Dover and the public face of Classics* Stephen Halliwell I suppose that up to the first World War British upper-class and middle-class 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.1 This epilogue offers some critical reflections on the way in which Kenneth Dover’s distinctive intellectual values informed his (evolving) conception of Classics as a discipline in an age of transition. My material will be drawn principally from a series of pieces which Dover wrote at the height of his academic career, in the 1970s and 80s, for non-specialist audiences, or at any rate on occasions which called for something other than exercises in primary research:2 his Presidential address to the Classical Association in 1976; a lecture to the 7th Congress of the International Federation of the Societies of Classical Studies (FIEC) in Budapest in 1979 (but not published till 1984); a 1985 lecture, ‘What are the “two cultures”?’, delivered at Rougemont School in Wales;3 and a short article for an Italian magazine in 1988, ‘Il valore degli studi classici’ (translated here in an appendix), which borrows from the 1979 and 1985 lectures but contains a few revealing details of its own. The first and third of these items were reprinted in The Greeks and their Legacy. The second lecture supplied (or, rather, given the chronology of composition, it incorporated) some passages which are also to be found in the introductory chapter to The Greeks, the book which accompanied the ill-fated 1980 series of BBC TV programmes of the same title.4 Finally, some of the formulations adopted in the Italian article found their way into Marginal Comment, which itself provides a certain amount of additional material pertinent to my argument. The four pieces I have selected were not, of course, Dover’s only writings for nonspecialist audiences. In fact, it is important to remember that he thought of several of his books (with whatever degree of hopefulness) in that same light, including Aristophanic Comedy, Greek Popular Morality, and, not least, Greek Homosexuality. But my focus on these four items will allow especially close attention to some of his more carefully calculated pronouncements in his role as a high-profile spokesman (probably not a term he himself would have used) for the discipline of Classics. It will also enable me to probe certain salient features, including points of tension, in Dover’s self-presentation as a classical scholar. These features include his unequivocal repudiation of any exceptionalist justification for the This piece has benefited from the comments of Ewen Bowie, Paul Cartledge, Jaś Elsner, Chris Pelling, Richard Rutherford, and Chris Stray. 1 Dover 1980b, 88 = 1988a, 290; the original publication is misdated as 1979 in the Contents of 1988a, vi. 2 Dover himself retrospectively, and oddly, categorizes the audience of his Classical Association address as ‘non-Classical’ (Dover 1988a, vii). This anomaly may reflect the fact that in the 1970s attendance at the Classical Association’s AGMs included many – not least, schoolteachers and enthusiastic Classics graduates – who were not professional scholars; in the lecture itself, Dover alludes to the spectrum represented by his audience (Dover 1976a, 10-11 = 1988a, 305-6). For some thoughts on the ‘genre’ of CA Presidential addresses, see Schofield 2003, with Stray, ed., 2003 more generally for the CA’s history. 3 The name of Rougemont School is misspelt in the Contents of G&L (Dover 1988a, vi), though it is correct in the Acknowledgements (viii). 4 Curiously, Clive James’ scathing review of the TV series cited in MC 133 does not even mention Dover, targeting its fire solely against the presenter and producer, Christopher Burstall (James 1983, 121). But James’ complaint that Burstall did not know how to ‘fade into the background’ implies that the programmes would have been better if the unmentioned Dover had been allowed more Burstall-free space. * educational and cultural value of Classics, a type of justification to which he was exposed in his education at St Paul’s and which was prevalent in the subject’s public self-image in the first half of the twentieth century; his consistent avoidance, in contrast to, for example, Eduard Fraenkel and E.R. Dodds, both of whom Dover greatly admired (if with eventual reservations in the case of the former), of a defence of Classics as a normative vehicle of humanism5 (a term nowhere employed with endorsement in Dover’s entire oeuvre); his attraction to a compound model of research in the humanities (a term Dover was happy to use, but without the idealizing force of ‘humanism’), partly quasi-scientific, partly anthropological, partly comparatist; and, finally, his determination, in the wake of the debates triggered by C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures thesis, to make ‘history’, in a deliberately expanded sense, into the master-concept of the humanities. Bearing those points in mind from the outset will help us to negotiate a recurrent trait of Dover’s work, namely its somewhat paradoxical combination of methodological selfreflectiveness with a marked aversion to sustained theorization of his practices or his values as a scholar. Dover saw ‘theory’ as conflicting with empiricism, though there is no shortage of those who perceive such conflict the other way round.6 His aversion applied equally to abstract reasoning insufficiently anchored in documented experience and to wholesale theoretical systems – those boasting a ‘comprehensive power’ – such as Marxism, structuralism, and (despite some peculiarly personal interest in it on Dover’s part) psychoanalysis.7 What he allows himself, by contrast, are limited, local formulations of the methodological principles he brings to bear on specific problems. The result is a body of writings which stands self-consciously at a distance from the proliferation of ‘theory’ of various kinds which became general in the humanities, and not least Classics, in the later decades of the twentieth century. Dover’s habit of offering discrete, unintegrated statements about his presuppositions, aims, and modus operandi might now strike us as frustratingly curt and under-elaborated, though I hasten to add that how things strike us now does not constitute a definitive viewpoint from which to consider the matter. To take just one token instance, it is remarkable to read in the Preface to Greek Popular Morality that rather than organize his material on the basis of a systematic treatment of Greek terminology or categories, he has taken ‘a quite deliberate decision ... to formulate such questions about morality as were prompted by my own moral experience’.8 What rationale of historical scholarship could explain this ostensibly back-to-front decision, which goes beyond a mere acknowledgement 5 6 7 8 The humanism of these two figures is prominent in their Oxford inaugural lectures, Fraenkel 1935 and Dodds 1936 (the latter treating humanism as an entire ‘worldview’ and advocating a ‘new humanism’); note also Dodds’ letter to Fraenkel of 31 July 1936, quoted in Stray 2019, 14. As early as 1920, Dodds complained that most classical scholars since the nineteenth century had ceased to be ‘humanists’, a class he equated, in a quasi-platonic idiom, with those who could recognize ‘the True and the Beautiful’ as ‘infinite living values’ (Dodds 1999, 347). On the extent to which modern conceptions of ‘the humanities’ depend on a conception of ‘humanism’, see Reitter and Wellmon 2021. MC 261 (a passage he thought merited an index entry, s.v. theory); cf. ibid. 146, ‘an English empiricist to the core and in politics more of a restless tinkerer than a revolutionary theorist’. Dover does occasionally apply ‘theory’ to his own views: see his ‘“feed-pipe” theory of history’ (cf. n. 20 below for context), though that is clearly a thin sense of the word. His general aversion to the heavily theoretical applied not least to linguistics: see MC 23 on theoretical versus comparative and historical linguistics; cf. ibid. 198. For (unspecified) theories boasting ‘comprehensive power’, see, again, MC 261; cf. the passing reference, ibid. 248, to the potentially distorting effects of ‘a theoretical schema drawn from sociology or metahistory’. Both a ‘fundamental objection’ to psychoanalysis (in the interpretation of literary texts) and a partial openness to its personal applicability can be seen in one and the same passage of MC 123. Dover 1974, xii; cf. MC 261 on his ‘considered refusal to separate interpretation of my own experience from the recovery of the experience of others, no matter how remote in time and place’: it remains a difficult question how this refusal is to be reconciled with the quasi-anthropological approach to antiquity considered in the last part of the present chapter. For more on the methodology of GPM, see Carey’s chapter in this volume. that his own experience has (inevitably) impinged on his thinking and appears to give it a formative function in the entire project? In the immediate context, we are simply not told, though informed readers would at least recognize the implicit divergence from the model of the history of moral ideas (a model which posits a gulf between ancient and modern thinking) promoted by Arthur Adkins, a bête noire for this part of Dover’s work.9 By focussing here on a group of pieces in which Dover allowed himself to ponder his guiding intellectual principles at more discursive length than in his major research publications, I hope to be able to clarify this aspect of Dover’s cast of mind. Dover’s standing as a prominent spokesman for Classics did not, of course, come into being overnight. It emerged gradually from the reputation he acquired within the discipline, and in due course from the institutional positions that followed from that reputation, including his presidencies of the Hellenic Society (1971-4), the Classical Association (19756), Corpus Christi College, Oxford (1976-86), the British Academy (1978-81), and JACT, the Joint Association of Classical Teachers (1985-7). How far Dover sought such a status, how far it was ‘thrust upon’ him, is a nice question which must be sidestepped here. But it is worth reflecting that when Dover left Balliol in 1955 to take up