One day in the winter of 1956/57 a fellow student came over to me as I was studying in the Ashmolean Museum’s library in Oxford. “Gilbert Murray is in the next room, he whispered. “I thought you’d want to know.” I did indeed for Murray was still a great presence in Britain even though he had stepped down as Regius Professor of Greek twenty years earlier. There he was, aged NN, with knit gloves with cut away fingers to help him turn pages in the always chilly Ashmolean. It was my one glimpse of the great man.
Murray’s contributions to classical studies have not held up very well. His nearly two dozen translations of Greek tragedies and comedies, big sellers in their day, seem quaintly out of date; his books on Greek literature and religion rarely enter into modern scholarly discussion.
But he made one great contribution to the field – whispering in the ea of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin that his succedsor should be not the reswpected philologist J. D. Denniston or the charming man of letters Maurice Bowra, but a relatively obscure young man teaching not at Oxbridge, but at redbrick Reading. Murray was, in A.E. Housman’s words, a “public intellectual,” devoted to liberal causes, articulate on the BBC and elsewhere, and accustomed to the corridors of power in British politics. His word was sufficient. E.R. Dodds was appointed Regius Professor of Greek, the most influential position in Classics.
That was in 1936. In the following years Dodds did what Murray had tried to do but never quite succeeded – he broadened the intellectual reach and changed its scholarly direction, most notably through his Sather lectures, The Greeks and the Irrational, and his editions of Euripides’ Bacchae. The vitality of Classics today owes much to Dodds, an to Murray’s whisper in the Prime Minister’s attentive ear.
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These recollections came to mind on reading David Butterfield’s review of Daisy Dunn’s Not Far from Brideshead: Oxford between the Wars, in the TLS for April 29, 2022 Thanks to Jean Houston for calling it to my attention.
Murray’s contributions to classical studies have not held up very well. His nearly two dozen translations of Greek tragedies and comedies, big sellers in their day, seem quaintly out of date; his books on Greek literature and religion rarely enter into modern scholarly discussion.
But he made one great contribution to the field – whispering in the ea of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin that his succedsor should be not the reswpected philologist J. D. Denniston or the charming man of letters Maurice Bowra, but a relatively obscure young man teaching not at Oxbridge, but at redbrick Reading. Murray was, in A.E. Housman’s words, a “public intellectual,” devoted to liberal causes, articulate on the BBC and elsewhere, and accustomed to the corridors of power in British politics. His word was sufficient. E.R. Dodds was appointed Regius Professor of Greek, the most influential position in Classics.
That was in 1936. In the following years Dodds did what Murray had tried to do but never quite succeeded – he broadened the intellectual reach and changed its scholarly direction, most notably through his Sather lectures, The Greeks and the Irrational, and his editions of Euripides’ Bacchae. The vitality of Classics today owes much to Dodds, an to Murray’s whisper in the Prime Minister’s attentive ear.
--
These recollections came to mind on reading David Butterfield’s review of Daisy Dunn’s Not Far from Brideshead: Oxford between the Wars, in the TLS for April 29, 2022 Thanks to Jean Houston for calling it to my attention.