Herodotos and Athens

Bibliographic Data

ID3937149
AuthorsW G Forrest (corresponding author)
Year1984
Volume38
Issue1
Pages1
Publication date1984-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePhoenix (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0031-8299 • E-ISSN: 1929-4883
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1088084
OpenAlexW2313954240
LanguageEN
Citations received22

When I first put to Mary White the argument which I shall be advancing this evening, she grinned in that engaging way she had and said something to the effect that I could get away with such absurdity. It was my ambition to persuade her that I could get away with it, sadly an ambition that cannot now be realised. That is only a trivial reason for missing Mary; there are more serious reasons. That we shall never be able to read her book on Tyranny, for example. But what we all miss far more is Mary herself, her pure, unselfish devotion to her subject, to scholarship in the practice of it, to honesty; to the pupils to whom she taught the subject and to the College which she loved so well and which allowed her to teach it. Above all her wry, dry, quizzical, sympathetic self, her great humanity. Mary had many adorable traits, one among them was that she was deeply attached to Oxford. Herodotos was similarly attached to Athens and it is this attachment that we now try to explore. Mary liked her Oxford College, she worshipped her tutor but she did not dislike other tutors or abominate other Colleges. Similarly it is ridiculous to suggest that Herodotos was pinned down to one particular political group in Athens. Herodotos could have dined one evening with Perikles, the next with Thucydides son of Melesias-I imagine that he did. But it does not follow from normal human, in his case superhuman, open-mindedness that there is a lack of political belief or of political inclination-Mary was polite to all but she was more inclined to be devoted to Theodore Wade-Gery than to some others

Ancient history · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Classical Antiquity Studies · History

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