the chair of Greek at St Andrews, he was aware that he was moving to an educational and cultural environment where Classics in general and Greek in particular held a less privileged, safeguarded position than they did in Oxford. It was not the case, for sure, that their position in Oxford itself was impregnable. The percentage of all Oxford finalists represented by Literae Humaniores in 1948 was only half what it had been twenty-five years earlier, not least as the result of a diminishing role for Classics in the (public) school system.10 Donald Russell, who became a fellow of St John’s in the same year in which Dover became a fellow of Balliol (1948), recalled that in the post-war context there were even those who expected Classics soon to become a small fringe subject; anxieties on those lines were shared, among others, by Dodds.11 Nonetheless, any classical scholar who had wanted to find as sheltered an academic home as possible would not have chosen to leave Oxford in 1955, still less to decline the opportunity to return there as Regius Professor of Greek in 1960. So there is an important sense in which Dover was ready to face the challenge in 1955 of moving to a more exposed part of the landscape of classical education in Britain. This is borne out by his subsequent involvement in initiatives to widen access to Classics at university level, including his introduction of an ab initio Greek stream (for which he wrote his own coursebook) at St Andrews in 1967, and his active membership of the advisory panel for the JACT Reading Greek project from 1974 onwards.12 By the time, then, of his appointment as President of the Classical Association for 1975-6, Dover not only had an international reputation as a philologist – he had given the Sather Lectures at Berkeley (which also offered him a chair) in 1967, and had already published ten books – but occupied a position which gave him the potential for considerable influence in shaping public perceptions of Classics. He called his Presidential address, delivered at Aberystwyth in April 1976, ‘On writing for the general reader’. The title signals a concern about how Classics could sustain a significant function in the wider culture at a time when school and university enrolments in the subject’s traditional degrees were 9 Dover draws programmatic attention to his difference from Adkins in Dover 1983b, 35 = 1987, 77. For the statistics, see Harrison, ed., 1994b, 142. But at the time Dover left Balliol, he himself felt ‘no anxieties’ about student numbers (MC 126); the ‘downward plunge’, in St Andrews at any rate, started in the mid-1960s (ibid.). 11 Russell 2007, 230-1; Dodds 1977, 172 dates the start of his own anxieties to the interwar years. In a longer vista, anxieties about the raison d’être of Classics in British education were already surfacing in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century: for various debates over values, see Stray 1998, 202-32. 12 Note also the introduction at St Andrews in 1975 of a first-year class in Classical Culture, based on texts read in translation, though Dover thought the subject unsuitable for a full degree programme (MC 130; cf. the similar reservations of Dodds 1964, 21-2 ~ 1977, 175-6). 10 continuing to fall. Since Dover starts by noting that the falling numbers of students in language-based programmes were offset both by rising numbers on Classical Civilization, translation-based degrees, and by the increasing popularity of books about the ancient world for the ‘general reader’, one might have expected him to mount a defiantly positive case for the resilience, adaptability and even the buoyancy of the subject in its various manifestations. One might also have expected at least an acknowledgement of the importance of translation, a subject which Dover pondered in other contexts but scarcely mentions here.13 Instead, he strikes a somewhat defensive and, to my mind, unusually awkward posture.14 This was probably in part because he was aware of stubborn resistance to change in certain quarters; hence his willingness to confront the hypothetical objection, ‘why should we change at all?’, together with a caustic suggestion that some classicists’ anxieties about the writing of ‘amateurs’ might reflect an instinct of threat towards their ‘social and cultural privilege’. For all his academic experience, and indeed the attention he had already paid, as both author and reviewer,15 to the challenges of writing for the general reader, this was the first time Dover had had to nail his colours to the mast in a public forum. At this stage, he seems to be feeling his way towards the formulation of principles with which to build a bridge from the technicalities of specialist scholarship to the maintenance of a reading public interested in serious writing about classical antiquity. And just beneath the surface of the uncertainty of tone in this Presidential address is actually, I suspect, a lack of confidence in the extent of that reading public.16 Having posed the overarching question of what professional classicists should do in the prevailing climate, and having introduced a distinction between prudential or instrumental considerations in defence of historical study (as ‘means to an end’) and the more personal ‘value’ of such study to individuals,17 Dover frames most of his argument as a matter of ‘problems’ to which practical solutions need to be found. What emerges from his wrestling with these problems is the following series of contentions: first, that it is vital not to misrepresent antiquity as in agreement with modern attitudes and concerns, nor to assume complacently that ‘the present knows better than the past’ (one version of presentism); second, that while stereotypes of the aridities of classical scholarship are sometimes justified, they often reveal misunderstanding of the significance of small (linguistic) details for the construction of larger explanatory hypotheses; third, good writing for the general reader should aspire to promote an improved understanding of the relationship between what Dover calls scholarly ‘process’ and ‘product’; fourth, and finally, that there is no escaping the importance in Classics of ‘the precise and subtle interpretation of language’, a claim not to be reduced to a pedantically linguistic credo but which carries with it a weightier conception of historical and literary hermeneutics, as confirmed by Dover’s passing remark (a criticism, by 13 The lecture mentions translation only as part of a suite of methods used by classical scholars (Dover 1976a, 14-15 = 1988a, 308-9); it does not discuss translations as free-standing publications. For some of Dover’s thoughts elsewhere on the latter, see his review of several versions of the Oresteia in Dover 1980c = 1987, 176-181. 14 Philip Howard, reporting the lecture in The Times, picked up on this tone: see the main headline, ‘Literacy on the defensive in a divided world of many cultures’, The Times, 15 April 1976, p. 3. 15 Qua reviewer, his main contribution was a hard-hitting review of Peter Green’s Armada from Athens (Dover 1972b = 1988a, 194-7, the latter including an additional note). His complaints about errors and shortcomings in Green’s work are germane to parts of the CA lecture. 16 In his 1981 Presidential address to the British Academy’s Council, Dover posited the existence of widespread philistinism in Britain, describing ‘public opinion’ as ‘not particularly well-disposed to research in the humanities’ (Dover 1981b, 80). 17 Dover’s defence of history in general is called ‘prudential’ as a matter of utility for ‘a given society as a whole’ (Dover 1976a, 10 = 1988a, 305), yet this same passage goes on to refer to the ‘value’ of the past apparently on a more personal level (‘for some’); certainly the latter appears later in the lecture as an explicitly non-utilitarian, self-sufficient value for individuals (1976, 16-17 = 1988a, 311, quoted in my text on p. 000). implication, of narrow Wortphilologie) that it is possible even for a ‘good grammarian’ to ‘disastrously misinterpret’ texts.18 There is the skeleton here of convictions that we will see developed and modified in later publications. But there is also, as I have noted, a general air of defensiveness, including the admission that Dover feels an ‘unusual degree of agitation and indignation’ (rather atypical vocabulary for his professional writings) over ‘amateur’ distortions of antiquity, of which, however, he gives no immediate examples.19 This defensiveness is compounded by the fact that Dover’s formulation of the ‘prudential’ importance of historical study, a tenet so crucial to his later intellectual stance, employs an infelicitous metaphor of history as a ‘feedpipe’ from past to present, with historians themselves as the ‘pipes’ conveying information, or at any rate ‘hypotheses’, about a changing body of ‘data’ (in Dover’s quasi-scientific lexicon, though here offset by the concluding insistence that history, including Classics, ‘is not a science’).20 This ostensibly mechanical model not only lacks the enrichment of anthropological and comparatist dimensions which Dover will later stress; it is also difficult to square with his eventual attempt to make ‘history’ embrace everything in the humanities, including interpretation of art, literature, and systems of cultural values. At the same time, the reductive ‘feed-pipe’ model is partly counterbalanced by an eloquent statement of personal motivation: ‘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’.21 This passion for language remains distinct from, though it might well underpin, that need for ‘precise and subtle interpretation of language’, cited above, which Dover regards as an indispensable instrument of historical (including literary) study. But it is also said to be something that the ‘general public’ mostly does not share, so that it counts as part of the problem of how to satisfy Dover’s desideratum of making good scholarly writing for the latter convey a sense of how ‘process’ contributes to ‘product’. On one reading, then, the lecture might be thought to leave us with the paradoxical subtext that Dover’s most precious intellectual value is a barrier to his hope of communicating effectively, as a classicist, with a wider audience. ~ If the 1976 Classical Association address betrayed a degree of unease in its view of how professional classicists should conceive of their relationship to society in a period of major cultural changes, Dover evidently continued to ponder such issues. In the following year, while completing Greek Homosexuality,22 he started planning a popular book on the Greeks to accompany the BBC TV series mentioned earlier. He drew on some of the material for that book when he lectured at the 7th FIEC Congress in Budapest in 1979. Although his title, Dover twice alludes to the potential failings of the ‘good grammarian’, the second time with the further phrase quoted: Dover 1976a, 15, 18 = 1988a, 310, 312. This is not, despite first appearances, at odds with his later admission of ‘the power of syntax [and other technical aspects of language] over my imagination and intellect’ (Dover 1976a, 17 = 1988a, 311), since he relates this power to the aesthetic function of language ‘as a medium of art’. On his conception of the aesthetics of language, cf. my text at p. 000. 