John Pentland Mahaffy

Sir John Pentland Mahaffy,

Politically, Mahaffy was a staunch unionist who in 1899 tried to have the Irish language removed from the national Intermediate curriculum on the grounds that there was no literature in the language that was not “religious, immoral or indecent”. In 1914, he suppressed the university's Gaelic Society when it proposed to mark the centenary of the birth of Thomas Osborne Davis with a gathering that was to be addressed by Patrick Pearse, who at the time was campaigning against the recruitment of Irish soldiers to serve in the British armed forces during World War I, whereas Mahaffy was vigorously in favour of all possible support for the British war effort. Additionally, Mahaffy was greatly worried by the prospect of the partition of Ireland, and during the Irish Convention of 1917-18, he proposed a federalist Home Rule arrangement in Ireland, based on the Swiss cantons’ model, with parliaments in each of the provinces sending representatives to a central assembly.^[11]

Mahaffy also had a reputation as a snob. For instance, he had a great admiration for the nobility and would often prefer the company of dukes and kings. When he moved into Earlscliffe (a house on the

Curmudgeon and snob though he could undoubtedly be, Mahaffy was also capable of great and spontaneous kindness, as is evident from the instance of the schoolboy whom Mahaffy came upon near the Hill of Howth, where the boy was reading Greek. Mahaffy asked him about his studies, later lent him books to assist him, and eventually saw to it that the young man was admitted free of charge to read Classics at Trinity College Dublin.[13]

Personal life

Mahaffy's paternal ancestry could be traced back to the south of County Donegal, where his great-grandfather owned land. His grandfather and father were also Church of Ireland clergymen.^[14]

In 1865, Mahaffy married Frances Letitia MacDougall (d. 1908), by whom he had two daughters, Rachel Mary (d. 1944) and Elsie (d. 1926), and two sons, Arthur William (d. 1919) and Robert Pentland (d. 1943).

His interests were not confined to academia: he shot and played cricket for Ireland, and claimed to know the pedigree of every racehorse in Ulster. He was also an expert fly fisherman.^[16] He was also instrumental in setting up a Georgian Society for the appreciation of Irish Georgian architecture; this functioned from 1908 to 1913.

In 1889, with his friend James Edward Rogers Mahaffy published Sketches from a tour through Holland and Germany.^[17][18]

The memory of many of Mahaffy's accomplishments was preserved thanks to the efforts of

Bibliography

Among Mahaffy's most notable works are

• Social Life in Greece from Homer to Menander (1874; 7th ed., 1890);
• Rambles and Studies in Greece (1876);
• History of Classical Greek Literature (1880; 4th ed., 1903);^[19]
• Descartes (1880, reprint 1896, online)
• Greek Life and Thought from Alexander to the Roman Conquest (1887; 2nd ed., 1896);
• The Story of Alexander's Empire (1887, online);
• Kant's Critical Philosophy for English Readers (1889, online)
• The Greek World under Roman Sway from Polybius to Plutarch (1890, online);
• The Flinders Petrie Papyri, with Transcriptions, Commentaries and Index, I-II (1891–1893); II-III (1893–1895);
• Problems in Greek History(1892);^[20]
• The Empire of the Ptolemies (1895);
• A History of Egypt under the Ptolemaic Dynasty (1899);
• An Epoch in Irish History: Trinity College, Dublin, its Foundation and early Fortunes, 1591–1660 (1903);
• The Particular Book of Trinity College, Dublin (1904);
• The Silver Age of the Greek World (1906);
• The Plate in Trinity College, Dublin. A History and a Catalogue (1918).

His translation of Kuno Fischer's Commentary on Kant (1866) and his own exhaustive analysis, with elucidations, of Kant's critical philosophy are also highly regarded. He also edited the Petrie papyri in the Cunningham Memoirs (vols. VIII (1891), IX (1893), XI (1905)).

See also

• Schema (Kant)
• Oscar Wilde's review of Mahaffy's book "Greek Life and Thought: from the Age of Alexander to the Roman Conquest" in the Pall Mall Gazette, Mr. Mahaffy's New Book, 9 November 1887. In a generally scathing review, Wilde remarks: "in his attempts to treat the Hellenic world as ‘Tipperary writ large,’ to use Alexander the Great as a means of whitewashing Mr. Smith, and to finish the battle of Chæronea on the plains of Mitchelstown, Mr. Mahaffy shows an amount of political bias and literary blindness that is quite extraordinary."

Notes

References

• ISBN 0-19-503103-2
  .
• Griffin, Gerald. The Wild Geese; Pen Portraits of Famous Irish Exiles. London: Jarrolds, 1938.
• Stanford, W. B. and R. B. McDowell. Mahaffy: A Biography of an Anglo-Irishman. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971.
  ISBN 0-7100-6880-8
• Valerio, F. 'John Pentland Mahaffy', in Capasso M. (ed.). Hermae. Scholars and Scholarship in Papyrology, III, Pisa-Roma: Fabrizio Serra, 2013, pp. 11–19.

Sources

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Mahaffy, John Pentland". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 17 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 394.

External links

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• Works by J. P. Mahaffy at Project Gutenberg
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• Works by John Pentland Mahaffy at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)

Academic offices
Preceded by Anthony Traill	Provost of Trinity College Dublin 1914–1919	Succeeded by John Henry Bernard