Kenneth Dover and the Greeks
Stephen Halliwell
[The following is the text, as delivered, of the memorial lecture 'Kenneth Dover and the Greeks'
given under the auspices of the Hellenic Society on April 4th 2011 in the Chancellor's Hall,
Senate House, London, and attended by members of Sir Kenneth's family, by former
colleagues, students, and friends, and by a wider audience. SH]
It's a privilege but also rather daunting to have the opportunity to present this lecture.
I find it hard to believe that it is only a few months short of thirty-five years since I
made my way across Oxford one day in 1976 to the President's lodgings of Corpus
Christi College to meet Kenneth Dover for the first time. He had returned to Oxford
that summer to become a Head of house at the very time when I was about to embark
on a D.Phil. thesis on Aristophanes; it was my exceptional good fortune that he had
been assigned to me as my supervisor. I was already aware of his work as perhaps the
greatest Aristophanic scholar in the world and one of the world's great Hellenists tout
court. I also knew that I could never hope to satisfy his own exacting standards. So it
was with a mixture of excitement and some trepidation that I approached that first
meeting.
Given that I was young, headstrong, and somewhat addicted to disagreeing
with people whose knowledge and expertise were far superior to mine (and only my
age has changed in the meantime), the relationship could have proved disastrous.
That it turned out not to be so was wholly due to Kenneth's patience, attentiveness,
and, above all, his inspiring example. I can still vividly remember coming away from
every supervision imbued with a feeling that nothing could be more exhilarating than
trying to study the Greeks as uncompromisingly and brilliantly as he did, with his
superb blend of philological meticulousness and probing historical imagination.
Having regular, close-range access during those four years to the penetrating ways in
which he thought about Greek literature, language, and culture was undoubtedly the
single most important influence on my own development as a Classicist – though I
should add that being deeply influenced by Kenneth was compatible with (it was
even in some ways conducive to) arriving at different views from his on many issues,
both large and small. (I can only dissent from the misplaced assumptions of the
reviewer of Marginal Comment who complained of Dover's silence about what she
called the 'intellectual descent group' of those he had influenced – as though influence
ought to generate discipleship.) If I can accomplish nothing else in this lecture, I
would at least like to pay my own tribute to the remarkable qualities of mind which
taught me so much as a doctoral student and from which I continued to learn for
decades thereafter, including the last fifteen years of Kenneth's life during which I
lived close to him, and enjoyed his friendship, in St Andrews.
It is entirely fitting that the Hellenic Society should celebrate the memory of
someone who, among his many other honours, was its President from 1971 to 1974
and subsequently a Vice-President for life, and whose contributions to Greek studies
can rival those of any other Hellenist of the twentieth century, or for that matter of the
two hundred years since Classics became a fully professionalised academic discipline.
What's more, the larger profile Kenneth Dover acquired in the course of his long
career (including his presidencies of an Oxford College, the British Academy, and
three national bodies for the promotion of Classics; his knighthood; his chancellorship
of St Andrews University) made him one of a select group of figures who were able to
stand as the public face of Classics on the educational and cultural scene more
generally in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century.
But how exactly should one set about reflecting in just a single lecture on the
achievements and legacy of such an outstanding scholar? Any attempt to give
individual attention to all of Kenneth Dover's projects and publications is, of course,
out of the question; it would certainly expose the limitations of my own competence to
appraise the full scope of his scholarship. What I'm going to offer cannot claim to be
more than selective and (in both senses of the word) partial: a first sketch, if you like,
of an intellectual portrait – but seen from my own indebted perspective, not from a
judiciously detached historical viewpoint. If there is a unifying theme to my
observations, it is the continuity of vision and values between the personality of the
man and the goals of his scholarship.
I would like to start with a pair of extracts from Dover's own writings (and
from now on I shall mostly confine myself to the bare surname). I've chosen these
extracts in part to draw attention to attributes which are, as I see it, fundamental to his
mode of scholarship and his patterns of thought, but also to try to conjure up at the
outset something of the distinctive tone of utterance and the stylistic stamp (the
χαρακτήρ, as some ancient critics would have called it) which will be familiar to
anyone who either heard him speak or has read much of his work. The nature of
linguistic style, both literary and sub-literary, was always a prime interest of Dover's
(it forms a thread of connection, for one thing, between his first book, Greek Word
Order, and his last, The Evolution of Greek Prose Style); from early in his career,
moreover, he became a self-conscious yet unfailingly polished stylist in his own right,
constantly attuned, as he explained in print, to the sounds, rhythms and structures of
his writing. By starting from some of his own words I hope to supply evidence for my
conviction that the way in which Dover both spoke and wrote was a manifestation of
a markedly individual cast of mind: style and substance are closely related in the
operations of his scholarly intellect – though I would not be able to say that they are
'inseparable' without contradicting a principle of analysis to which he himself came to
attach great importance.