19 Dover 1976a, 12 = 1988a, 307. Cf. n. 40 below for a related passage in the 1985 ‘two cultures’ lecture. 20 ‘Feed-pipe’: Dover 1976a, 10 = 1988a, 305. ‘Hypotheses’ about ‘data’: Dover 1976a, 16 = 1988a, 310. History ‘not a science’: Dover 1976a, 19 = 1988a, 313. Dover’s ‘feed-pipe’ model was repeated in the 1985 ‘two cultures’ lecture (Dover 1988a, 323): see my text at p. 000. 21 Dover 1976a, 16-17 = 1988a, 311; cf. MC 200. In Halliwell 2011 I quoted a longer stretch of this passage (which expresses sympathy with Jane Harrison’s ‘tears of joy’ on first making acquaintance with verbal aspect in the Russian language) as an especially telling specimen of Dover’s writing. For Dover’s attitudes to, and ‘love’ of, language in general, see Prauscello’s chapter in this volume. 22 As already mentioned, the Classical Association address shows that Dover considered Greek Homosexuality itself a book for the general reader, a category he clearly conflates with the ‘Greekless’ reader (Dover 1976a, 10 = 1988a, 305). I wonder how many Greekless readers have actually read this book, as opposed to browsing it (and its images). 18 ‘Archaic Greece and the continuity of ancient civilization’, does not indicate a concern with contemporary issues, his lecture actually starts from what he describes as an increasing tendency, even among the educated, to question the use, value and justification of Classics. He immediately states his own preference for a short, ‘deictic’ answer – in effect, look at how good Greek literature and art are – though he is careful not to say (and he did not believe) ‘how much better’ than anything else.23 This answer, as he admits, depends on a higher-order premise about the value of literature and art in general, but a premise he does not attempt to defend. Instead, he spells out two further justifications. The first is that it is possible to ‘learn directly’ even from a culture remote in time, and to apply what one learns to one’s own life. This proposition, reinforced with the semi-confessional remark that ‘some of us’ have found that ‘acquaintance with distinctively Greek attitudes ... has helped us to live’, is not elaborated any further at this juncture. It might seem superficially tempting, given Dover’s lifelong fascination with Thucydides, to call this a personalized Thucydidean justification for history. But it remains acutely uncertain whether the ‘usefulness’ Thucydides famously ascribes to history (1.22.4) is really a matter of ‘learning lessons’ at all (in a pragmatically positive sense), rather than the acquisition of a deeper understanding of why human affairs go so badly wrong in similar ways in different historical settings.24 When we come later on to examine Dover’s most mature thinking about the rationale for the study of history, we shall see that while he retains some form of the idea of learning from history, he also adopts an arguably unthucydidean view of the latter as consisting of unique particulars, not event-types that can be observed to recur in different contexts. The second reason Dover advances for (part of) the value of Classics stems from a familiar-looking claim that ancient Greek culture was the first – at any rate, he is careful to add, the first in the Mediterranean and Near East – to exhibit certain phenomena, including democracy, critical historiography, religious scepticism, and drama. The remainder of the lecture is taken up with a selective attempt not just to fill out this claim by a series of comparisons between Greek attitudes and practices and those of the Near East, especially Egypt and Mesopotamia, but to characterize an explanatory factor he thinks common to all the Greek phenomena in question, a factor he identifies (with an acknowledgement of simplification) as an ‘unprecedented irreverence towards authority’ [his itals] in religion, politics, art, historiography, and science.25 It is this defining cultural mentality of antiauthoritarian, heterodox scepticism, rather than simply being ‘the first’ in a chronological sense (something which would not in itself, he thinks, justify continuing to study the Greeks), that forms the nub of Dover’s case. Furthermore, since he is explicit that the common factor of sceptical anti-authoritarianism is the thing ‘from which we have most to learn’, his second justification is actually an extension of the first. This may be the closest Dover ever comes to suggesting that studying the values of the Greeks can provide us with values to follow in our own lives, though he makes the point ever plainer in the overlapping material from The Greeks than in the FIEC lecture: ‘One argument of this book’, as he puts it there, ‘is that ... we can learn and profit directly from the Greek example’ (1982, 15). Yet even in the book, so clearly aimed at the (putative) ‘general readership’ Dover had made his subject in the 1976 Classical Association lecture, he never actually translates this idea of a Greek ‘example’ into terms that would match the first part of his bipartite justification, namely the provision of values that can ‘help us to live’. To do so would, I think, have gone against the grain in more 23 He is unambiguous about this judgement of value in The Greeks, asserting that Greek literature is not better than e.g. English or French literature but can ‘stand comparison’ with any other: Dover 1982, 9 (n.b. different pagination from the original 1980 BBC edition of The Greeks). 24 Cf. n. 42 below. On Dover’s extensive dealings with Thucydides, see Pelling’s contribution to the present volume. 25 Dover 1984, 27. ways than one, and that semi-confessional reference to what ‘some of us’ have learned by studying the Greeks remains a kind of personal protection against the pressure to assert for everyone else just what they stand to learn. The result is an unbridged gap between intensity of personal experience and the guiding principles of professional scholarship. As a final observation on the FIEC lecture, it is well worth noticing Dover’s intriguing use of a counterfactual thought-experiment. This occurs at the point where his argument loops back to form a connection with its initial statement of the quality of Greek literature as sufficient justification for the study of the language. Dover presents ‘a passage of poetry’ which at first glance appears to be Greek but turns out to be part of the Old Babylonian version of Gilgamesh with the original names replaced by Greek ones taken from Pindar’s Fourth Pythian. The aim is to produce a sort of momentary alienation effect – a reaction on the part of someone familiar with Greek poetry to the effect that ‘Unless it is quite extraordinarily distorted in translation, it is not Greek ... and on stylistic grounds it could not conceivably be Greek’.26 This intriguing exercise is designed to prompt reflection on the criteria by which certain literary features might be deemed peculiarly Greek (or patently unGreek). And this leads Dover to his concluding thesis that one vital aspect of Greek originality which, unlike democracy and the rest, has not been properly investigated is the culture’s distinctive development of language ‘as an art-form’, shaping forms of stylistic expressiveness that have proved immensely influential in the history of literature.27 The passage points forward to Dover’s own later work on style, and affirms his conviction that stylistics cannot dispense with aesthetic criteria. It also provides a compact but forceful statement of the thesis that language itself is fundamental to a conception of the character of ancient Greek culture. Yet, significantly, Dover never repeated this type of comparison between Greek and Near-Eastern literature anywhere else in his work.28 Why not? One reason may be that the limited, provisional nature of his quasicomparative exercise was overtaken by the more detailed and sophisticated forms of comparative work in this area undertaken by, above all, Walter Burkert and Martin West. It is unclear whether in 1979 Dover already knew of the emerging interests of Burkert, the most pertinent of whose publications, including those on Near-Eastern literature and Homer, did not start to appear till the early 1980s. Dover had, however, examined Martin West’s edition of Hesiod’s Theogony as a doctoral thesis in 1963 (see Stray in this volume, 000) and he reread the whole book before publication (West 1966, vii), so he was undoubtedly aware of West’s comparative interests even if he could not foresee the scope of their future trajectory. In any case, Dover (pardonably) underestimated just how far exceptional scholars like Burkert or West would be able to go in learning ancient Near-Eastern languages to a high level of competence.29 Against that backdrop, one is left to wonder how Dover might have modified his view of the stylistic originality of Greek literature in the light of a possible challenge to it from West’s The East Face of Helicon – but equally, perhaps, whether West’s 26 Dover 1984, 30-1. Dover 1984, 31: there is something missing from Dover’s text (either before or after ‘expressions’) in ‘Greek innovations lay in expressions’, but the thrust of the passage is not obscured by this blemish. 