Dodds, Plotinus, and Stephen MacKenna

This chapter examines E.R. Dodds’s relationship with the Irishman Stephen MacKenna (1872–1934), the remarkable journalist turned Greek scholar, who devoted the latter part of his life to the translation into English of the Enneads of Plotinus. MacKenna discovered Plotinus when his journalistic work for Pulitzer’s New York World brought him to St Petersburg in 1905, to cover the abortive revolution there. During his stay, he discovered a copy of the Enneads of Plotinus, which he then began to read while confined temporarily in his hotel room. By the beginning of 1907, he had already formed the idea of translating Plotinus into English. Dodds was regularly consulted over the latter part of MacKenna’s translation of Plotinus. He then initiated a connected series of efforts to bring both Plotinus and MacKenna’s translation of him to a wider public in the year after he took up the Regius Chair of Greek at Oxford.