DODDS, Eric Robertson (1893-1979)

DODDS, Eric Robertson (1893-1979)

E.R. Dodds was born on 26 July 1893 at Banbridge, Co. Down, and died at Old Marston, near Oxford, on 4 April 1979. His parents were both schoolteachers: his mother (Anne Fleming Allen) trained as a teacher at VictoriaCollege, Belfast, while his father, Robert Dodds, obtained a first class honours degree in Classics at Queen’s College, Galway (1878), where he was taught by D’Arcy Thompson sr. Both parents were Protestants, his mother from rural southern Ireland, his father an Ulsterman. At the time of Dodds’s birth (he was the only child), Robert Dodds was Headmaster of the Classical and Intermediate School at Banbridge, but lost this post due to alcoholism and died at the age of 45 in 1901. Thereafter Dodds’s mother was an energetic and protective parent who soon moved to Dublin where she ran a private school and ensured that her son received a sound education at St. Andrew’s College, Dublin before entering Ulster’s premier public school, CampbellCollege, Belfast. (Her role in her son’s life is remarkably similar to that played by a widowed mother in the early life of Gilbert Murray, Dodds’s future mentor.) Dodds obtained an exhibition at UniversityCollege, Oxford in December 1911 (after failing to get a scholarship at Balliol), and in his last term at Campbell he was expelled for insolence towards a philistine headmaster. He entered Oxford an atheist, widely read in the history of religion, and combining literary aestheticism with socialist leanings.

At Oxford Gilbert Murray, recently appointed Regius Professor of Greek, was the strongest influence on the young scholar through his classes and lectures on Euripides, Greek religion and methods of translation. Also, in preparing for examinations in Classical Moderations Dodds's technical weakness were remedied by his college tutor, A.B. Poynton,who sensed that, despite limitations in his earlier training, his pupil could win university scholarships. Coached in verse composition by A.D. Godley, Dodds obtained a Craven scholarship in 1913, and in 1914 took a first class in Classical Moderations in the spring and in December won the blue riband of Oxford Classics, the Ireland Scholarship.

He should have spent his remaining time at Oxford basking in this glory and advancing his academic career. He was involved in literary circles, was widening his interests in psychology and anthropology (he heard William McDougall and R.R. Marret lecture), and was exploring Plotinus (in a class given by J.A. Stewart that he took in early 1915 together with T.S. Eliot). But World War I intervened.

He served as a volunteer stretcher-bearer in Serbia in the summer and autumn of 1915, but took advantage of the prevailing Service Acts that allowed him, as a resident of Ireland, to avoid military service. On his return to Oxford in 1916 he was outspoken in his support of the Dublin Easter Rebellion of that year, thereby offending, R.W. Macan, a conservative Irish Protestant and Master of University College. Dodds was not formally expelled, as he had been from CampbellCollege, but had to absent himself. He was allowed to return in the summer of 1917 to take his final examinations in the School of Literae Humaniores. Despite disliking ancient history, his philosophy papers earned him first class standing, and he returned to Ireland to teach school until the war ended and wait for a position commensurate with his academic credentials.

He hoped to get an Oxford fellowship, but Gilbert Murray warned that his wartime record would be held against him; Dodds defended himself, denying in particular that he was a pacifist (letter of 7 February 1919 at Murray Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford, vol. 38, fols. 168-9), but recognized that his immediate future lay elsewhere, perhaps even outside Britain. He considered positions in South Africa and the USA, and was turned down at the University of Edinburgh because of his war record. Finally, he was appointed as a lecturer at Reading (then an affiliated college of the University of London) in a small department headed by a benign expert on Boetian pottery, Percy Ure.

Here Dodds readjusted rapidly. He had voted for Sinn Fein in the Irish elections of 1918, but soon recoiled from the Irish Free State that emerged after the Treaty of November 1921. He had earlier encountered the last flourishing of Anglo-Irish society in Dublin, and met brilliant individuals such as Æ (George William Russell), Yeats, Lennox Robertson and Stephen MacKenna. The new Ireland seemed unappealingly philistine. He broke off an engagement to an Irish Catholic woman, began to lose contact with his Irish friends (notably the poet and art critic Thomas MacGreevy) and in 1923 married Annie Edwards Powell, the daughter of an Anglican cleric and a lecturer in English at Reading.