28 In the related/overlapping parts of The Greeks, Dover hints lightly at a comparative judgement on Greek and Mesopotamian or Egyptian literature, but leaves the matter hypothetical: Dover 1982, 12. In this connection, it is a pity that Dover nowhere mentions the famous comparative exercise, involving Homeric epic and the Hebrew Genesis, undertaken in the first chapter of Auerbach 1953: for all its arguable claims, Auerbach’s comparison of Eurycleia’s recognition of Odysseus’s scar and Abraham’s would-be sacrifice of Isaac poses questions akin to Dover’s concerning the relation between individual linguistic features and a larger stylistic ethos. 29 Dover does allude (1984, 25) to the prospect of new kinds of comparative scholarship in this area, but he also records the existence of dismissive attitudes to comparatism among classicists, and it is evident that he was not able to anticipate the full potential of such work. 27 book itself takes sufficient account of the nuanced considerations sketched by Dover’s miniature thought-experiment in his FIEC lecture.30 ~ I have so far tried to show that both the Classical Association address of 1976 and the FIEC lecture of 1979 contain suggestive but, in part, elusive expressions of Dover’s cast of mind and his conception of the values of Classics as a discipline. But, perhaps surprisingly, it was in a lecture delivered at a Welsh school in 1985, ‘What are the “two cultures”?’, that he produced the most sustained and wide-ranging explanation of his intellectual and educational principles.31 Although Dover makes only minimal reference to the original 1959 Rede lecture by C.P. Snow (for whom he does not conceal his disdain),32 and says nothing about the further details of the controversy it had sparked,33 he nonetheless uses Snow’s ‘two cultures’ thesis as one reference point for his own position. He contends, first, that several traditional reasons for the study of Classics (as well as some cognate reasons for the humanities in general) are bad reasons, even ‘harmful’; secondly, that the humanities share with the natural sciences their basic methods of enquiry and analysis, so that in this essential respect the two cultures model is fatally flawed; thirdly, that Snow also conflated academic research in the humanities with artistic creativity, the latter being one vital object of study in the humanities but, in itself, a distinct kind of human activity; fourthly, that the humanities as a whole all belong to Dover’s (expanded) category of ‘history’; finally, that the relationship between present and past (and, therefore, any sophisticated notion of historical ‘relevance’) cannot be simply calibrated on a scale of temporal distance. In starting his lecture (after a few autobiographical remarks) from a critique of traditional but ‘bad’ reasons for the study of Classics, Dover trenchantly repudiates stale orthodoxies in a way which was still rare among British classical scholars at this date; the closest comparandum I am aware of, written in a typically pugnacious style, is the contribution of Moses Finley to the 1964 collection Crisis in the Humanities.34 Dover’s While West’s book accumulates myriad examples of affinities/parallels between stylistically functional elements in Greek and certain NE literatures, it nowhere confronts the perspective opened by Dover’s thoughtexperiment: in short, its preoccupation with similarity precludes attention to difference. Furthermore, although West uses the term ‘style’ in quite a few places (e.g. West 1997, 168-70), there is no attempt of the kind Dover thought important (e.g. Dover 1997a, 1-12) to clarify the concept of style itself. 31 Dover says in MC 258 that he started to form his view of the ‘two cultures’ controversy in the mid-1960s (‘about thirty years ago’); was this linked to his personal (and less than admiring) encounters with Snow when the latter was Rector in St Andrews (see n. 32)? There is, however, no explicit reference to the two cultures controversy in Dover’s earlier publications: the earliest reference occurs in his British Academy Presidential address of 1981 (Dover 1981b, 81), where he combats Snow by positing ‘three cultures’ (i.e. scientific enquiry, enquiry in the humanities, artistic creativity): cf. n. 41 below. 32 Dover 1988a, 319. See also MC 172-3 (cf. 258) for Dover’s personal dislike of Snow, who was Rector (a position in Scottish universities elected by the student body) at St Andrews 1961-4. 33 Collini 1998, esp. ix-xliii, provides a concise introduction to the controversy; for further reflections, see Small 2013, 30-47. Classicists should note that Rüegg, ed., 2003 includes a piece by Walter Burkert (91-102) which somewhat pessimistically stresses the challenges standing in the way of genuinely interdisciplinary thought, especially between the humanities and natural sciences. 34 Finley’s argument, which Dover is likely to have read, has several points of contact with Dover’s: the rejection of exceptionalist justifications for Classics (Finley 1964, 13 and 15), the ‘fallacy’ of appeals to distinguished products of classical education (ibid. 13-14), and the fallacy of thinking of language (Finley specifies Latin) as ‘training the mind’ to think logically vel sim. (18-19). It also stresses the need for expert scholars to write for the general public (21-2), thus anticipating the theme of Dover’s 1976 Classical Association address, and identifies as a salient feature of ancient Greek culture the willingness to challenge ‘inherited beliefs and authorities’ (15), which Dover himself would later foreground in both his FIEC lecture and The Greeks (see the discussion in my text). But Finley, as an ancient historian with much less interest in ancient literature than Dover, is more sweepingly negative (19-20) about the centrality to Classics teaching of ‘linguistic skills’ (and not just the exercise of composition) than Dover would have found acceptable. On 30 critique is made all the more telling as a public pronouncement by the declaration that his scepticism about such reasons goes all the way back to his schooldays. In rebutting the premise that ‘translation into Classical languages makes us think logically’, he bluntly challenges a longstanding rationale for the practice of prose composition (and a fortiori verse composition) in which he himself had been intensively trained at St Paul’s and which he taught with considerable commitment, though for more pragmatic pedagogical reasons, at Balliol, somewhat less so at St Andrews. His attitude to this conventional premise, which he actually calls an ‘extraordinary notion’, is not casually sceptical; it is grounded in his own demonstrably deep engagement with the workings of language, which he regards as too complex and fluid to be aligned with the requirements of logic.35 His dismissal of the further argument that many influential figures of the past (he gives Karl Marx as a token example) were educated in Classics is easy to state (‘they didn’t have much choice’, as he pithily puts it), but it is worth adding that even in the early twenty-first century, when Classics has supposedly moved away from its traditional self-vindicating tenets, one does not have to look far to find scholars still attempting to win a kind of kudos for the subject by citing the cases of Marx et al. The third of the ‘bad reasons’ dismissed by Dover involves more subtle and contentious considerations. This is the claim that classical Greek art and literature are ‘canonical’ (with classical here understood in its modern chronological sense). Dover here appears to be defining a double-sided position: he not only rejects the idea of a canon as a permanent, definitive standard of value; he also regards the classical-as-canonical mentality as an invention of ancient Greek civilization itself, its ‘one fatal weakness’, an ‘inability, after a certain point in time, to comprehend and develop genuine innovation in the arts’.36 Dover’s dismissal of the ideology of the canonical needs to be observed all the more carefully in the light of the fact, visible in some of my earlier citations from his work (including what his Budapest FIEC lecture calls his ‘deictic’ response to the question ‘why study Greek?’), that his own preferred justification for the study of ancient Greece makes intrinsic appeal to criteria of artistic, literary and aesthetic value. Clearly, then, appeals to value need to avoid the trap of being converted into ideas of an authoritative canon. To adopt a slightly different formulation, qualitative judgements about the merits of ancient art and literature must avoid a presumption of exceptionalism. The study of Greek (or Roman) culture has, in Dover’s mind, a strong rationale, but it cannot any longer lay claim to a (self)privileged status; as regards such sense of privilege, he speaks sweepingly in the two cultures lecture of the (former) ‘arrogance and complacency of classicists’.37 At the same time, it is part-and-parcel of Dover’s scheme of values as a Hellenist that, like many before him, he counts the chronologically classical (or, rather, the archaic and classical together) as superior in important respects to the post-classical, at any rate from the mid-Hellenistic age onwards, though he was scrupulous not to reduce this evaluative perspective to cheap disparagement of later periods of Greek culture.38 What makes this familiar scheme of values Dover’s rather mixed views of Finley, see esp. MC 130 and 260 n. 3; but in a letter to his parents of 14 June 1956 he described Finley, with reference to The World of Odysseus (published 1954), as having ‘a gift for asking simple questions which most professional scholars have completely overlooked, and he’s not so bad at finding the answers to them’. 35 The same reason, together with other ‘bad reasons’ for studying Greek, reappears in the Italian article of 1988 (discussed at pp. 000-000) as well as in MC 126; cf. n. 54 below. In The Greeks, though not in the two cultures lecture, Dover also rejects the claim that ancient Greek ‘was a uniquely subtle and expressive language’ (Dover 1982, 8). 36 Dover 1988a, 316; contrast the position of Dodds 1964, 15-16 (repeated in Dodds 1977, 173-4), who, despite his careful qualifications, adumbrates a quasi-canonical conception of ‘masterpieces’. 