Friday, March 19, 2010

Sir Kenneth Dover Obituaries and Lives Remembered

A week or so ago, I mentioned the Obituaries of Kenneth Dover that appeared in The Times and the Telegraph. The Times has followed up with several enjoyable reminiscences in Lives Remembered:

Lives Remembered: Sir Kenneth Dover
. . . . Kenneth Dover was an extraordinarily gifted teacher. His classes on Thucydides, for example, brought his own painstaking scholarship to his students with that rare ability that invited them to share his interest and excitement. I remember the alarm with which we were told to use the French edition “as the only decent one around just now” (his own had not yet been completed); it was a toss-up which created more of a headache for the first-year undergraduate: the French notes or the Greek original . . . .
There is another brief entry in Lives Remembered earlier this week, and The Sunday Times commented briefly.

Also this week, a full obituary in the Independent:

Professor Sir Kenneth Dover: Hellenist best known for his work on Greek homosexuality and for two controversial presidencies
Professor Sir Kenneth Dover was the foremost Hellenist of his generation, a skilled and authoritative interpreter of almost all the multifarious genres of ancient Greek literature. Somewhat to his regret he was probably most widely known as a disarmingly frank pioneer historian of Greek male same-sex gendering and sexuality, but he should better be remembered, and his work long revisited, as a quite formidable exponent of a unique combination of precise philological mastery with broader historical, sociological, and aesthetic exegesis, both of major canonical texts and of Greek (mainly Athenian) popular thought and morality. His career of high academic office-holding was attended by some considerable notoriety as well as renown . . . .

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