2
The first of my two quotations dates from 1975. (You'll find all the main
passages cited in this lecture referenced on the handout [see pp. 15-16 below].) It is
taken from his Presidential Address of that year to the Classical Association, under
the title 'On Writing for the General Reader'. (I suppose it's conceivable that there are
people in this room who actually heard that address delivered.) The passage in
question forms part of a set of reflections on the peculiar sensitivity to language which
Dover recognised in himself but also thought typical, as he said, of 'a strikingly high
proportion of professional Classicists'. Here is the quotation.
To value linguistic phenomena not for their utility as means to a non-linguistic
end, but precisely for their self-sufficient particularity, as one might value a
tropical beetle or the movement of a bear, is one way of loving life..., but it is
not most people's way, and there is no good reason why it should be...
If I ask myself whence, in forty-three years of studying Greek (years in which I
have not undergone so much as thirty seconds of boredom), I have derived the
most powerful excitement, stimulus and – well, let us make good use of the
word 'joy' before it starts to travel the same road as 'gay' – the answer which
comes into my head is: syntax, textual criticism, palaeography, dialectology
and lyric metre. The first answer that comes into one's head is not always or
necessarily the truthful answer; the question, after all, is historical in so far as it
concerns events in one's past life, and historians are justified in treating
immediate answers with caution. Nevertheless, the fact of its being the first
answer is a fact of a kind which has a claim to be taken seriously, and, if
possible, to be explained.
The lecture to which that passage belongs was written at a time of major shifts on the
intellectual and educational landscape, a time when the relationship between Classics
and the wider culture in Britain was becoming an issue of growing urgency. Dover
himself, for all his great gifts as a communicator, was made somewhat uncomfortable
by a conflict between the demands of specialised scholarship and the desirability of
maintaining a presence for classical antiquity in the discourse and imagination of a
general educated public. Much, of course, has changed since the mid-70s, both within
and outside the profession. Dover's insistence on the inevitable gap between the
Classicist's linguistic bent and the interests of the general reader might now be
thought (by some) to reflect the priorities of a previous era of scholarship, an era
which has given way in the meantime to the blurring of older demarcations between
academic and non-academic genres of writing. Yet he himself did much, in works
which he wrote or edited, to bridge that gap between specialist and general public: at
least four of his own books were designed to be accessible to those with no knowledge
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of Greek: Aristophanic Comedy, Greek Popular Morality, Greek Homosexuality, and The
Greeks – the last, despite having been written in conjunction with the ill-fated tv
programmes of 1980, nonetheless an excellent précis of Dover's values as Hellenist.
But since I'm concerned here principally with the mind of the individual
scholar, not with the evolution of the discipline, the more direct interest for my
purposes of the passage I've quoted lies in its intricately crafted expression of a
characteristic kind of intellectual self-monitoring on Dover's part. The author's intense
love of language is eloquently avowed, but it is almost immediately held at a slight
distance and turned into something that itself calls for historical understanding – the
kind of understanding Dover believed was necessary to make sense of all the
particulars of the human world, including the historian's own assumptions and point
of view.
The main reason, I think, why the confession of a fascination with linguistic
phenomena for their own sake seems to carry with it a degree of anxious qualification
is that Dover was aware of a possible tension between what one might call, with slight
simplification, the philological and the cultural elements in the historical study of
language. From his early teens onwards (when he not only fell in love with Greek, as
he puts himself, at St Paul's, but also developed a precocious interest in the grammar
of several languages of the islands of the Western Pacific), Dover found the workings
of language utterly absorbing in their own right – so much so that he would have
applied for a first degree in linguistics if such a degree had been available at that time
at either Oxford or Cambridge. But what he himself described in an interview as the
'scientific, essentially wissenschaftlich' nature of this interest gradually matured into a
conception of language as central to, as well as paradigmatic of, the entire study of
history – the study of the totality of what people were capable of thinking, saying, and
doing. With the passage of time, Dover became very clear in his own mind that he did
not want to be the kind of figure (and he had encountered such individuals) whom he
described, in that same Classical Association address, as 'the good grammarian to
whom a text, once accurately translated, has no more to say'.