37 Dover 1988a, 316; cf. the related statement of his anti-exceptionalist stance at Dover 1982, 8-9. 38 Dover’s presuppositions about the relative qualities of archaic/classical and post-classical literature and art are not spelt out in the two cultures lecture itself, but they are concisely explained, for literature, in Dover 1997b, notable in Dover’s case is precisely that he subscribes to it without endorsement of the idea of a canon, indeed while making the historical judgement that it was notions of the canonical which proved deleterious to the evolution of Greek culture itself: far from the outstanding achievements of classical art and literature being some kind of unique miracle, inevitably followed by decline or degeneration, the relationship between classical and post-classical was itself the product, he maintained, of a contingent cultural psychology which inhibited continuing innovation. There is room, needless to say, to question the entwinement of evaluation and explanation in this position: among much else, what exactly counts as ‘innovation’? and does innovation in any case trump other criteria of quality? Even so, we are dealing here not with mere adherence to a conventional scheme of values, but with a more intricate cluster of ideas – hence the paradox that such thinking, in the 1985 lecture, sits alongside an uncompromising critique of ‘bad arguments’ for the study of Classics. Given the demotion of Classics by the 1980s from its earlier position of educational and cultural privilege to the standing of one among many of the humanities, Dover understandably spends most of his two cultures lecture outlining a defence of the latter in the round. He does so against the background of society’s technologico-scientific priorities, for which he had considerable respect, but also of a political threat which should still strike us as all-too-present (‘If everything is subject to market forces, how will the humanities fare?’, as he summarizes the situation).39 In seeking to validate the humanities en bloc, Dover again feels the need to clear out of the way some inadequate arguments: the teaching of foreign languages for practical purposes is best undertaken by specialist language teachers, not by university foreign language departments whose cultural and historical brief is much wider than that; the comparative financial cheapness of running humanities degrees is no argument of substance at all (there may still, in principle, be better things on which to spend the money); and the idea of academics as writers of works for a general readership, the very topic to which he had dedicated his Classical Association address a decade earlier, is here pushed aside with impatience as reducing scholars to ‘tame jester[s]’ in the service of ‘the entertainment industry’, together with the ironic aperçu – which might be thought to subvert the entire point of that 1976 lecture – that history, biography, etc., written by the ‘ignorant’ ‘is even more entertaining ... than the truth’.40 And so we come to the crux: where does Dover locate the bedrock on which a general defence of the humanities can be built? The answer is linked to the lecture’s specific point of engagement with Snow’s two cultures thesis. Dover faults Snow, as already mentioned, both for neglecting the fact that the humanities share their core methods of enquiry, investigation, and analysis of evidence with the natural sciences, and for idly conflating humanities research with artistic creativity. On this basis Dover reconfigures the notion of two cultures (though he is hardly invested in retaining the label as such) in terms of a fundamental distinction between enquiry tout court, whose object is ‘discovery’, and artistic creativity.41 His aim, however, is not to make the humanities as scientific as possible, since methods alone do not 3-4, and, for the visual arts, in Dover 1982, 67-71. For his own principal foray into the post-classical, his 1971 edition of selected poems of Theocritus, see Hunter in this volume. The relatively restricted range (in chronological terms) of Dover’s main interests was noted as a limitation in Russell 1989. 39 The government minister whose sneering attitude to anthropology is alluded to in this context (Dover 1988a, 316) was Norman Tebbit; cf. the related reference to Tebbit in MC 253. 40 Dover 1988a, 318. This passage illustrates the ‘unusual degree of agitation and indignation’ that Dover had said in 1976 was aroused in him by amateurish writing about antiquity (see n. 19 above). But it remains curious that whereas in 1976 he had treated writing for the general reader as a topic meriting careful consideration, now in 1985 he gives it no more than this curt and jaundiced reference. 41 Dover 1988a, 319. Lloyd-Jones 1989, 372 garbles Dover’s case by saying that it retains the status of ‘two cultures’ for science and history; this is incorrect, notwithstanding Dover’s occasional reference elsewhere to ‘three cultures’ (see n. 31 above, with MC 258). define the raison d’être of a practice, but to clear a space in which to position the humanities collectively as the pursuit of ‘history’. Whereas science is taken to deal in universals, generating hypotheses testable by experiment, Dover regards all history, in a seemingly unthucydidean move, as a matter of unique particulars, thus making the study of history idiographic not nomothetic.42 Moreover, he now defines history, in a deliberately expansionist spirit, as coextensive with the humanities, embracing the study of ‘everything that human beings have done, said, written, thought or felt’ (1988a, 320-1). Leaving aside (to cite just one problem) the question of how philosophy, as opposed to the history of philosophy, is supposed to fit into this schema of the humanities as history, Dover’s definitional equivalence between the two terms might still look at first sight as little more than a piece of terminological redescription.43 It is the next step in his argument which carries more weight and brings with it more far-reaching consequences for his conception of Classics. This is the claim of ‘smooth continuity’, i.e. the absence of any kind of dividingline, between historical research and the nature of ‘everyday existence’ in the present (1988a, 321-2). Both involve the same processes of interpretation and (attempted) understanding. Interpreting the distant past, the nearer past, and the present may have access to varying amounts of pertinent evidence, though there is no simple inverse ratio between the latter and the passage of time. But all, on Dover’s account, are au fond one and the same activity of trying to make sense, in their full complexity, of human purposes, thought and behaviour. History, then, is a potentially unlimited repository of human self-consciousness, the activity which makes a society’s ‘total, collective experience available to it’, though Dover hesitates about applying to this the fuzzy concept of ‘collective memory’ (1988a, 323). Somewhat in tension with the idea of collective experience, which might in any case be thought to avoid the vexed issue of competing histories, is the metaphor from his 1976 address to the Classical Association to which he here returns, namely the historian as a ‘pipeline’ (it was earlier a ‘feed-pipe’) acting as a conduit from particular parts of the past into the present. But that infelicitous metaphor makes little or no difference to the final stage of Dover’s argument, which tackles head-on the issue of ‘relevance’, already in the mid-1980s a shibboleth of utilitarian and instrumentalist conceptions of higher education, yet also a criterion of educational value which defenders of the humanities often feel pressure to appropriate for their own cause. To take a conveniently cognate example, the 1964 essay by Moses Finley cited earlier states: ‘If the past – any past, whether Graeco-Roman or nineteenth-century – is to enlighten and remain relevant to the present, it requires active interpretation and reinterpretation ...’44 Dover too wants to affirm the relevance of the humanities qua history, and as anyone who adopts such a stance must do, he has to attempt to disarm the prejudice that there is a negative correlation between relevance and distance from 42 See Windelband 1980 for an English translation of the 1894 lecture in which he introduced this dichotomy; for some criticism of Windelband, see Collingwood 1946, 166-8 (a book known to Dover: 1983a, 57 = 1988a, 57). But to regard history as idiographic does not exclude the use of reasoning that incorporates generalizations and arguments from likelihood or probability (‘general propositions are necessary at every stage of inquiry in the idiographic sciences’, Windelband 1980, 182): Dover identifies these elements both in his own outlook (1988a, 323) and in that of Thucydides 1.22.4 (1973b, 43-4); cf. Dover 1983a, 62 = 1988a, 63. However, Dover 1973b, 43 also ascribes to Thucydides the stronger, nomothetic belief in ‘general laws’ of history, which seems at odds with his own denial in the two cultures lecture that history ‘repeats itself’ (1988a, 322). It remains an open question, therefore, just how Thucydidean Dover took his own view of history to be; cf. pp. 000-000. 43 For one perspective on philosophy as a humanistic discipline, see Dover’s own undergraduate pupil Bernard Williams in Williams 2006, 180-99. But Dover’s view of philosophy as confined to various kinds of abstract reasoning (esp. MC 60-1; cf. the definition of moral philosophy, ibid. 155) is harder to integrate into his conception of the humanities as history. Dover classed all philosophy as a form of ‘theory’ (see n. 6 above); cf. MC 161, ‘philosophical theorising’. 