Rediscovering E. R. Dodds

Christopher Stray is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Classics, Ancient History, and Egyptology at Swansea University, and Associate Fellow at the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London. He has held visiting positions at Wolfson College, Cambridge; the Beinecke Library, Yale University; and at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He works on the history and sociology of classical teaching and learning at school and university level, and has also published on examinations, institutional slang, and textbooks. He contributed three chapters to The History of Oxford University Press (OUP, 2013), and is currently working on contributions to a forthcoming history of Trinity College, Cambridge.Christopher Pelling is Emeritus Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford. He occupied that chair from 2003 to 2015, and before that was McConnell Laing Fellow and Praelector in Classics at University College, Oxford, where he is now an Honorary Fellow. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales, and also served as the President of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies from 2006 to 2008 and President of the International Plutarch Society from 2008 to 2011. Among his books are Literary Texts and the Greek Historian (Routledge, 2000), Plutarch and History (The Classical Press of Wales, 2002), Twelve Voices from Greece and Rome: Ancient Ideas for Modern Times (with Maria Wyke; OUP, 2014), and Herodotus and the Question Why (University of Texas Press, 2019).Stephen Harrison is Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Oxford, Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and also visiting professor at the universities of Copenhagen and Trondheim. He has held other visiting appointments and fellowships at the universities of Bergen, Otago, Cape Town, Stanford, the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, and the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. He has published extensively on Latin literature and its reception, including the following volumes: Generic Enrichment in Vergil and Horace (OUP, 2007), Living Classics: Greece and Rome in Contemporary Poetry in English (edited volume; OUP, 2009), and Louis MacNeice: The Classical Radio Plays (co-edited with Amanda Wrigley; OUP, 2013).

• FrontmatterList of IllustrationsList of Contributors1: Christopher Stray and Christopher Pelling: Introduction: A Missing Person?2: Christopher Stray: An Irishman Abroad3: Renaud Gagné: The Battle for the Irrational: Greek Religion 1920 19504: N. J. Lowe: The Rational Irrationalist: Dodds and the Paranormal5: Robert Parker: The Greeks and the Irrational6: Scott Scullion: 'The road of excess': Dodds and Greek Tragedy7: R. B. Rutherford: Dodds and Plato: The Gorgias Edition8: Anne Sheppard: Dodds's Influence on Neoplatonic Studies9: Teresa Morgan: Pagans and Christians: Fifty Years of Anxiety10: John Dillon: Dodds, Plotinus, and Stephen MacKenna11: Tom Walker: 'the lonely flight of Mind': W. B. Yeats, Louis MacNeice and the Metaphysical Poetry of Dodds's Scholarship12: Peter McDonald: The Deaths of Tragedy: The Agamemnon of MacNeice, Dodds, and Yeats13: David Phillips: Dodds and Educational Policy for a Defeated Germany14: Ruth Padel, Helen Ganly, Oswyn Murray, and Donald Russell: Memories of E. R. DoddsEndmatterE. R. Dodds: A Bibliography of his PublicationsGeneral BibliographyIndex

Rediscovering E.R. Dodds is an invitation to consider not only Dodds the enshrined scholar, but also Dodds the human, himself once a nobody, who lived in trying times and had to overcome many hurdles. These hurdles and his beginner's luck, panache and intellectual strategies are retraced in Stray and Pelling's first chapter.