The couple moved to the University of Birmingham in 1924 when Dodds was appointed Professor of Greek, and here he spent the years that he always regarded as the happiest of his life. His wife’s two miscarriages brought sadness, but there were congenial colleagues, including after 1930 a fellow Ulsterman Louis MacNeice whom he appointed as a lecturer in his department and who became a lifelong friend. Dr George Auden, an amateur classicist in the Faculty of Medicine, brought him into contact with his son, W.H. Auden, then spectacularly launching his career as a poet. There was time to cultivate interests in psychical research, in film, in poetry (he published a book of rather traditional verse in 1929) and in gardening. He followed up his early work on the text of Plotinus with a pioneering edition of Proclus’ Elements of Theology, while with his help his friend MacKenna completed a translation of Plotinus. He was also able to contribute Plotinian material to his wife's well-received book on the Romantics’ theory of poetry. And shortly after MacKenna’s death in 1934 Dodds paid tribute to him with a memoir and an edition of his letters and notebooks — a final farewell to the Ireland from which he was now decisively separated.

1936 was the mid-point of Dodds’s life in every sense, and it brought him back to Oxford. Gilbert Murray’s successor as Regius Professor of Greek was notionally to be chosen that year by the monarch (in reality, by the Prime Minister of the day, in this case, Stanley Baldwin, a former President of the Classical Association). Murray supported Dodds against two internal candidates, Maurice Bowra and J.D. Denniston, and, given his prominent position in public and political life, was able to exercise decisive influence. He approached Dodds to be a candidate, and, after he had heard that H.J. Rose had contacted the Prime Minister, he placed himself at Baldwin's disposal. The Prime Minister was at the time grappling with the impending abdication of an uncrowned King and the ambitions of German and Italian fascism. Dodds (Missing Persons, pp. 124-5) was unaware of Murray’s role, and would have declined the offer of the chair had he known of it.

He regretted returning to Oxford. He was seen as an outsider, tainted by his record in World War I, his alleged pacifism, his actual socialism (he was a member of the British Labour Party) and a scholarly reputation based on studying authors outside the classical curriculum that the Regius Professor of Greek traditionally sustained. An intemperate attack in the Daily Mail by Randolph Churchill was followed by resentment from some Oxford colleagues, notably Denys Page, who reportedly (Lloyd-Jones, 1982, p. 297) refused to speak to him in the years in which they were both at ChristChurch, where Dodds’s chair was based.

But Dodds was not easily shaken. He campaigned from the beginning for the reform of the Oxford curriculum (notably the inclusion of literature along with philosophy and ancient history in Greats), and warned against undue encroachments on what he dubbed ‘humanism’ by the research culture that was beginning to develop in British universities. He also began editing Euripides’ Bacchae, to which he had been attracted by Gilbert Murray’s lectures in his undergraduate years. He reprinted Murray’s Oxford text, about which he had some reservations, and, as Murray himself recognized when the edition appeared, his former pupil showed himself ‘much more industrious and careful’ [letter from Murray to Dodds, 19 December 1944, Dodds Papers, Box 3]).

In World War II Dodds supported Britain as a civil servant engaged in educational intelligence in a research unit headed by Arnold Toynbee, based in Oxford and later relocated to the Foreign Office. He made an exhausting visit to Chinese universities in 1942 and 1943; wrote a pamphlet (Minds in the Making) on Nazi methods of secondary education; and delivered a radio broadcast urging Eire to participate in a war that he saw as a battle against an evil that threatened Western civilization, not the exercise in imperialist aggression from which he had recoiled in 1914.

In post-war Oxford Dodds was more readily accepted. His personality markedly softened, though he was always rather withdrawn. But the nature of his work (he wrote almost nothing for popular consumption, and, despite his literary interests, never translated a major ancient author) meant that he never s attained the prominent public position of his predecessor. He met the requirements of his chair with lectures on major authors (notably on Homer in the late 1940s and early 1950s) and contrived to offer 'classes' (seminars) on Greek religion and an introduction to Neoplatonism.

The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), the Sather Lectures given at the University of California at Berkeley in 1949, became Dodds' most famous and influential book. It book was particularly well received in the United States and offers of positions followed from universities there. But Dodds remained in Oxford and devoted most of the next decade to editing Plato’s Gorgias. He revised John Burnet's Oxford textin light of accurate collations of certain manuscripts, but he did not provide the kind of historical and philosophical interpretation that he had originally envisaged (see Todd, 2002). A few years after his retirement in 1960 he published Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, essentially a coda to The Greeks and the Irrational, in which he explored manifestations of irrationality in late antiquity (see Smith and Lounibos). His wife’s death in 1973 provoked him to write his autobiography, Missing Persons; its title referred to the problem of recovering his own earlier selves, though it could equally well apply to individuals he either omits or treats with extreme circumspection.