44 Finley 1964, 22. Cf. n. 34 above. the present. It is entirely in keeping with his characteristic aversion to sustained ‘theory’, which I foregrounded near the start of this chapter, that he handles this task not with a piece of abstract reasoning but with a mixture of, first, anecdotal remarks on the relationship between the upbringing of his own grandmother and daughter; second, a pointedly counterintuitive comparison between certain ways of speaking in Homeric epic and on the part of modern committee chairmen; and, finally, some first-hand observations of cultural mentalities which he had made during a lecture trip to China and Japan (1988a, 323-5). What emerges most strongly from these various considerations, all of them inevitably open to possible reservations, are the claims that ‘anything to do with material conditions of life is comparatively superficial when we are talking about relevance’ (323) and that the existence of ‘extraordinary similarities’ between some human phenomena in different cultures means that the availability of ‘instructive examples’, in literature and elsewhere, is not directly related to distance in time or place (324). These propositions, albeit anecdotally rather than theoretically supported (and this is, after all, a lecture for a general audience, not a treatise), take us into the realms of a historical anthropology. It is an anthropology that Dover elsewhere reinforces with the idea that historical distance itself is a relativistic concept: as he put it piquantly in The Greeks, in comparison to the entire history of homo sapiens ‘Socrates was around only yesterday; he is virtually our contemporary’.45 In the same vein of thought, when lecturing for the first-year undergraduate Classical Culture class in St Andrews, Dover used a handout which started with a chronological scale on which homo erectus was placed at one end, approximately (he indicated) a million years ago, while ‘Homer, Plato, Newton, Marx, Freud, you, etc.’ were squeezed together right at the other end of the line. So there is a sense in which the Doverian vision of the humanities can be thought of as compressing historical time for that whole stretch of history which covers the relationship of the present to classical antiquity. And it is a concomitant of this that Dover also appears to play down the sheer existence of cultural difference, making the Greeks of antiquity much less alien from us (whoever ‘we’ are) than it was already common among classicists in the 1980s (and earlier) to claim that they had been. As it happens, however, Dover unsurprisingly wavered over how far we should think of ancient Greeks as ‘alien’ or as ‘like us’. In Marginal Comment, he sarcastically criticizes older Oxford classicists who lazily assimilated ancient poets to their own small cultural world (‘interesting neighbours who called in at the vicarage for tea ...’); he faults his former St Andrews colleague Douglas Young for having failed to understand ‘the attitudes and presuppositions of an alien culture to the extent required’; he subtly observes that one might find individual elements in a Greek tragedy ‘alien’ yet the complex interrelations between them ‘intelligible’; and at a later point he strikes a balance by describing Greek culture as ‘similar enough to ours to be intelligible’ yet ‘different enough to make us reflect critically on ours’46 – this last formulation ostensibly akin to the position of Jean-Pierre Vernant, though Dover’s style of scholarship shared little with Vernant’s ‘historical psychology’ and its quasiteleological account of the Greeks’ invention of rationality, their discovery of the individual, 45 46 Dover 1982, 5. Phrases, in order, from MC 39, 87, 125, 126. At MC 126 n. 1 he dissents from the unattributed phrase ‘unimaginably alien’; although this may be a half-remembered version of Louis MacNeice’s ‘unimaginably different’ in his poem Autumn Journal, part IX (MacNeice 1966, 119; cf. Güthenke in this volume on the context and resonance of MacNeice’s phrase) Dover himself subsequently thought he might (also) have had at the back of his mind ‘astoundingly alien’ in Padel 1992, 10. For a more basic reference to any culture other than our own as ‘alien’, see Dover 1983a, 62 = 1988a, 63. Richard Rutherford reminds me that Jones 1962, 17, describes Greek tragedy as ‘desperately foreign’ (cf. 277, ‘very alien’); the phrase was used as the title of Moses Finley’s review of the book (Finley 1972, 11-15), which partly modifies Jones’ position by arguing that historical understanding always takes place ‘in a contemporary way’ (15) and is even, in the end, ‘about the present’. and so forth.47 But the descriptive, or, rather, evaluative, categories of similarity and difference as applied to cultural relationships across history are infinitely malleable, as Dover well knew. They are also perspectival, dependent for their perception and salience on the viewer’s own background, interests and motivations. Dover encapsulated this very point, with a characteristically personal inflection as well as with a sideswipe at Arthur Adkins, when he wrote near the start of Greek Popular Morality that ‘I and most of the people I know well find the Greeks of the Classical period easier to understand than Kantians.’48 In a talk he gave in St Andrews in 2000 at a celebration of his 80th birthday, he remarked, in that same lightly ironic manner, that ‘Personally I find [the Sophoclean] Ajax much more familiar and more intelligible than, say, Cardinal Newman.’49 But if judgements of historico-cultural similarity and difference are perspectivally variable, so too must be judgements of ‘relevance’. This represents a point of tension in Dover’s attempted defence of the humanities in general as forms of history. Without a firm anchorage of relevance in a determinate set of concerns and motivations, a condition one can hardly expect to be met in the modern study of the humanities, the concept of relevance is likely to collapse into, at best, a subjectivist free-for-all, or, at worst, a perpetual and irresolvable clash of incompatible viewpoints. A cognate version of this principle applies to the basic notion of ‘learning’ from history, which we saw Dover subscribing to in his FIEC lecture of 1979 and which presumably underlies the notion of ‘instructive examples’ as found in the two cultures lecture (see above). But if one concludes, as I think one must, that Dover never fully came to terms with the problem of competing frameworks of interpretation and value through which history can be viewed (though he was less concerned about subjectivism than many would be),50 that is a less damning verdict than it might seem: it arguably applies to all invocations of ‘relevance’ on the part of defenders of the humanities, which cannot, unfortunately, be cogently justified by any single criterion of value.51 The problem in question has, moreover, been exacerbated by the presentist trends visible in much of the humanities in recent times. Presentism in an undiluted form, whatever else can be said about it, effectively short-circuits the challenge of facing up to the unquantifiable interpenetration of likeness and difference in the relationships which the present can construct with the past. Dover, as I noted earlier, was anxious not to succumb to presentism by judging the past from the standpoint of modern preoccupations, though it is an open and tricky question how far he compromised that point of principle, or his own methodological consistency, in yielding to what he admitted was a fondness for adducing ‘modern parallels’ sporadically in his work.52 For a succinct statement of Vernant’s position on the dialectic of cultural distance/closeness, strangeness/familiarity, in ‘our’ relationship to the Greeks, see Vernant 1996, 10 (= 2006, 14). Dover nowhere engages with the work of the French school of historical anthropology in Gernet, Detienne, Vernant, etc.: many of their ideas are likely to have struck him as too abstract, schematic, and ‘theoretical’ for his liking. There is a single passing reference to Vernant in MC 123. 48 Dover 1974, 2-3 n. 3. In reviewing GPM, John Gould criticized what he claimed was the book’s consistent playing-down of the view of Greek attitudes as ‘alien’ to us (Gould 1978, 287). 49 From a copy of Dover’s typescript in my possession. 50 Subjectivism, that is, in so far as Dover was never in any doubt that how interesting one finds ancient Greek culture (or anything else) is ultimately a matter of individual disposition: token examples are Dover 1976a, 10 = 1988a, 305 (‘If contemplation of a future society ...’), Dover 1982, 146 (‘if Greek ways of seeing and saying are congenial to you’). 51 Small 2013 provides a helpful survey and analysis of arguments in defence of the humanities. 52 Dover 1983b, 48 (= 1987, 96) admitted, in response to criticism from Arthur Adkins, to a liking for ‘modern parallels’ when interpreting Greek moral attitudes. Russell 1989, 14 shrewdly notes that Dover’s modern parallels sometimes sit alongside those from ‘very remote cultures’. 47 Presentism is a matter of degree on a spectrum on which all historians, whether consciously or otherwise, must position themselves.53 ~ The final item for consideration here, an article which appeared in 1988 in the Italian cultural magazine L’umana avventura (and is translated in an appendix below), is also the shortest. But it provides a convenient summing up of themes and views which I have traced in various stages of emergence in three earlier pieces. Indeed, anyone who comes to it with knowledge of those pieces is bound to have a sense of déjà vu. The Italian article, written explicitly against a background of anxiety that the teaching of classical languages was in danger of disappearing altogether from schools and universities, starts from Dover’s conviction that most of the standard reasons for studying Classics do not hold water. He presses his case, with some irony, in a kind of miniature retrospective dialogue with those who had taught him at school. Of particular interest here is the fact that he mentions not only the bogus notion that Greek and Latin teach you to think logically, but two further arguments which he dismisses with some ridicule: one, that these languages teach you (i.e. via etymology) ‘the real meaning’ of words in various modern languages, a claim he rebuts bluntly in a related passage of Marginal Comment by saying that ‘words do not have “real” meanings’; the other, the common contention that it is impossible to understand your own culture without understanding its roots.54 This passage, which once again indicates Dover’s rejection of any exceptionalist favouritism for the educational standing of