Dodds and Educational Policy for a Defeated Germany

This chapter examines the work of E.R. Dodds during preparations for the post-war occupation of Germany. In 1940, Dodds joined Arnold Toynbee’s ‘Foreign Research and Press Service’, which had moved to Oxford, and he began to work on the history of education in Germany. Arnold’s group eventually became the Foreign Office Research Department (FORD), and Dodds produced for it lengthy memoranda to inform others working on the subject. He also lectured at many meetings and published a pamphlet, Minds in the Making, a study of the hollowness and barbarity of Nazi ideology and its effects on education. For FORD he also chaired committees on re-education and on textbook production. In 1947, he led a delegation to Germany of the Association of University Teachers, which produced a damning report on the state of German universities. He proved to be one of the most significant people involved in shaping educational policy as it developed in the British Zone of Germany.

The Deaths of Tragedy

This chapter focuses on Louis MacNeice’s translation of The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1936), which is often cited by classicists as well as by admirers of MacNeice’s own poetry as one of the most important twentieth-century versions of Greek tragedy that exists. The enthusiasm of classicists for MacNeice’s achievement seems to point to a fusion of Greek fidelity with poetic originality. The chapter then argues that the meaning of MacNeice’s Agamemnon is bound up closely with certain creative tensions that energized both his own writing in the 1930s and after and, more generally, informed the direction of Irish literature of the mid-century. In trying to identify and define these tensions, it helps to bring MacNeice alongside two figures of central importance: the classical scholar and poet E.R. Dodds, and the poet and classical enthusiast W.B. Yeats.

‘The lonely flight of Mind’

This chapter discusses E.R. Dodds’s relationship with modern poetry. While he is very much known as a professional classicist rather than poet, Dodds might still be enlighteningly thought of as a poetical scholar. This is not only in the sense that his scholarship relates to his attempts to write poetry or that he followed in the footsteps of his academic mentor Gilbert Murray. Rather, his academic work was partly informed by the modes of thinking and feeling that were embodied in the work of the modern poets he admired, while his words and ideas also had some impact on certain contemporary poets. The chapter then traces the intertwined relationship between Dodds’s developing scholarly interests—particularly in relation to questions of metaphysics and mysticism—and his engagement with modern poetry in the case of two of the poets he considers to have been the best of his lifetime: W.B. Yeats and Louis MacNeice.

The Rational Irrationalist

This chapter looks at E.R. Dodds’s engagement with the paranormal. Dodds’s career in psychic research had three distinct phases: before, during, and after his tenure of the Oxford chair. His own paranormal beliefs, however, solidified early and remained consistent over his long career in the field. Telepathy was real, an innate part of human development, and a default explanation for other forms of clairvoyance and mediumship. On the other hand, disembodied intelligences—including demons, ghosts, and spirit guides—were a delusion. Though marginalized in modern histories of psychic studies, Dodds’s long and active association with the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) made him a central figure in the history of twentieth-century paranormal research in Britain, and one of the most thoughtful and hard-nosed embedded observers of its journey from the Victorian parlour to eventual extinction in the laboratory environment he had spent his adult life advocating.

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.

The Battle for the Irrational

This chapter examines how the historiography of Greek religion renewed itself between 1920 and 1950. This period invested a great deal of effort in the answers that could be sought from the celebrated old sources. As the former certainties were battered from all sides, the revered voices from the past often resonated with the intensity of a battle call for renewal. Greek religion, one of the most contested domains in the reception of ancient culture, was to be solicited again and again to help imagine a new future. The chapter then considers the great changes that saw the Belle Époque study of ancient religion thoroughly transformed after the Great War, and the stakes of some of the fundamental disagreements that set influential scholars of the Interwar years against each other. Ultimately, the battle for the Greek Irrational was a search for the new foundations of modernity.

Pagans and Christians

This chapter studies E.R. Dodds’s lectures published in 1965 as Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, which marked a pivotal moment in the modern study of late antiquity. By 1963, Dodds had a long history of combining his scholarly and other interests to create new fields of study. Pagan and Christian draws both on his non-academic interests and on his past research into Neoplatonism, Greek literature, Greek religion, and the ‘irrational’, encompassing the supernormal or paranormal in antiquity. Dodds argued for seeing common ground between pagan and Christian mentalities in a way which can now be taken for granted but was anything but typical at the time. In the process, he created a new field of study and, if not many scholars have followed him in studying the whole breadth of the field, there has been much more serious discussion since of many of its elements.

The Greeks and the Irrational

This chapter focuses on E.R. Dodds’s famous book The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), in which he has largely moved on to a more psychologically inflected anthropology. Indeed, in the preface, Dodds warns that the book is not ‘a history of Greek religion or even of Greek religious ideas or feelings’. A famous—one might say notorious—argument in The Greeks and the Irrational is that the archaic Greek’s supposed anxieties and sense of guilt were a product of the tensions between fathers and sons created by the loosening of the old solidarity of the family which imposed absolute obedience. This is an argument that extends a psychological proposition about sons’ feelings for fathers to a proposition about society, thus an instance of the bridge between social psychology and social anthropology.

Memories of E. R. Dodds

This concluding chapter presents the accounts of E.R. Dodds’s students. Ruth Padel was Dodds’s last Doctor of Philosophy student. At Oxford, Dodds read papers she wrote towards her thesis and made imaginative connective suggestions. Moreover, they talked about writing and poetry, discussing how Dodds wrote The Greeks and the Irrational. After the death of Dodds’s wife, Padel took upon herself the task of looking after him in his old age. Padel then encouraged her lifelong friend, Oswyn Murray, to reach out to Dodds, thinking he would appreciate being asked to meet present-day undergraduates. Thus, Murray had the honour of dining with Dodds and W.H. Auden. Meanwhile, Helen Ganly had the opportunity to draw Dodds in person. During their conversations, he spoke about his love of gardening.

Dodds on Plato

This chapter assesses E.R. Dodds’s commentary on the Gorgias. Dodds’s edition of the Gorgias was the third commentary he published, and in some ways the most traditional. In his work on the Gorgias, he followed more closely a well-established channel of scholarship on a central author. Yet the book contains much that is characteristic of Dodds’s work, and in many passages one recognizes his distinctive voice. When Dodds was writing about the Gorgias, he had to deal with Plato as a critic of human politics and society, and he kept in view the author’s development into a reformer and a legislator who laid down the principles on which society must be based and the means by which morals and correct beliefs must be imposed upon mankind.