Dodds’s contribution to British classical scholarship goes well beyond the considerable, if somewhat delayed, influence of The Greeks and the Irrational. He was a pioneer in the academic study of Neoplatonism. Earlier British scholars had dealt with Plotinus and other Neoplatonists in relatively superficial or discursive terms (see Bigg and Inge); Dodds brought formidable technical powers to editing, at A.E. Taylor's suggestion, the major synoptic manual of ancient Neoplatonism, Proclus’ Elements of Theology, and interpretive imagination to landmark studies on Plotinus’ use of Plato’s Parmenides and the evolution of Neoplatonism before Plotinus. He was invited in the 1930s to translate Plotinus for the Loeb Classical Library, but bequeathed the task to A.H. Armstrong, a younger scholar whose work Dodds generously encouraged.

Dodds’s interest in Neoplatonism was always motivated by a historicism that he enriched with insights from anthropology, psychology and psychical research, and that has made him a seminal figure in the evolution of modern cultural studies. Thus he saw later ancient philosophy as part of a wider movement of intellectual decline, with the rise of magic and superstition indicating what he, like Murray, regarded as a ‘failure of nerve’ that began in the Hellenistic period. (Plotinus he saw as standing apart from this development and as the last voice of the Hellenic tradition of rationalism.) Yet early in his career Dodds was trying to identify the origins of this decline in the classical period, locating them initially in Euripides. Psychological perspectives dominate papers on Phaedra’s erotic madness in the Hippolytus (1925), and the general survey, ‘Euripides the Irrationalist’ (1929). Invited by Murray in 1932 to lecture at Oxford on Greek religion in an annual series of preparatory lectures for Greats, Dodds began exploring the religion of the classical period, and had addressed the irrationalism of mystical cults well before he agreed in 1937 to edit Euripides’ Bacchae, a text that both displayed and analyzed the phenomena of irrationality that was now his major preoccupation.

The Greeks and the Irrational was originally designed as a set of studies of the decline and fall of ancient rationalism (see Todd, 1998), ending with a reprint of an earlier Freudian analysis of Augustine’s asceticism (Dodds, 1927/8), but practical considerations limited the book to the classical period. Some critics faulted Dodds for offering no general analysis of 'the irrational' and leaving it to span both pathological and undesirable psychic and social conditions as well as certain inherent features of the human condition. It was certainly the former category that most interested him. During World War I he had traced parallels between the hysteria of the time and the rise of occultism in late antiquity, and in the 1930s he had seen analogues to the political irrationalism then gripping Europe in the social and intellectual tensions that Euripides' plays reflected. However, The Greeks and the Irrational concluded optimistically with the perhaps surprising, and to some critics implausible, claim that modern psychology might prevent a repetition of antiquity's post-classical failure of nerve.

Dodds is a complex figure: an intellectual who courageously challenged the tradition that he inherited in classical studies while splendidly mastering its fundamental techniques; and a scholar whose work often reflected his own experience of political and social disruption. This rare amalgam will ensure his continued attraction for classical scholars, even though he left no theoretical legacy. He ought to have confronted Marxist models of explanation with an overt statement of his implicit but firm commitment to an undetermined and indeterminable human power for rational and irrational ideas and practices. Instead he chose to exemplify this assumption in his studies. However, Dodds’ still largely unexploited body of papers at the Bodleian Library, which include revealing general lectures that a less fastidious scholar might have published, may in time throw some light on the broader implications of his scholarly achievements.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Select Passages Illustrating Neoplatonism: Translated with an Introduction

(1923).

‘The aidôs of Phaedra and the Meaning of the Hippolytus’, CR, vol. 39

(1925), pp. 102-4.

‘Augustine’s Confessions: A Study of Spiritual Maladjustment’, Hibbert

Journal, vol. 26 (1927-8), pp. 459-73.

‘The Parmenides of Plato and the Origin of the Neoplatonic “One”’, CQ,

vol. 22 (1928), pp. 129-42.

‘Euripides the Irrationalist’, CR, vol. 43 (1929), pp. 97-104.

(Ed.), Proclus:Elements of Theology(Oxford, 1933; 2nd edn, 1963).

(Ed. with a memoir), Journal and Letters of Stephen MacKenna (1936).

Minds in the Making (1941).

(Ed.), Euripides:Bacchae (Oxford, 1944; 2nd edn, 1960).

The Greeks and the Irrational, Sather Classical Lectures vol. 25 (Berkeley and

Los Angeles, 1951).

(Ed.), Plato:Gorgias(Oxford, 1949; repr. 1966).

Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge, 1965).

The Ancient Concept of Progress and Other Essays on Greek Literature and

Belief (Oxford, 1973).

Missing Persons: An Autobiography (Oxford, 1977).