Classics, is strikingly sceptical about arguments that attempt to derive evaluative conclusions from genetic premises (one form, therefore, of the genetic fallacy). Historical roots per se, he believes, have no authoritative claims on the attention of those interested in the forms of life which have grown from (or away from) those roots. Dover does not deny that the study of roots is one legitimate pursuit among many, or that it may play a distinctive role in specific instances of historical understanding. Nor is he questioning the validity of broader kinds of genealogical thinking that concern themselves with processes of influence and reception.55 What he insists is that ideas of classical antiquity as the ‘ancestor’ of (certain aspects of) modern culture cannot underwrite a special status for Classics within the humanities, let alone be allowed to encourage a nostalgically classicizing mentality: the subject’s fortunes must stand or fall, as he contended in the 1985 Rougemont lecture and now repeats, with those of the humanities as a whole. With that premise in place, Dover proceeds to summarize his opposition to Snow’s two cultures thesis (pointing out, as the 1985 lecture had not done, that Snow’s dichotomy was drawn in terms of ‘science’ and ‘literature’, thereby neglecting the importance of history), briefly returns to the concerns of the 1976 Classical Association address about the dangers of popularizing works written by those who lack sufficient historical expertise, and challenges current demands for ‘relevance’ in the humanities as simplistic in their crude association of this concept with proximity in space or time – a valid complaint, though not one which does much to resolve the problem I identified earlier of how to give relevance a positive role to play in defence of the humanities. But the most significant feature of the article for my purposes is its attempt to refine Dover’s conception of a dialectic between perceptions of similarity and difference in the study of history. We find here several new Cf. Osborne 2017, esp. 218-19 and 226 (with 222-3 on what he considers the role of Dover’s GH in a new wave of ‘presentist’ work on ancient sexuality). 54 Dover 1988b, 59; the related passage in MC, where the reasons in question are called ‘bunk’, is at 126. Compare Dover 1997a, 123-4, and 1988a, 45. 55 His most obvious acknowledgement of such interests was his editing of Perceptions of the Ancient Greeks (Dover, ed., 1992). Even so, it is notable that, as Donald Russell put it in his Times obituary, Dover ‘never wrote or talked much about the continuities of European civilisation’ (Russell 2010, 60). 53 formulations. Dover now speaks of differences as being mostly easy to recognize, since they lie, so to speak, on the surface of cultural phenomena, while similarities or affinities may operate at a deeper, more structural level and need to be located by more active investigation. There is no question, he stresses, of appealing to an unchanging human nature; human nature has changed immensely since homo erectus, as he puts it (shades of the undergraduate handout I cited earlier), though only the thousandth part of that change has occurred in the last thousandth part, i.e. the last millennium, of the intervening period – a highly Doveresque framing of the point. For Dover as an individual classicist, the substrate of underlying similarities between ancient and modern matters far more than surface differences. To understand intuitively (‘empatizzare’) the clash between Antigone and Creon in Sophocles’ play, he suggests, one does not need to worship Zeus or believe in omens, since one can tap into a modern awareness of what it means for arbitrary authority and basic ‘human rights’ to clash head-on. What is more, Dover has himself heard children arguing about issues akin to those in Sophocles’ Philoctetes (he does not specify precisely which issues!), and, in a startling autobiographical reminiscence mentioned nowhere else in his work (including Marginal Comment), he recalls having once used Aeneas’s morale-boosting speech in the first book of Vergil’s Aeneid to help quell an incipient mutiny among troops.56 The brevity of these anecdotal examples suits a two-page magazine article but is also in keeping with Dover’s characteristic belief that personal experience counts for more than abstract ‘theory’. The examples themselves, which appear (no doubt partly because of their brevity) to peel away layers of cultural specificity in order to find a hard kernel of human intelligibility, speak to his view that cross-cultural historical understanding is possible on the basis of alignments not between discrete factors or elements but between structures of experience. At the same time, his stance remains conspicuously dialectical. Far from suggesting that such alignments lurk everywhere, or should dominate historical thought, he approaches the end of the article on an explicitly anthropological note. The vital differences between cultures, he maintains, reside in systems and hierarchies of value. But this in itself provides a good reason for historical study, a reason more compactly stated here than in any of the other pieces I have discussed. Dover regards history, in all its aspects, as a quasianthropological resource with which individuals and cultures can consciously and comparatively reassess their own values.57 He remarks that it is ironic that Classics has fallen into decline during the very period in which social anthropology has become established in universities. Classics, he insists, has its own anthropological potential, its own mixture of ‘exotic’ and ‘familiar’, and it should work alongside anthropology as a disciplinary partner within the equal community of the humanities.58 So much Heraclitean water has flowed under the bridge in the decades since Dover expressed these thoughts that it is, or should be, difficult for anyone confidently to appraise his intellectual principles in relation to the flux of change in the subject, and all the more so for anyone who cares to contemplate the view in both directions, but without either presentist bias or arrogantly prescriptivist inclinations, from whatever position they occupy on the bridge in question. I hope, at least, that the present discussion has succeeded in clarifying 56 Dover 1988b, 60: the speech in question is Aen. 1.199-208; Dover curiously implies that he quoted some lines in Latin, though most of the troops under his command cannot have had any knowledge of the language. Richard Rutherford points out to me that Aeneas is explicitly described as masking his own fears (1.209, spem voltu simulat, premit altum corde dolorem) and poses the intriguing question whether this could have (subliminally) influenced Dover’s recourse to the passage. 57 Cf. the motivation for studying Greek moral attitudes in GPM: ‘in order to conduct our own criticism ... of our assumptions and principles, whether individual or collective’ (Dover 1974, xiii). 58 In the stemmatic diagram of his intellectual formation originally produced as a handout for a lecture in Rome in 1993 (and reproduced at the end of Halliwell 2011), Dover marks anthropology as an interest which lasted from his mid-teenage years for the rest of his life. some of the terms in which Dover not only came to understand the nature of his own work in relation to the parameters of his discipline, but also, in the process, made himself an instructive object of the kind of historical enquiry which he prized so highly. Appendix Kenneth Dover, ‘The value of Classics’ (translated from the Italian by Stephen Halliwell)* When I was a schoolboy, the teachers used to give us bad reasons to entice us to study Latin and Greek. ‘They teach you to think logically’, they would say. But was that true? No language has ever been designed by a computer programmer; every language is a collection of behavioural patterns that is under continual modification, as proved by the fact that a translator has less need for logical acumen than for sensitive antennae and good experience of human irrationality. ‘They make you understand the true meaning of the words we use today.’ Alas, such an absurd misconception of the nature of language can only be a very poor advertisement for the classical culture of anyone who holds a view of this sort. ‘You cannot understand our own culture if you do not understand its roots.’ Really? Which problem relating to the actual operations of any element of our culture (unless it is an explicitly and precisely historical problem) requires a knowledge of the past that reaches back beyond the 19th century? Fortunately, since I had always loved Latin and Greek simply because I found them extremely interesting, I have never needed any bad, independent reason for studying them. There will always be those who love them, just as there will always be those crazy about microbiology or Tibet or quasars. But to say no more than this is a lazy, selfish response, inadequate at a time when educational reforms threaten to eliminate even the possibility of enjoying a taste of the classical languages. Are there not perhaps good reasons for preserving that possibility, reasons intelligible to students, their parents and the Ministry of Education? Let us be frank about practical usefulness: some academic subjects are more important than others; they are not all equal. If we need water and when we open the tap none comes out, we may even die. If we want to read Plato and cannot find him in bookshops, we may be upset or disappointed, but we don’t die as a result. The sciences needed for the distribution of drinking water, the production of food and the building of shelter (as well as many other practical necessities) enjoy a specially privileged position, and rightly so, since life depends on them. The defence of Classics succeeds or fails with the defence of that whole field of studies we call the ‘arts’ or ‘humanities’, but which I actually prefer to group together under the heading of ‘history’, by which I understand the study of everything that humans have done, written, said, thought or felt. The theory of the ‘two cultures’ popularized by C.P. Snow rests on the opposition between the physical sciences and technology, on