Owen's Remains

Gwil Owen died suddenly in July 1982 in Cambridge, where, after many years as Professor of Ancient Philosophy in Oxford and Harvard, he had made his last academic home. With tragic irony, his death coincided almost exactly with the publication of a Festschrift' in which a generation of classical philosophers celebrated his unique influence on the development of the study of ancient philosophy since the war. Such volumes are frequently notable for the somewhat forced nature of the compliments paid to the dedicatee by the contributors; the uniform and evident depth and sincerity of the tributes contained in his celebration are a mark of the universal respect in which Owen was held in the field that he had done so much to develop. Yet, although it has taken four years for the Collected Papers to appear, as Martha Nussbaum points out in her delicate Preface, this was Gwil's project. He himself prepared the texts for publication; and although there were some gaps and incompletenesses (filled in a sensitive manner by the editor), this is in no sense a posthumous compilation: and for that at least we should be grateful. For Gwil Owen was an original: everything he did bore his unmistakeable personal stamp. To have been left with anything less than the genuine article would have been tragic indeed. The collection contains twenty items, and as such very nearly the whole of Owen's published output (the exceptions, principally review notices, are listed in the Preface). It is a small corpus for such a reputation to rest upon; but in an age in which academic publication records are judged by mass rather than by weight, it is salutary to reflect upon the importance of the material contained in this volume. It is not an exaggeration to say that Owen revolutionised the study of ancient philosophy after the war. The

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