E. R. Dodds


Eric Robertson Dodds was an Irish classical scholar. He signed all his publications E. R. Dodds.

Life

Dodds was born in Banbridge, County Down, 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 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, or Literae Humaniores. 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 his final examinations in Literae Humaniores, and was awarded a first class degree to match the first-class awarded him in 1914 in Honour Moderations, the preliminary stage of his degree. His first tutor at Oxford was A. B. Poynton.
After graduation, Dodds returned to Dublin and met W. B. Yeats and AE. He taught briefly at Kilkenny College and in 1919 was appointed as a lecturer in classics at the University of Reading, where in 1923 he married a lecturer in English, Annie Edwards Powell. They had no children.
In 1924, Dodds was appointed Professor of Greek at the University of Birmingham, and came to know W. H. Auden. Dodds was also responsible for Louis MacNeice's appointment as a lecturer at Birmingham in 1930. He assisted MacNeice with his translation of Aeschylus, Agamemnon, and later became the poet's literary executor. Dodds published one volume of his own poems, Thirty-Two Poems, with a Note on Unprofessional Poetry.
In 1936, Dodds became Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford, succeeding Gilbert Murray. Murray had decisively recommended Dodds to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and it was not a popular appointment – he was chosen over two prominent Oxford dons. His lack of service in the First World War and his support for Irish republicanism and socialism in addition to his scholarship on the non-standard field of Neoplatonism, also did not make him initially popular with colleagues. He was treated particularly harshly by Denys Page at whose college the Regius Chair of Greek was based.
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 to 1963.
He died in Old Marston, northeast of Oxford.

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 I.
For a bibliography of Dodds' publications see Quaderni di Storia no. 48 175-94, and for general information on him and studies of some of his works see the bibliography to the entry for him in The Dictionary of British Classicists, vol. 1, 247–51. Add the articles on his work on Neoplatonism in Dionysius 23 139-60 and Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 103 499–542.
He was also editor of three major classical texts for the Clarendon Press, Proclus: Elements of Theology, Euripides' Bacchae and Plato's Gorgias, all published with extensive commentaries, and a translation in the case of the first. His autobiography, Missing Persons, was published in 1977.
He edited Louis MacNeice's unfinished autobiography The Strings are False and MacNeice's Collected Poems.

Cultural references

The Berkeley, San Francisco punk band The Mr. T Experience recorded a song for their 1988 album, Night Shift at the Thrill Factory, entitled "The History of the Concept of the Soul", which is a two-minute, musical version of lead singer Frank Portman's master's thesis. Dodds' The Greeks and the Irrational is specifically referenced at the end of the song as "footnotes" sung by Portman.

Publications