the one hand, and literature, on the other. History has been left out: there is no place in this dichotomy for history as I have defined it and therefore for at least half the studies pursued in schools and universities. There are indeed two cultures, but they are not Snow’s. One of them is the culture of analysis, inquiry and research; by its very nature this culture embraces every type of science and every kind of history: it is the study of what there is, what exists. The second culture is not science but art, a way of adding to reality, the creation of something that was not there before, that did not exist until we ourselves created it. The two cultures are not enemies. There may be some creative artists who fear and distrust history and science, but there are precious few historians or scientists who fear or despise art. * Kenneth Dover, ‘Il valore degli studi classici’, appeared in the Italian magazine L’umana avventura, summer/autumn 1988, 59-60: I am very grateful to Dr Massimiliano Ornaghi for obtaining a copy of this article for me. Where it overlaps with some of Dover’s English publications, both earlier and later, I have taken account of the forms of words used in those other places, though without thereby departing from the sense of the formulations employed in the Italian article itself. Within the genus ‘history’, the species ‘Classics’ must be able to compete on equal terms with all the other species belonging to the same genus. There is no special justification for creating a privileged position to give Classics a questionable advantage in this competition. No enthusiastic supporter of Classics will ever fear that without sufficient protection from special regulations classical literature and art may be forgotten. More than once in the last millennium the study of Greek has experienced periods of revival, not because someone thought it a key for solving practical problems, but always because it was recognized that there were things written in Greek which were worth reading. There is, however, a danger. To set up a classical canon, to disseminate the idea that everything post-classical is decadent, involves a fatal error, an error committed by the Greeks themselves. Their ‘classicism’, which was both premature and nostalgic, ended by preventing and foreclosing a genuinely innovative impulse in the artistic domain. Nevertheless, the literature and art produced in the centuries when the Greeks were genuine innovators can stand comparison with the results of any other culture. We can and should enjoy this material on its own terms. [p. 60] Numerous books are published these days about the ancient world (books on archaeology, biographies of famous individuals, translations of classical literature) which find a growing readership among a public whose working time is spent in other fields: industry or business, technology or finance. This tendency is starting to transform Classics into a minor branch of the entertainment industry or, at least, the leisure industry, but this does not mean that more people will start to study the classical languages. One must also consider the risk that, as time proceeds, the books which serve to entertain us and fill our leisure time might be written by authors increasingly less capable of distinguishing whether what they write has some relationship to historical truth or has turned into a kind of ignorant, fanciful work of fiction. And it is easy for books of precisely this kind to attract readers more than historical reconstructions. One can be entertained without any need to study, as testified by the sale of some popular, best-selling books. One can also study without experiencing pleasure: discontented school and university students confirm this. If we are sufficiently curious to pose questions about the ancient world, and if we really want to answer our questions, then someone somewhere has important work to undertake: syntax, manuscripts, inscriptions, tax systems – thousands of things might prove important or fundamental to obtaining the answer we are looking for. There is in fact no way of knowing in advance, when one is committed to solving a problem, what will prove really important or fundamental in the process of research. In this respect Classics is no different from any other type of historical study, and indeed no different from the study of the physical or biological sciences either. Establishing the text of a papyrus and using a microscope have the same status, both of them opposed to lazy or frivolous falsifications of the world, of the world as it is now or has been in the past. If Classics is put aside and deemed a useless ally in this battle, this can only be because it is considered of little relevance to our contemporary situation. The popular notion of relevance is absurdly simplistic, if not the result of outright ignorance. If B is nearer to A than C is in space and time, people assume that B has a closer connection with A. On this premise, medieval French would be a more suitable subject of study for English schools than classical Latin, not to mention that modern French would be the most interesting language in this context. In reality, every judgement on the relationship between A and B depends on the answer one wants to give to a double question: what experiences are shared by A and B, and in what respects do their experiences differ? Normally, differences strike us before resemblances; they jump out at us because they exist on a more superficial level: e.g. the presence or absence of human sacrifice, emperor cult, television, computers. Similarities, however, must be looked for at a deeper level, in structures of personal relationships; they concern the ambitions and desires, the fears and frustrations, of individuals. To take account of this factor does not imply naive or complacent acceptance of the old popular adage that ‘human nature never changes’. Human nature has certainly undergone substantial changes since the appearance of homo erectus, and it is an assumption that the last thousandth part of the intervening period has witnessed a thousandth of these changes, a tiny fraction that need not trouble us. It is a simple and widely observable fact that the substrate common to life in the ancient and modern world greatly exceeds the differences between them. To understand intuitively the conflict between Antigone and Creon we do not need to live in a city-state or worship Zeus or believe in omens; these are only superficial differences, whereas what makes an impression on us is the clash between arbitrary authority and what Antigone calls ‘unwritten laws’ and we call ‘human rights’. I myself have seen this tragedy performed, with extraordinary conviction, by a group of Scottish schoolchildren who had scarcely heard of the Greeks before then. I have also had occasion to hear some boys, with scarcely a smattering of Greek culture, arguing passionately over problems and solutions highlighted by Sophocles’ Philoctetes. And if I may be permitted a brief autobiographical digression, I once succeeded in quelling an incipient mutiny by quoting from memory some words used by Aeneas to raise the morale of his men in the first book of the Aeneid, in particular ‘o passi graviora’ and ‘forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit’. One should not be surprised about this; Vergil knew much more than I do about war, defeat, hardship, and desperation. The most important difference to be grasped between two cultures consists in differences in the range and hierarchy of their values, since these are profoundly reflected in individual choices and motivations. And this is important and significant because reexamining and reassessing our assumptions and values represents a vital necessity for the health of our own culture. Comparing ourselves with the assumptions and values of an alien culture constitutes the most effective stimulus to such a process. There is a certain irony in the way in which Classics went out of fashion at the very time when social anthropology was becoming a fashionable subject. The latter is regarded as useful (and rightly so, in my view) because if we can grasp the basic elements common to the structure of Melanesian or Bantu society and the structure of our own, we have a good chance of understanding why one society chooses a certain path of development and another society a different path. But it remains to be asked whether from our point of view Melanesian or Bantu culture holds a real advantage as a subject of study over Greek or Roman culture. Why discard cultures which share many fundamental characteristics with ours in favour of cultures which have very few such characteristics? The study of these subjects belongs side by side. The modern classicist, whether consciously or not, is profoundly indebted to the valuable stimulus of data obtained by anthropology. We have also been able to benefit from being forced to recognize, if belatedly, that the anthrôpoi who form the subject of study of this ology also include those who are white, literate and technologically advanced. For all these reasons, let us not neglect the Greeks and Romans. With them we find an exceptional mixture of the exotic and the familiar, constituting an extraordinarily rich field of research: sufficiently exotic to prompt a reexamination of ourselves, and sufficiently familiar to allow easy, immediate access to their territory. Up to this point, I have simply advanced good reasons for the study of history in general: essentially, I have not said anything in favour of Classics in particular. I have done so deliberately, in keeping with my personal definition of ‘history’ and the strength of my conviction that history and science are complementary, a reason which entitles them to equal consideration and rights in our educational system. Bad science and bad history have contributed much to the tragedy of the human past, including the recent past. Given that, it remains for me to add just one thing, and this time in a defensive rather than assertive spirit: Classics can survive by basing itself exclusively on its own merits, provided that access to the subject is not barred. ‘Let a thousand flowers bloom’ and let Classics be one of these flowers.