… a great classical scholar, has died at 87. From the Telegraph obit:
… Lloyd-Jones was the product of a type of rigorous philological training in Latin and Greek which was uniquely characteristic of the best English schools in the pre-war period. To this he added a thorough knowledge of the classical tradition and the history of scholarship; expertise as a papyrologist and textual critic; and a thorough grounding in ancient Greek religion and culture. Thus armed, for most of his academic career he engaged in an almost personal war to protect the soul of Classics from the modern age.
… As part of his wartime work, Lloyd-Jones had learned Japanese, and noticed how it was impossible, or at least difficult, to express certain Western concepts in that language. When he returned to Oxford, he set out in an essay for his tutor to refute St Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God by showing the difficulties of expressing it in Japanese…
But really I just wanted to show you this photo.
1978, Cyprus, with his wife, Mary Lefkowitz.
Could they be any more professoresque?
October 5th, 2009 at 8:49PM
I liked the line in the obit, "Despite the passion of his own intellectual convictions, he was always tolerant of his students’ wild ideas."
October 6th, 2009 at 7:22AM
The British intelligence services in WW II had the belief that young men who could learn ancient Greek well could also learn Japanese–and so they did!
October 6th, 2009 at 10:44AM
He was my thesis supervisor in the late 80s and I adored him and feared him in equal measure, as is probably true of a lot of his supervisees. I saw him eviscerate graduate students on occasion but he could also be the kindest person in the world, as he was to me. At my first APA meeting when I was having a thoroughly unpleasant time on the job-search meat market and was despairing of ever finding anything, he took time to cheer me up and to encourage me to believe in my own scholarly worth. Ave atque vale, Sir Hugh!
October 6th, 2009 at 11:30AM
Sophie: Lovely. Thank you for that remembrance. Certainly the obits I’ve read make him sound at times rather frightening… But when you look at the whole package, it’s clear he had one of those personalities that brought out the best in his students — made them tougher intellectually.
October 6th, 2009 at 2:20PM
I, too, experienced Hugh’s kindness on more than one occasion when I was his student during the late 1960s, when he would spend a semester a year as visiting professor at Yale. Yes, over the years I often saw him perform the kinds of disemboweling procedures that became the stuff of legend. And I regret to say that, like many others who studied under him or saw him in action, I have been guilty of perpetrating some pretty dreadful imitations of his mannerisms. But I also experienced his unhesitating kindness and generosity. Indeed, I would not now be a professor of Classics had Hugh not 40 years ago advocated for me when I desperately needed an advocate. Though I have not talked to him in some years, I was very sorry to learn of his passing.
October 6th, 2009 at 3:58PM
Many thanks, David, for that recollection of Lloyd-Jones.
There are many pleasures associated with blogging, but one of the greatest is the way commenters deepen my understanding of some of the people about whom I write.