Kenneth Dover de mortuis

"I do not spare the dead, nor do I expect to be spared when I am dead", wrote the great Sir Kenneth Dover whose excellent obituary appears in The Times today.

Not many classicists write a 'sensational' biography. Nor was one expected in 1995 even from the pioneering author of 'Greek Homosexuality' and the famously frank and independent leader of St Andrew's University, the British Academy  and Corpus Christi, Oxford.

But Dover's Marginal Comment caused a sensation  - not only for its frankness in so many personal and public respects but for its justification of doing so. 

In the opening chapter, he set out his general approach to feelings: "I accept responsibility for my actions and words, and my processes of rational thought can fairly be judged competent or incompetent. For my feelings, desires, fears and hopes, I accept no responsibility at all; they simply happened to me, like health and sickness, good weather and bad."

Hence the unusually honest record of his reaction to the suicide of a troublesome Oxford colleague, Trevor Aston, his candid admission of previously worrying  "how to kill him without getting into trouble" and his statement that he "had no qualms about causing the death of a Fellow from whose non-existence the college would benefit". Next morning, after the event, " I got up from a long, sound sleep and looked out of the window across the Fellows' Garden. I can't say for sure that the sun was shining, but I certainly felt it was. I said to myself, slowly, 'Day one of the Year One of the Post-Astonian Era'."

As Bernard Knox pointed out in the TLS at the time, Dover's account of what he calls "The Aston Affair" caused much comment, most of it adverse.

"To those who have had to preside over a residential institution of higher learning, fantasies of violence and murderous intentions are not unknown; they can even flourish in a situation where contact is limited to class-room and committee meeting," Knox wrote.

But, even by friends and admirers, objection was taken to Dover's expression of relief that Aston had killed himself, the expression of his own wish to have done the deed, his justification of that wish and his relief when the job was done. 

All classicists living today would be the poorer today if Kenneth Dover had never lived, as the obits properly acknowledge. But there is also this remarkable account of himself, "the sober, cruelly honest record of a life of devoted service to humanistic education", the kind of record which truly illuminates a man's death.

Comments

[Candadai Tirumalai]

The obituary in the Times ensures that Sir Kenneth Dover is not sunk by what he called "The Aston Affair." A great mathematician sagely remarked that distinguished men have their peculiaritites.
I cannot claim to know Oxford colleges from the inside but I know enough about them to think that Masters and Fellows there are probably brought together in a way that would be unlikely in all but a few American academic settings.

[Jim Devin]

Why is it always difficult to find the Table of Contents for the TLS
in these webpages?

Week after week I struggle to find it and may weeks fail completely.

J. Devin
Toronto

[Terese]

"Not many classicists write a 'sensational' biography."

Such a sub-genre might have to be termed "sensational according to oneself."

The raw honesty of Dover's remarks on Aston's death qualifies as sensationalism I think but fortunately it also has the undeniable ring of objective truth. Until now I had labored under the misconception that 'sensationalism" required distortion but perhaps not. One hopes that Aston's family and friends will have managed to recognize the wicked sense of humor at work in the bio, which I plan to read to catch up on the details.

[Air Rift]

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