E. R. Dodds

E. R. Dodds
Occupation	Classics scholar, writer

Eric Robertson Dodds (26 July 1893 – 8 April 1979) was an Irish classical scholar. He signed all his publications E. R. Dodds.

Dodds was born in Banbridge, County Down, the son of schoolteachers. His father Robert was from a Presbyterian family, and died of alcoholism when Dodds was seven. His mother Anne was of Anglo-Irish ancestry. When Dodds was ten, he moved with his mother to Dublin, and he was educated at St Andrew's College (where his mother taught) and at Campbell College in Belfast. He was expelled from the latter for "gross, studied and sustained insolence".

In 1912, Dodds won a scholarship at University College, Oxford to read classics, or Literae Humaniores (a two-part four-year degree program consisting of five terms' study of Latin and Greek texts followed by seven terms' study of ancient history and ancient philosophy). Friends at Oxford included Aldous Huxley and T. S. Eliot. In 1916, he was asked to leave Oxford due to his support for the Easter Rising, but he returned the following year to take his final examinations in Literae Humaniores, and was awarded a first class degree to match the first-class awarded him in 1912 in Honour Moderations, the preliminary stage of his degree. His first tutor at Oxford was A. B. Poynton.

After graduation, Dodds returned to Dublin and met W. B. Yeats and AE (George William Russell). He taught briefly at Kilkenny College and in 1919 was appointed as a lecturer in classics at the University of Reading, where in 1923 he married a lecturer in English, Annie Edwards Powell (1886–1973). They had no children.

...
Wikipedia