E. R. Dodds

E. R. Dodds
Born	Eric Robertson Dodds (1893-07-26)26 July 1893 Banbridge,County Down,Ireland
Died	8 April 1979(1979-04-08)(aged 85) Old Marston,Oxford,England
Nationality	Irish
Occupation(s)	Classical scholar, writer
Title	Regius Professor of Greek
Spouse	Annie Edwards Powell ​ ​ (m.1923; died 1973)​
Parent(s)	Robert and Anne Dodds
Awards	Duff Cooper Memorial Prize for Literature
Academic background
Education	St Andrew's College, Dublin Campbell College
Alma mater	University College, Oxford
Academic work
Institutions	Kilkenny College University of Reading University of Birmingham University of Oxford
Notable works	The Greeks and the Irrational(1951) Missing Persons(1977)

Eric Robertson Dodds(26 July 1893 – 8 April 1979) was an Irishclassicalscholar.He wasRegius Professor of Greekat theUniversity of Oxfordfrom 1936 to 1960.

Early life and education

Dodds was born inBanbridge,County Down,the son of schoolteachers.His father Robert was from aPresbyterianfamily and died of alcoholism when Dodds was seven. His mother Anne was ofAnglo-Irishancestry. When Dodds was ten, he moved with his mother toDublin,and he was educated atSt Andrew's College(where his mother taught) and atCampbell CollegeinBelfast.He was expelled from the latter for "gross, studied, and sustained insolence".

In 1912, Dodds won a scholarship toUniversity College, Oxfordto readclassics,orLiterae Humaniores,a two-part four-year degree program consisting of five terms' study of Latin and Greek texts followed by seven terms' study of ancient history and ancient philosophy. Friends atOxfordincludedAldous HuxleyandT. S. Eliot.In 1916, he was asked to leave Oxford due to his support for theEaster Rising,but he returned the following year to take his final examinations inLiterae Humaniores,and was awarded a first-class degree to match the first-class awarded him in 1914 in Honour Moderations, the preliminary stage of his degree. His first tutor at Oxford wasA. B. Poynton.

After graduation, Dodds returned to Dublin and met the poetsW. B. YeatsandGeorge William Russell,who published under thepseudonym"A. E.". He taught briefly atKilkenny Collegeand in 1919 was appointed as a lecturer in classics at theUniversity 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 ofGreekat theUniversity of Birmingham,and came to knowW. H. Auden(whose fatherGeorge,Professor of Public Medicine and an amateur classicist, was a colleague). Dodds was also responsible forLouis MacNeice's appointment as a lecturer at Birmingham in 1930. He assisted MacNeice with his 1936 translation ofAeschylus'sAgamemnon,and later became MacNeice'sliterary executor.Dodds published one volume of his own poems,Thirty-Two Poems, with a Note on Unprofessional Poetry,in 1929.

In 1936, Dodds becameRegius Professor of Greekat theUniversity of Oxford,succeedingGilbert Murray.Murray had decisively recommended Dodds to Prime MinisterStanley 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 BowraofWadham CollegeandJohn Dewar DennistonofHertford College). His lack of service in the First World War (he had worked briefly in an army hospital inSerbiabut later invoked the exemption from military service granted Irish residents) and his support forIrish republicanismand socialism in addition to his scholarship on the non-standard field ofNeoplatonism,also did not make him initially popular with colleagues.He was treated particularly harshly byDenys Pageat whose college (Christ Church) the Regius Chair of Greek was based.

Dodds had a lifelong interest inmysticismandpsychicresearch, being a member of the council of theSociety for Psychical Researchfrom 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.He died in the village ofOld Marston,northeast ofOxford.

Work

Among his works areThe Greeks and the Irrational(1951), which charts the influence of irrational forces in Greek culture up to the time ofPlato,andPagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety,a study of religious life in the period betweenMarcus AureliusandConstantine I.

Dodds's scholarship on what he called the "irrational" elements of Greek mental life was significantly influenced by anthropology ofJ. G. Frazer(especiallyPsyche's Task)andRuth Benedict'sculture-patterntheories, the philosophy ofFriedrich Nietzsche(esp.Beyond Good and Evil), and thepsychoanalysisofSigmund FreudandErich Fromm.Indeed, Dodds actually first considered training as a psychoanalyst:

I think I should have done so had I been able to support myself during the long period of probation. As it was, I had to remain a dabbler and content myself with applying a little of what I had learned to the study of Greek religion.

It was this synthesis of anthropological, psychoanalytic and philosophic lenses which re-invigorated interdisciplinary conversations in Classics that had faltered ever since the controversies of theMyth-ritualists.In a similar vein, Dodds would go on to convince theethnopsychiatristGeorge Devereuxto teach himself Greek in order to turn his psychoanalytic lens on ancient texts (culminating in Devereux'sDreams in Greek Tragedy).Dodds delivered theFrazer Lectureat theUniversity of Glasgowin 1969.

For a bibliography of Dodds' publications seeQuaderni di Storiano. 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 inThe Dictionary of British Classicists(2004), vol. 1, 247–51. Add the articles on his work on Neoplatonism inDionysius23 (2005) 139-60 andHarvard Studies in Classical Philology103 (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 majorclassicaltexts for theClarendon Press,Proclus:Elements of Theology,Euripides'BacchaeandPlato'sGorgias,all published with extensive commentaries, and a translation in the case of the first. His autobiography,Missing Persons,was published in 1977.

He editedLouis MacNeice's unfinished autobiographyThe Strings are False(1965) and MacNeice'sCollected Poems(1966).

Cultural references

TheBerkeley, Californiapunk bandThe Mr. T Experiencerecorded a song for their 1988 album,Night Shift at the Thrill Factory,entitled "The History of the Concept of the Soul", which is a two-minute, musical version of lead singerFrank Portman's (also known as Dr. Frank) master's thesis. Dodds'The Greeks and the Irrationalis specifically referenced at the end of the song as "footnotes"(including anIbid) sung by Portman.

Publications

Books

• Select Passages Illustrative of Neoplatonism(London:S. P. C. K.,1924) (Texts for Students, 36)
• 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 LecturesGiven 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 theBacchae".Harvard Theological Review,1940, 33, 115-76
• "Three notes on theMedea"(Humanitas,1952, 4, 13-18)
• "Gilbert Murray" (Gnomon,1957, 29, 476-9)
• "On misunderstanding theOedipus 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

• "Memoir", in Dodds, E. R., ed.,Journals and Letters of Stephen MacKenna,London: Constable & Company Ltd., 1936 (Other People's Letters), pp. 1–89.

See also

• Allegorical interpretations of Plato

Further reading

• Wayne Hankey,Re-evaluating E. R. Dodds’ Platonism,Harvard Studies in Classical Philology103 (2005)
• Theodore Nash,Murray and Dodds and Page (oh my!): On the Pleasure and Value of Wissenschaftsgeschichte,inAntigone Journal
• Christopher Stray, Christopher Pelling, and Stephen Harrison, eds.,Rediscovering E. R. Dodds: Scholarship, Education, Poetry, and the Paranormal(Oxford UP, 2019)

External links

• Works by E. R. DoddsatLibriVox(public domain audiobooks)
• Donald Russell,Dodds, Eric Robertson, 1893-1979atThe British Academy