That last point can be reinforced and extended by turning to the second of my
programmatic excerpts. This one comes from the article entitled 'The Portrayal of
Moral Evaluation in Greek Poetry', published in this society's own journal in 1983. The
piece, as some of you will surely remember, was conceived as a response (a
penetrating and, in my view, quietly devastating response) to criticisms made by
Professor Arthur Adkins of Dover's 1974 book Greek Popular Morality in the Time of
Plato and Aristotle. The passage I've chosen occurs in the article's epilogue, one of
whose strands – for which, interestingly (given Dover's anti-Platonic inclinations),
some Platonic support is invoked – is the claim that a distinction between moral and
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aesthetic reactions to life may sometimes be hard to draw at the level of experience
itself. The passage runs as follows.
Sloppy table manners can create more implacable enmities than pride or
callousness; if we cause the death of a bird by accident, a pretty bird that sings
is a more grievous burden on our conscience than an ugly bird that croaks; and
'nauseating' as a term of moral disapproval is not just a metaphor. The
determinants of the moral values of an individual or a society are remarkably
heterogeneous. That is why I stressed in Greek Popular Morality...the
inconsistent, incoherent and unsystematic nature of Greek (or any other)
popular morality. In criticising me for this Adkins points out that 'a functional
structure may exist in the absence of rational design' and that the grammar of a
language is an example of systems which 'exhibit coherent structures in the
absence of grammarians...to design them'. I welcome this analogy, but employ
it differently. The generalisations ('rules') which constitute a descriptive
grammar of a language include some of very wide application, but a great
number each one of which applies to a single word or to a group of words
definable only by enumeration. Few rules cohere in the sense that one is
predictable from another or explicable in the light of others. During the
continuous process of change which characterises a living language, rules
contract and extend their domains, some perish and others are born. The
determinants of linguistic change, as of morality, are heterogeneous.
That passage – itself a fine specimen of Doverian prose (notice, among other things,
the cultivated avoidance of sentence connectives) – highlights a number of significant
traits of his way of thinking. The contrast with Adkins himself is salient and
instructive. Adkins believed that Greek ethical ideas could be treated as more or less
systematic; that different periods of Greek culture were definable by structural
changes in the system; that the system functioned above all, and in a publicly objective
manner, through the power of key evaluative terms; and that even non-philosophical
Greeks thought in ways which could best be analysed with quasi-philosophical
categories and frames of reference. Dover, by contrast, as the passage just quoted
indicates, constructed a picture of a more unsystematic and untidy state of affairs; he
stressed the importance of situating and interpreting ethical judgements in individual,
concrete contexts, and in building up generalisations very cautiously on the basis of
particular cases; he saw perpetual scope for clashes of value-judgements (he spoke
elsewhere of humans as 'a social species...beset by conflict because every single
member of it has so extraordinary a range of possible responses to any given
situation'); he thought that ethical or moral forces operated through far more than
5
individual evaluative terms; and, finally, he placed far greater weight than Adkins
and others on non- and even anti-philosophical habits of mind, the habits of a kind of
'folk psychology'. (Philosophers, he liked to insist, were not typical Greeks.)
The contrast with Adkins can stand more generally as an illustration of
something characteristic of Dover's intellectual and scholarly convictions. While it is
impossible here to attempt a detailed appraisal of his relationship to other Hellenists
in the second half of the twentieth century, it is worth stressing that he was always an
individualist as a scholar, resistant to anything like a school of thought, a mastermethodology, a highly schematised view of historical processes, or belief in what he
called 'underlying structures' (though admittedly in this last regard he could be said
to have made a partial exception – intermittently and ambivalently – for the
psychoanalytical ideas of Freud, whom he had started reading in his teens). In that
general resistance to various kinds of theory-building, one could also contrast him
with Adkins' own teacher, the influential figure of E. R. Dodds – someone Dover
knew in Oxford in the late 40s and early 50s, whose scholarship he greatly respected
(and the respect was mutual), but whose preoccupation with one dimension of Greek
culture (namely the psychology of the irrational and non-rational) gave much of his
work the kind of dominant orientation to which Dover himself was instinctively
averse.
