An Irishman Abroad

This chapter discusses E.R. Dodds’s life in Oxford. To understand what Dodds did in Oxford, an analysis of what he brought to it is needed. One way to look at this is to compare him with his teacher Gilbert Murray, who, like him, combined profound knowledge of Greek with an awareness of areas beyond language and the classical world. Dodds’s wider interests were perhaps not as wide-ranging as Murray’s, but his linguistic scholarship was more rigorous, and moreover integrated with his literary interests in a way that Murray’s was not. Dodds could also be compared with his colleague in Oxford for seventeen years, Eduard Fraenkel, whose impact on Oxford scholarship was at least as great as Dodds’s, and who—as a German Jew—was even more of an outsider. What both men brought to Oxford was the stimulus of ideas and traditions foreign to a local culture of scholarship whose very success had made it complacent.