local doctor.

Doctor, his father introduced him. This, too, was a genuine friendship.

In the 40s, when Dods was at Oxford, he continued to have young poets and students

who loved poetry to tea in his salon, but alas, without the beloved garden,

which he was unable to recreate in Oxford, he had to leave it behind. I

came to know as a young student at G.l own girl AA1, who

later became a powerful scholar of ancient Greek philosophy. Oh, and had

poetic ambition and was part of Dods Student Circle.

They went regularly to have tea and talk about poetry with Dods O and told me that he remembered

the free-fall they felt on being read for the first time. Lay your sleeping head, my

love human on my faithless arm, which had been sent from

New York. It is, I think, as as fine and

honest a love poem is, as there is in the English language, and he learned

that is a buton written to a man, to Chester Coleman in the nineteen forties. That was

something quite new. So that’s a brief introduction to

the relationship between these two men and poetry gods,

forward looking modern, Bower’s more backward looking, if you will.

They had very different experiences of war. Borah served

in the artillery as a forward observer in observation

posts from 1917 to 1918. He survived

death narrowly on two occasions.

There is hardly a position more dangerous than that of

an artillery observer in the day before satellites.

I was actually trained for this job when I was in the Army. You have to be in the

forefront of the line where you could see whatever target you were trying to obliterate

with your artillery and you would call instructions by telephone.

When I was trained, we still use telephones for this part of the job of the artillery. When was the spring

telephone lines? This is not irrelevant to Barbara’s story

so that you could call to the artillery men to either raise or lower the barrel or

shifted a little bit to left or right so as to obliterate the target. He had the sad experience

of having to wipe out a beautiful church in a French village that was

being used by the Germans as an observation post.

The yeah, by the way, I was not allowed to do this because of my poor eyesight, which may have saved my life.

The observer is in danger, but it has one privilege your own

telephone line. Unlike most people

in the trenches in World War One, and wherever Barbara went, there was a telephone line for him to call in

instructions about the fire. This saved Barbara’s life when he was buried in

a trench at Cambrai. It was a sturdy German made trench,

and that, too, helped preserve his life. But it was the phone that saved him.

It was still working. And just before he lost consciousness in the caved in

trench, he called and someone who knew him heard his voice and they dug him out.

But he did lose consciousness. An amazing story. Luckily, the wire had not been cut.

That is amazing. Then there was the battle. He fought in his pajamas.

When the bunker in which he slept was overrun by the enemy. I can’t imagine

soldiers wearing pajamas at night. But we certainly didn’t.

He had these memories of narrow escapes, and no doubt

he carried with him also the memories of comrades who had been blown to pieces.

Around him when Dods arrived at Oxford

in 1936, Bauder was known to ask him frequently

and everywhere. What did you do in the war? Dotti

thoughts had not served. The story

about dogs is this.

Dods, like many of the Irish,

both Anglo Irish and am Catholic Irish, was not impressed

by the rebels and the Easter Rising. They thought it was much too soon. It wasn’t planned.

It was disturbing everything. And so they were not big supporters of the Easter

rising, but everything changed for them. When the British brought in the black and times

and started executing the leaders of the Easter rising, that turned things around.

Dods himself was outraged by the executions of Irish

patriots and expressed his outrage both in Ireland, I think,

and in England. And for this he was essentially sent

down. His tutor’s insisted that he be allowed to

come back to take his final exams, which he did

after a year of private study in which he actually did not

ace. He says he had a terrible time writing the essays because he’d been

being rusticated in Ireland. He had forgotten how to write a short

essay on an exam. And so you only answered about half the questions.

But he answered them so well that they gave him a Avivah

puts a viva viva voce of an oral exam

on the on the questions he hadn’t answered, and he did so well on the Viva that they gave him a first class

degree. But after what the Black and Tans had done to

the Irish Patriots, Todd said, I cannot ever wear this uniform.

And during this period, he traveled by boat on his way to take his final exams at Oxford,

traveled by boat from Ireland to London

with a whole bunch of black and tans who were on leave, going on leave.

And the boat had one table for meals where everyone sat together. And of course,

one of the Black and Tans proposed a toast to the king.

Dods couldn’t raise his glass to the king, just couldn’t

do it. Immediately afterwards, he was confronted on deck by the black intensives,

threatened to throw him overboard and they meant it. I mean, I think they might really have done it. He

said he tried to talk them out of it, persuading them that the ship’s manifest would prove

that he had started out with the ship and that questions would be asked about why why he didn’t

disembark at the end. So instead, the Black and Tans raided his state room,

took his pajamas and threw them overboard. But pajamas figure

in both men’s stories.

Thus, the award went to Dods, as you know, Dods

became the Regis professor of Greek at Oxford in 1936

when Dods and Bête came up to Oxford from Birmingham, Oxford Society

turned its back on them both and they were miserable.

They’d left their friends in their garden. Behind the consensus

at Oxford was that Bara had been cheated of what he deserved. Dods,

they felt, had been virtually a traitor to the crown. Rumors of Barra’s

eccentric sexuality had queered his chances. They thought that was unfair.