What is at stake here, in the contrast between Dover and scholars like Adkins
and Dodds, is on one level the question of how far it is possible and desirable to
ascribe to (large segments of) Greek culture something like an integrated worldview.
Both Adkins and Dodds, in their selected areas of interest, are examples of scholars
who believed it was both feasible and fruitful to do so. Dover, I submit, consistently
supposed otherwise. At least as early as a review published in 1957, in JHS as it
happens, he expressed strong reservations about the practice (associated not least with
the work of Bruno Snell) of extrapolating from the language, sensibility, and modes of
perception found in an individual text, author, or genre to the mentality of a whole
society or cultural epoch. Dover accepted, for sure, that in the archaic and classical
periods there were identifiable tendencies of thought and behaviour which became
hallmarks of Greek culture; some of them he took to be among the best reasons for
continuing to study the culture. But those tendencies were, for him, less a matter of a
substantive body of beliefs or a stable Weltanschauung than of dynamic attitudes – of
sceptical questioning, rational inquiry, artistic experiment and innovation – which
influenced many areas of Greek life and could only be made sense of, according to
Dover's principles, by working outwards from a close interpretation of historical
particulars, not by imposing a conceptual template on the evidence.
In order to clarify the underpinnings of this Doverian assessment of Greek
culture and its connections with his own scheme of values, I think it may be helpful at
6
this point to make a few observations on the genesis and formation of his core
interests as a Hellenist. Needless to say, time does not permit anything like a full
account of the various influences which impinged on Dover's early intellectual
development and which he discussed himself in Marginal Comment and elsewhere.
Those influences undoubtedly involved a mixture of the personal and the academic.
Wartime service was obviously salient in the first of those respects, leaving its mark as
it did not only on his views of Thucydides as military historian, but also on the way
he came to think about such things as the workings of popular morality and even the
sexual language of Aristophanic comedy. It's also worth pausing long enough to recall
briefly the early influence on him of three individual scholars in particular. One was
his undergraduate tutor at Balliol, Russell Meiggs, who inculcated in him both the
habit of employing inscriptional evidence wherever possible (an epigraphic habit
Dover himself would apply assiduously, and throughout his career, to linguistic as
well as political and other questions) and also a kind of tough historical realism, rather
than more rationalistic modes of interpretation, in formulating and addressing
questions about the past: Dover always professed that it was 'real life' – by which he
meant concrete experience rather than bloodless abstractions – that motivated him as
a historian. Another scholarly influence was the formidable figure of Eduard Fraenkel,
an unavoidable challenge for any aspiring Hellenist in post-war Oxford: for Dover, it
was Fraenkel's intense, Germanic seriousness in both literary-historical and
philological analysis which provided at this stage a model of scholarship to emulate.
But also of substantial importance were the few months in 1948 which Dover spent
working on an envisaged D.Phil. thesis under the supervision of the great historian of
ideas, Arnaldo Momigliano. (What a thought it is to picture those two extraordinarily
subtle yet so very different intellects in dialogue with one another). It's worth
stressing, though, that for all the acute qualities Dover found in Momigliano ('for
learning, accuracy of recall, speed of absorption and breadth of historical interests he
was a man whose like I have not known', we read in Marginal Comment), the choice of
research topic for the D.Phil. (Athens in the two decades immediately after the
Peloponnesian War), together with the initial focus on both oratory and the
fragmentary comedy of the period, were Dover's own choices. I once heard
Momigliano himself (no doubt with rhetorical self-depreciation) say there was
nothing at all he could teach Dover. I am confident Dover would not have agreed.
The lines of influence which ran between his various teachers and Dover could
clearly be pursued much further. But what I want to emphasise myself here is a
different kind of consideration: namely, how early in Dover's career certain
fundamentals established themselves in ways which were to remain of lasting
importance, and how early we can see a significant pattern emerging between the
subjects on which his work concentrated itself. Dover's principal interests as a
7
Hellenist cluster in six main areas: Old Comedy, and therefore of course Aristophanes;
Thucydides' Histories (and to some extent fifth-century historiography more generally
– one shouldn't forget that he loved Herodotus as well, even if he wrote about him
less often); fourth-century Attic oratory (both as a rhetorical-cum-literary and as a
social phenomenon); Greek popular morality (studied above all through the lenses of
comedy and oratory); Greek sexual mores and psychology, especially homosexuality;
and, last but evidently not least, the Greek language itself, chiefly in the archaic and
classical periods and particularly from the point of view of historical stylistics, but
with sustained attention (which I've already mentioned) to documentary as well as
literary texts. There is a whole network of connections and intersections between these
domains, as Dover's work cumulatively and powerfully demonstrated. And it looks,
in retrospect at any rate, as though the authors and topics in question were already
starting to form a constellation in his mind even in the late 1940s, in the years
immediately after his completion of Greats in 1947, and then increasingly so in the
course of the 1950s.
