Eric Robertson Dodds

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Eric Robertson Dodds (26 July 1893 - 8 April 1973) was an Irish classical scholar.

[edit] Life

Dodds was born in Banbridge, County Down, Northern Ireland, the son of schoolteachers. His father Robert was from a Presbyterian family, and died of alcoholism when Dodds was seven. His mother Anne was of Anglo-Irish ancestry. When Dodds was ten, he moved with his mother to Dublin, and he was educated at St Andrew's College (where his mother taught) and at Campbell College in Belfast. He was expelled from the latter for "gross, studied and sustained insolence".

In 1912 Dodds won a scholarship at University College, Oxford to read classics. Friends at Oxford included Aldous Huxley and T. S. Eliot. In 1916 he was asked to leave Oxford due to his support for the Easter Rising, but he returned the following year to take examinations, and was awarded a first class degree.

After graduation, Dodds returned to Dublin and met W. B. Yeats and George Russell. In 1919 he was appointed as a lecturer in classics at the University of Reading, and in 1923 he married a lecturer in English, Annie Edwards Powell (1886-1973).

In 1924 Dodds was appointed Professor of Greek at the University of Birmingham, and came to know W. H. Auden (whose father was a colleague). Dodds was also responsible for Louis MacNeice's appointment as a lecturer at Birmingham in 1930. He assisted MacNeice with his translation of Aeschylus, and became the poet's literary executor. Dodds published one volume of poems himself, in 1929.

In 1936, Dodds became Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford, succeeding Gilbert Murray. Murray had chosen Dodds himself, and it was not a popular appointment - he was a compromise, chosen instead of two academics already at the University. His lack of service in the First World War (he had worked briefly in an army hospital in Serbia) and his support for Irish republicanism and socialism also did not make him initially popular with colleagues.

Dodds had a lifelong interest in mysticism and psychic research, being a member of the council of the Society for Psychical Research from 1927 and its president from 1961-1963.

[edit] Work

Among his works are The Greeks and the Irrational, which charts the influence of irrational forces in Greek culture up to the time of Plato, and Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, a study of religious life in the period between Marcus Aurelius and Constantine.

He was also editor of a number of major classical texts for the Clarendon Press, including Euripedes' Bacchae and a heavily annotated edition of Plato's Gorgias. His autobiography, Missing Persons, was published in 1977.