Laudator Temporis Acti: K.J. Dover

Friday, March 12, 2010

K.J. Dover

Greek scholar K.J. Dover died on March 7. Obituaries appeared in The Times, The Guardian (by Stephen Halliwell), The Telegraph, and The Scotsman (by Chris Mair).

I own the following books by Dover:

Aristophanes, Clouds, abridged ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970)
Aristophanes, Frogs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993)
Aristophanic Comedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972)
Greek and the Greeks: Collected Papers, vol. I (Language, Poetry, Drama) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987)
Greek Homosexuality, updated ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989)
Greek Popular Morality in the Time of Plato and Aristotle (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974; rpt. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994)
Plato, Symposium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980)

He wrote many more books, and everything he wrote on the subject of the ancient Greeks is of course illuminating. I confess that his controversial autobiography, Marginal Comment (London: Duckworth, 1994), left me cold—too much about academic politics, too little about the study of Greek. On the day when he died, by coincidence, I borrowed his school edition of Thucydides, Book VII (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), from the library. Here are a couple of quotations from the Preface, a bit out of context, but still characteristic:

...I have no sympathy or respect for the currently fashionable view that Classical scholars should spend more time in entertaining the public and less in trying to discover what the Greek authors actually said...
...I do not believe that any worth-while contribution to Greek studies is ever likely to be made by anyone who does not know the Greek language well...

# posted by Michael Gilleland @ 5:13 AM

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K.J. Dover

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