We can observe the configuration taking shape not only in some of his early
publications but also, during this same period, in inchoate and proleptic ideas for
larger projects which he would return to and carry out at later stages. Consider briefly
how this is borne out for each of the six areas I listed. Old Comedy (blurring into socalled Middle Comedy) was part, as I've mentioned, of the abortive D.Phil. project on
early-fourth-century Athens; it belonged there because its contemporary references
could contribute to a detailed, chronologically careful reconstruction of events in
Athens in the postwar period: one of the products of this work was an early article
(1950) on Plato comicus. But it was not just comic fragments which interested Dover;
Old Comedy in its Aristophanic incarnation clearly attracted him from the outset, not
least for its combination of earthy realism and poetic virtuosity (two aspects of human
behaviour which appealed to him equally). From around 1950 he was contemplating
an edition of Frogs for a new Oxford series of commentaries, though he switched to
Clouds in 1955. A characteristically perspicacious review of Ehrenberg's The People of
Aristophanes appeared in 1952, and in the mid-50s he produced two substantial and
still useful works – the chapter on comedy in Platnauer's Fifty Years (and Twelve) of
Classical Scholarship and a Lustrum survey of publications on Aristophanes from 1938
to 1955 – both of which attest to the concentration of thought he was giving to comedy
at that time.
As for oratory, that other strand of (in both senses) the post-war Athenian
project, Antiphon and Lysias in particular figured prominently in the work of these
early years. When, two decades later, Dover gave the Sather lectures on Lysias at
Berkeley in 1967, he was, as he put it himself, 'reviving a project which had attracted
[him] in 1948 but was set aside in 1949': in other words, the Sathers, which turned of
8
course into the 1968 book Lysias and the Corpus Lysiacum, were in effect a belated
fulfilment of one component of the original D.Phil. conception.
Alongside oratory, which like comedy served multiple purposes in studying
the dynamics of classical Athenian culture, the austere but inescapable work of
Thucydides exercised a strong fascination on Dover from the period of Greats
onwards. He spoke of the 'intellectual excitement' he derived from studying Athenian
history with the help of the first volume of Gomme's new commentary, published in
1945; and early in his Fellowship of Balliol he started lecturing for Mods on
Thucydides Books 6-7, texts he would make his own in the following years,
publishing on them from 1953 onwards and eventually writing the bulk of the
commentary on them in the continuation of Gomme's commentary on which he
collaborated with Andrewes after Gomme's death at the start of 1959. There can be
little doubt that throughout his life Dover felt a special affinity with Thucydides'
fastidiously rational and self-conscious intelligence, though he never idolised him
(any more than he did any other Greek) and could identify blindspots in him,
including the conviction (from which Dover himself never suffered) that he had said
the last word that needed to be said on certain events. Thucydides sometimes
reminded Dover of things he had experienced himself during the war, which may
help to explain why he could not read the account of the Athenians' retreat from
Syracuse in Book 7, even when he had done so more than a hundred times before,
'without feeling the hair on the back of [his] neck stand on end'.
If one asks where the larger spheres of social, behavioural, and moral subjects
which issued in two of the major books of the 1970s find a place in the genesis of
Dover's interests, here too there is evidence that their gestation goes far back. While
his earliest work on oratory was channelled mostly into technical questions of
chronology, authorship, and stylometrics, we know from his own record that already
in the intellectual ferment of the late 1940s he had toyed with the idea of a project that
would use the orators, alongside comedy, as a window on the moral and religious
values current in Athenian society – the sort of project, then, which later materialised
in Greek Popular Morality. As regards the specific topic of homosexuality, the first seeds
of a new approach to this subject were planted as early as 1952-4: in giving
undergraduate lectures in Oxford on iambic and elegiac poetry in those years, his
thoughts on the homoerotic verses in the Theognidean collection led him to form the
view that almost nothing of historical value had ever been written on Greek
homosexuality in general. Much further thought and work, stimulated in part by a
new interest in Plato's Symposium in the early 1960s, would of course enlarge and
transform his ambitions to reinterpret the history of homosexuality. But once again I
find it notable that the original impulse can be traced back to the cluster of ideas and
questions generated in the early post-war period.
