E. R. Dodds

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E. R. Dodds
Old Marston, Oxford, England
NationalityIrish
Occupation(s)Classical scholar, writer
TitleRegius Professor of Greek
Spouse
Annie Edwards Powell
​
​
(m. 1923; died 1973)​
Parent(s)Robert and Anne Dodds
AwardsDuff Cooper Memorial Prize for Literature[1]
Academic background
EducationSt Andrew's College, Dublin
Campbell College[1]
Alma materUniversity College, Oxford
Academic work
Institutions
Notable worksThe Greeks and the Irrational (1951)
Missing Persons (1977)[1]

Eric Robertson Dodds (26 July 1893 – 8 April 1979) was an Irish classical scholar.[2] He was Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford from 1936 to 1960.

Early life and education

Dodds was born in

St Andrew's College (where his mother taught) and at Campbell College in Belfast. He was expelled from the latter for "gross, studied, and sustained insolence".[4]
: 195 

In 1912, Dodds won a scholarship to

A. B. Poynton.[5]

After graduation, Dodds returned to Dublin and met the poets W. B. Yeats and George William Russell, who published under the pseudonym "A. E.". He taught briefly at Kilkenny College and in 1919 was appointed as a lecturer in classics at the University of Reading, where in 1923 he married a lecturer in English, Annie Edwards Powell. They had no children; Powell died in 1973.

Academic career

In 1924, Dodds was appointed Professor of

literary executor
. Dodds published one volume of his own poems, Thirty-Two Poems, with a Note on Unprofessional Poetry, in 1929.

In 1936, Dodds became Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford, succeeding Gilbert Murray. Murray had decisively recommended Dodds to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin (the chair was in the gift of the Crown) and it was not a popular appointment – he was chosen over two prominent Oxford dons (Maurice Bowra of Wadham College and John Dewar Denniston of Hertford College). His lack of service in the First World War (he had worked briefly in an army hospital in Serbia but later invoked the exemption from military service granted Irish residents) and his support for Irish republicanism and socialism in addition to his scholarship on the non-standard field of Neoplatonism, also did not make him initially popular with colleagues.[6] He was treated particularly harshly by Denys Page at whose college (Christ Church) the Regius Chair of Greek was based.

Dodds had a lifelong interest in mysticism and psychic research, being a member of the council of the Society for Psychical Research from 1927 and its president from 1961 to 1963.

On his retirement in 1960, Dodds we made an Honorary Fellow of University College, Oxford, until his death in 1979.

Old Marston, northeast of Oxford.[7]

Work

Among his works are The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), which charts the influence of irrational forces in Greek culture up to the time of

Constantine I
.

Dodds's scholarship on what he called the "irrational" elements of Greek mental life was significantly influenced by anthropology of

ethnopsychiatrist George Devereux to teach himself Greek in order to turn his psychoanalytic lens on ancient texts (culminating in Devereux's Dreams in Greek Tragedy).[8] Dodds delivered the Frazer Lecture at the University of Glasgow
in 1969.

For a bibliography of Dodds' publications see Quaderni di Storia no. 48 (1998) 175-94 (with addenda in the same journal, no. 61, 2005), and for general information on him and studies of some of his works see the bibliography to the entry for him in The Dictionary of British Classicists (2004), vol. 1, 247–51. Add the articles on his work on Neoplatonism in Dionysius 23 (2005) 139-60 and Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 103 (2007) 499–542. See now the bibliography contained in Stray, C, Pelling, C. B. R., & Harrison, S. J. (2019), Rediscovering E. R. Dodds, Oxford.

He was also editor of three major classical texts for the Clarendon Press, Proclus: Elements of Theology, Euripides' Bacchae and Plato's Gorgias, all published with extensive commentaries, and a translation in the case of the first. His autobiography, Missing Persons, was published in 1977.

He edited Louis MacNeice's unfinished autobiography The Strings are False (1965) and MacNeice's Collected Poems (1966).

Cultural references

The

Ibid
) sung by Portman.

Publications

Books

  • Select Passages Illustrative of Neoplatonism (London: S. P. C. K., 1924) (Texts for Students, 36)[10]
  • Thirty-Two Poems: With a Note On Unprofessional Poetry (London: Constable, 1929)
  • Humanism and Technique in Greek Studies: A Lecture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936)
  • Minds in the Making (London: Macmillan & Co., 1941) (Macmillan War Pamphlets, 14)
  • The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951) (Sather Classical Lectures, 25)
  • Plato, Gorgias, with "revised text with introduction and commentary, by E. R. Dodds". (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959)
  • Euripides, Bacchae, 2nd edition, "edited with introduction and commentary, by E. R. Dodds". (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960)
  • Morals and Politics in the Oresteia (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1960)
  • Classical Teaching in an Altered Climate (London: John Murray, 1964)
  • Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge University Press, 1965) (The Wiles Lectures[11] Given At The Queen's University, Belfast, 1963)
  • Proclus, The Elements of Theology, "a revised text with translation, by E. R. Dodds". (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964)
  • The Ancient Concept of Progress and Other Essays on Greek Literature and Belief (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973)
  • Missing Persons: An Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977)

Articles

  • "Why I Do Not Believe in Survival" (London: Society for Psychical Research, 1934) (Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, part 135, pp. 147-172)
  • "Maenadism in the Bacchae". Harvard Theological Review, 1940, 33, 115-76
  • "Three notes on the Medea" (Humanitas, 1952, 4, 13-18)
  • "Gilbert Murray" (Gnomon, 1957, 29, 476-9)
  • "On misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex" (Greece and Rome, 1966, 13, 37-49)
  • "Supernormal Phenomena in Classical Antiquity" (London: Society for Psychical Research, 1971) (Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 55, p. 203)

Other

See also

References

  1. ^
    University College Record
    . Vol. VII, no. 5. pp. 229–230.
  2. ISBN 0-85672-446-7. From the Proceedings of the British Academy
    , London, Volume LXVII, 1981.
  3. JSTOR 27687441
    .
  4. JSTOR 1050263
    .
  5. ^ Eikasmos, Volume 15, pages 463–476, 2004.
  6. ISBN 978-0-19-929584-5
    .
  7. ^ "Eric Robertson Dodds". idih.org. International Dictionary of Intellectual Historians. Archived from the original on 6 June 2019. Retrieved 15 February 2010.
  8. ^ a b c Dodds, E. R. (1977). Missing Persons. Oxford University Press. p. 186.
  9. ^ The Mr. T Experience — The history of the concept of the soul Lyrics.
  10. ^ F. L. Cross, ed., St. Cyril of Jerusalem's lectures on the Christian sacraments: the Procatechesis and the five Mystagogical catecheses, London: S. P. C. K., 1951, publisher's advertisement in final pages. Retrieved 30 May 2022.
  11. ^ The Wiles Lectures, cambridge.org. Retrieved 30 May 2022.

Further reading

External links

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