But the pain endured by Dods and his wife in their early years at Oxford was almost unbearable.

I don’t know why they didn’t leave. But this made him

ask himself whether he really did deserve the Regis professor

ship, and I think it affected his scholarly career thereafter. In

had most of their scholarly output ahead of them. Appointing a professor.

Looks to the future, not the past. Which one of the two would

in the future do the kind of work that could justify holding the richest professorship?

Well, we can’t answer that really, because the future does not hold the answer. The appointment

changed the game for both men. DOD certainly produced the more important work

after nineteen thirty six. But then he was trying hard and somewhat painfully

to live up to his new position. He left behind

his passion for the neo plainness and the occult that interested him

so much. Borah went on doing what he liked.

After 1936, Barbara continued to be productive, writing, translating

and holding court at bottom. He would secure a place as one of Oxford’s great

public intellectuals. He had a delightful job as warden of his

college and a knighthood. His most important

work in scholarship was in the poet Pindar, the editor of the O.C.D.

Penders Work, translated the poems and wrote about him. His book on Sophocles

is well regarded. And sometimes cited I’ve read almost

everything available about Sophocles is one of my favorite topics and I’ve found much

that is useful, but none of it was in Barbara’s book, which is elegant,

conventional, but never probing or adventurous.

Dods also did work on texts as a young scholar,

he had focused on the plate, Nizam, his first work was a was a very impressive commentary

on propolis. And this connected roughly with the interest he had in the occult.

It was fascination with the occult that connected him to the poet A.E.

and through him to Yates. But after nineteen thirty six, he felt he should

work on texts of more general interest at Oxford, Oxford.

It’s a limited place. It is. Circumscribed

by the by the the texts that are assigned

for for degrees and no one was much interested in propolis, and so

Dods had to leave that behind. Dods produced a magnificent

commentary on Pleitez gorgeous. I think it’s the finest commentary at any work of Plato’s.

For this, he traveled around to European libraries to see for himself the manuscripts

in various libraries that had been incorrectly reported to Bernet, who Dunt

who had done the Oxford classical text. Bernet had had to rely

because he couldn’t travel at the time on other people’s readings of those manuscripts,

and they were, in many cases, not accurate. There is an art to deciphering

an original manuscript. Dodds learned it and applied it in this case.

Dods also produced the new text of Euripides bankai, connecting what he called

correcting what he called the faults and fancies of Gilbert Murray’s edition.

And his addition of the Bakrie is just fascinating.

It inspired me to do a great deal in many directions.

Dods followed Murray’s example by giving brilliant lectures on classical topics.

It was Murray’s lectures that had so excited Dods that he shelved

his plan to switch to modern English literature and instead stayed with

the classics because he thought, gosh, if you can do that, you can do what Murray is.

It’s really worth it. The best of these lectures found their way into

print in a book entitled The Ancient Concept of Progress and other essays

on Greek literature and belief. These papers

can be read by non scholars, but they’re also a great value to scholars. The

most famous is an essay entitled On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex,

which should be required reading for anyone writing on this play. I recently

edited a book of philosophical essays about Oedipus and virtually all of the

authors cite this essay of dogs. It’s impossible to write about Oedipus and not

cite this essay. Dodd’s most famous book was The Greeks and the Irrational, which came

out in 1951. It was the text of the Sailor lectures which he was invited

to give. Before Neches Influence was felt.

Scholars continued to treat the ancient Greeks as models of ordered

rational thought, thoughts changed that. In retrospect,

we can say that Mary’s choice was excellent. Dods did become

the greatest classical scholar of his generation, the most influential and with the broadest range.

We cannot say, however, that Barbra would not have been a good choice.

Who knows how his career would have developed had he held the famous professorship?

As for me, I don’t think he had the brilliance or the originality of mind to match your Dodd’s.

His work shows him to have been more interested in Bell letter that in game changing scholarship.

His poetic tastes chose him to have been stuck in the past, unsuited to appreciating

the development of arts in the 20th century. And

by the way, also unsuited to appreciating developments in the sciences. When

Wharton came into some money and that was a proposal to hire a fellow

in science, Barbara opposed it on the grounds that science was simply a matter of

facts. And learning facts was not education.

Yeah, he was somewhat limited. Dodds had a mind that was at

the same time more adventurous than Bower’s and more meticulous

in scholarship. Barra’s own verdict in the end was that Dods

was a good choice, though he would have preferred Denniston in

his memoir. He has nothing but good to say about Murray. He doesn’t blame Murray

of Murray. He says it was impossible to know him without loving him.

In 1936, when the sad news came to Barra and he had to share it with Dennison

barbarous friends Cyro several, Bailie told him that what seemed

like a rebuff could easily turn into a blessing. He was quite right,

says Barra. I was saved from a post to

which I was not naturally fitted. And before long, my life took a new direction

to which I was much more suited. Thank you very much.