9
As, finally, for language (including the ancillary disciplines of epigraphy and
textual criticism), well a scrupulous attention to that infused everything, as it would
always continue to do: the study of language in a manner both meticulous and
nuanced was Dover's master-passion and his greatest asset. The use of oratory and
inscriptions for historical purposes had led in each case to an interest in linguistic and
stylistic features; Dover even pondered the possibility of writing a new grammar of
Attic inscriptions. From 1949 he worked for several years on preparing the second
edition of Denniston's Greek Particles for the press. And during that same period he
started to give sustained thought to the elusive question of Greek word order, an
interest he would carry right through the decade and bring to fruition in his first book,
published in 1960 after the material had been worked up for the Gray lectures in
Cambridge the previous year.
I've drawn attention, then, to a selection of details which bear out the claim that
Dover's interests in comedy, historiography, oratory, popular morality, sexual mores,
and the workings of language (including stylistics) amount to a strikingly stable, longstanding grouping which was already taking shape in the late 1940s and early 1950s
and which continued to be central to his concerns as a Hellenist right through to the
final publications. At the same time, this configuration is complex: its internal
relationships and the emphasis placed on individual components shift over time, and
other factors enter into or fade from the picture at different stages. How far is it
legitimate, then, to see here a genuine unity of interests rather than a bundle of things
which held together over time but were the result as much of the contingencies of an
individual life as of a coherently formulated agenda? Dover was unusual for a scholar
in the degree to which he reflected on the shape and determinants of his own career.
The autobiography, together with a number of interviews and other pieces that
followed in its wake, was obviously the culmination of this process, but in fact it was
always part-and-parcel of his cast of mind, in ways I touched on earlier, to ponder the
relationship between his own values and motivations, on the one hand, and the aims
of his scholarship, on the other. The question, therefore, how far Dover's career
embodies a uniform approach to Greek culture is one for which an unusual amount of
supplementary first-person evidence is available. But that does not make it an
altogether easy question to answer.
At this point I'd like to glance at one particular piece of evidence for Dover's
own retrospective attempt to make sense of his career and indeed of the life of his
mind more generally. The diagram on the second side of the handout [see p. 16 below]
was produced by Dover himself to accompany a talk about his own intellectual
formation which he gave in Italy in the early 1990s, at a time when the autobiography
itself was underway and perhaps even close to completion.
10
The first thing which should strike a classicist's eye about this diagram, I think,
is its partial resemblance to the stemma of a manuscript tradition. The resemblance
can hardly be accidental: it is as though Dover is contemplating the formation and
evolution of his interests as an analogue to textual transmission – though admittedly it
is more like the transmission and entanglement of a plurality of texts than of a single
work. The diagram, which as you can see is in Italian (no doubt the talk itself was too:
Italian was the modern language Dover spoke and wrote best, partly because he had
acquired a liking for it during his wartime service there), lends itself to interpretation
in more than one way. It tracks developments over time, marking continuties and
discontinuities, as well as various degrees of intensity in the cultivation of particular
interests. In doing so it simultaneously suggests a large element of contingency but
also exposes something like the aggregative structure of an individual intellect. From
left to right it falls roughly into three zones: first (filling the whole left-hand side), the
classical (with subdisciplines, individual authors, and topics such as stylometrics –
and with the Greek language running down the middle as the only subject which
merits a double line uninterrupted except by the war years); then a group of cultural
categories and topics which includes morality, religion, homosexuality, anthropology,
and animal behaviour; finally, a set of interests in the natural world which begins with
apes and insects at the age of 3 (!), up in the right-hand corner, and eventually
branches in mid-life into birds and plants. (You see, by the way, even at this side of
the diagram that we're not dealing with discrete, entirely non-academic interests: apes
and birds lead on to a more sustained concern with ethology, which in turn has
connections with work on morality, religion, and homosexuality.)
