Laudator Temporis Acti

Kenneth Dover (1920-2010), Marginal Comment, edd. Stephen Halliwell and Christopher Stray (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), p. 96 (chapter 9, footnotes omitted):

My tutor in ancient history was Russell Meiggs, who made no allowance at all for the fact that we had all been away from academic work for several years. In that he was right, for once excuses are allowed they begin to breed. His comments on our essays were always penetrating, sometimes brutal; it was several weeks before I wrung a word of praise from him, and the end of term before I discovered that he regarded me highly. This would have been a pleasing recompense for working a seventy-hour week, if recompense had been needed, but the intellectual excitement of immersion in the history of fifth-century Athens — the first volume of Gomme's Historical Commentary on Thucydides had just been published — was its own reward. Meiggs combined an expertise in documentary inscriptions with a down-to-earth curiosity about how things really worked, and how people really felt, in the ancient world. He had no time for the kind of solution of historical problems which shuffles the ingredients of a problem into an ingenious pattern and turns history into an intellectual game. The seed of two habits was planted in me by Meiggs more firmly than either of us realised at the time. One was: on any question in Greek history or the Greek language, go first to inscriptions and only after that to literature. The general practice among ancient historians in the English-speaking world had been to treat Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon as 'authorities' and inscriptions as an optional side-dish. I preferred to begin with the inscriptions, construct historical hypotheses to account for this stone, bearing these words, found here, and then to see how the historiography of the time fitted. Students of the Greek language mostly ignored the existence of inscriptions, and even in my own time good scholars have made untrue statements through failure to look in the right places. The second thing I learned from Meiggs was never for a moment to forget that the people whose activities I was studying were real, and that I must make every possible effort to put myself into their place.