For all its intricacy, the diagram remains selective; its details could be added to
and complicated further. But it nonetheless brings out, I submit, three points of wider
significance: first, that Dover's mind, in its range of interests, was the reverse of
narrowly specialised; secondly, that it was a mind which was open to links between
multiple spheres of thought and experience; finally and most importantly, that as an
exercise in condensing processes of historical understanding (and applying them to
himself) the diagram exemplifies a typical feature of Dover's ways of working, since it
brings the maximum precision possible to bear on the analysis of something which is
at the same time recognised to be irreducible to principles of systematic order.
It's that last point – the combination of analytical precision with a recognition of
the resistance of human experience to unified explanation – which I want to
emphasise, because it is, I believe, a key trait of Dover's cast of mind and his frame of
reference as a historian. One can find examples of it throughout his work, but it is
most obviously present in what he thought of himself as his most valuable
achievement, the studies of syntactic and stylistic phenomena in language, where a
strong attraction to quantitative methods sits alongside an always pragmatic
11
awareness of the plurality of factors which affect the choices facing individual writers
and speakers. ('[M]y approach to all utterance is pragmatic and resolutely
intentionalist', as he put it in The Evolution of Greek Prose Style). In a characteristic
statement (this one from the article 'Greek Homosexuality and Initiation'), he writes:
'The historian has to reckon all the time with heterogeneity of causal processes.' It is
very telling that he then adds: 'That is particularly true if he is a student of the history
of linguistic behaviour, a topic from which the student of other kinds of human
behaviour can learn much.' Whereas some historians might be tempted to think of
language as among the more stable and consistent of human phenomena, Dover's
hard-won sense of the limitations of analytical rigour in historical linguistics made
him regard the conditions of language (which we've already seen that he took to be a
matter of 'constant change and the instability of rules') as a paradigm of the challenge
facing historical understanding and interpretation in general.
It was Dover's ingrained pragmatism where both language and other forms of
behaviour are concerned which made him averse to anything like a systematically
integrated view of Greek culture. I contrasted him earlier with scholars like Adkins
and Dodds who were inclined to conceptualise Greek culture in terms of 'worldviews':
both these scholars, like many others, actually used that category in their accounts of
Greek mentalities, though Dodds at any rate was too sophisticated not to realise that
there was a price to be paid for doing so. Dover never posited anything as substantial
as a Greek worldview (or a series of worldviews). He attempted to explain both
individual and collective patterns of behaviour, employing explanatory principles
which made frequent use of 'hypotheses' (a term of which he was fond) but always
stopping short of more ambitious levels of theoretical formalisation, mindful as he
was that (I quote again from the response to Adkins) 'the few Greeks whom we know
through surviving literature are only samples drawn from a population whose days
were as fully occupied by action and speech as ours'.
In addition, he held a modified version of an appraisal of Greek history which
antiquity itself had invented, seeing the archaic and classical periods as powerfully
innovative and experimental in the intellectual, artistic, political and social domains
(he regarded even overtly celebrated homosexuality as an act of cultural innovation
on the part of the Greeks), and sticking to the conviction, which would now provoke
many into sharp disagreement, that the post-classical era, though far from simply
derivative or uncreative, witnessed a gradual diminution in Greek creativity, with the
result that, as he put it rather trenchantly, 'the one fatal weakness of Greek civilization
itself [was] its inability, after a certain point in time, to comprehend and develop
genuine innovation in the arts'.
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There is so much more, of course, that could and should be said about these ideas. I've
only scratched the surface of some of the questions which seem to me worth about
Dover's mind and scholarship. But I must move to a few concluding thoughts.
Dover's career coincided with an age of transition as regards the place of
Classics in British education and in the wider culture. He formulated the nature of
that transition himself in the following terms, during the discussion which followed
his paper on 'Expurgation of Greek literature' at the 1979 Fondation Hardt
colloquium: 'I suppose that up to the first World War British upper-class and middleclass society was extraordinarily confident of its own values. It knew what it wanted
from the Classics, and it exploited them in order to sustain its values. Now, especially
since the Second World War, this self-assurance has given way to self-doubt, humility
and guilt; we do not now 'exploit' the Classics, because we are not agreed on the ends
to which the study of Classics is a means.' Dover never argued for the perpetuation of
a privileged position for Classics; in fact, he explicitly rejected as bad arguments most
of the claims which had once underpinned that privilege (claims such as those for the
special value of learning Greek and Latin, or for the canonical authority of ancient
literature and art).
What he did argue for, and gave exemplary embodiment to in his own writing
and teaching, was the validity of keeping a substantial Classical presence in the larger
study of the humanities. And he defended the study of the humanities as a whole, in
an increasingly technological world, as an educational and cultural enrichment of a
society's collective stock of experience, and with that an expansion of what he always
saw as the continuum between historical research and everyday experience in the
present. That certainly doesn't mean that he naively collapsed the differences between
cultures in the past and the present. Here too he was a pragmatist: he saw both
constants and variables, continuities and discontinuities, mixed together in the total
fabric of human experience across time. A number of times in his work he faces the
question whether the ancient Greeks could or should now be considered 'alien' to us –
a question prompted, at root, by mid-twentieth century influences of anthropology on
Classics (and, incidentally, Dover himself regularly cited real anthropological data in
his work, more so than some scholars who think of themselves as anthropologically à
la page). He gave an answer which is bound to disappoint those who prefer polarised
extremes, but one which was in keeping with his entire conception of history, namely:
it all depends which phenomena are under consideration, and, equally, who is doing
the considering. As he put it in a talk given in St Andrews on the occasion of his 80th
birthday, 'Personally I find Ajax much more familiar and more intelligible than, say,
Cardinal Newman.' Actually, he went on immediately to qualify that by saying that
he found some things about Ajax 'unimaginably alien' (in Louis MacNeice's phrase),
and others all too intelligible. The Greeks, like the rest of the human record, he saw as
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inevitably a composite (to the eye of any individual observer) of the alien and the
recognisably similar. And he took the resulting problems of interpretation to form one
of the unending tasks both of history and of life.
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(photograph by Robin Gillanders)
Some references:
(i) 'To value linguistic phenomena...': Presidential Address to the Classical Association 1975,
'On Writing for the General Reader', publ. 1976, rpr. in The Greeks and their Legacy (GL) 311.
(ii) Early interest in language 'scientific, essentially wissenschaftlich': interview with Naim
Attallah, http://quartetbooks.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/insights-sir-kenneth-dover/
(iii) 'Sloppy table manners...': 'The Portrayal of Moral Evaluation in Greek Poetry', JHS 103
(1983) 46-7, rpr. in Greek and the Greeks (GG) 94.
(iv) Human beings as 'a social species...beset by conflict because every single member of it has
so extraordinary a range of possible responses to any given situation': 'Speaking Volumes:
Kenneth Dover on Fabre's Book of Insects', Times Higher Education Supplement 5th May 1995.
(v) Scepticism about 'underlying structures': 'Greek Homosexuality and Initiation', GL 132.
Reading Freud in his teens: Marginal Comment (MC) 7. Mixed feelings about Freudian
psychoanalysis: cf. e.g. MC 106, 123-5, Greek Homosexuality 179 n. 24.
(vi) Resistance to Snellian tendencies in reconstructing Greek mentalities: review of M. Treu,
Von Homer zur Lyrik, JHS 77 pt. II (1957) 322-3; cf. e.g. GG 106-7, MC 78 with n. 5.
(vii) Meiggs, Fraenkel, Momigliano: MC 58-9, 39-40, 64 (cf. 263).
(viii) Sather lectures 'reviving a project which had attracted me in 1948': MC 137.
(ix) Thucydides prompting personal memories of war: MC 53. Reading the retreat from
Syracuse made 'the hair on the back of my neck stand on end': The Greeks 41.
(x) Thinking behind Greek Popular Morality goes back as far as 1948: MC 155.
(xi) '[M]y approach to all utterance is pragmatic and resolutely intentionalist': The Evolution of
Greek Prose Style 13 n. 15; cf. GL 62, MC 258-9.
(xii) 'The historian has to reckon all the time with heterogeneity of causal processes': GL 132.
(xiii) '[T]he few Greeks whom we know...': JHS 103 (1983) 48 = GG 96.
(xiv) '[T]he one fatal weakness of Greek civilisation...': 'What are the "Two Cultures"?', GL 316.
(xv) 'I suppose that up to the first World War...': 'Expurgation of Greek Literature', GL 290.
(xvi) 'Personally I find Ajax much more familiar and more intelligible than, say, Cardinal
Newman': 80th birthday talk, St Andrews, March 2000; unpublished ms.
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