Jasper Griffin

• 1. Introduction

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  Jasper Griffin coined a word that ended up in chemistry. That word, 'agostic', was later adopted by the organometallic chemist Malcolm Green to describe C-H-M interactions, a particular kind of chemical bond. Griffin was not a chemist. He was born on the 29th of May 1937 and spent his career at the University of Oxford studying ancient literature. He died on the 22nd of November 2019. He served as Public Orator and Professor of Classical Literature at Oxford from 1992 until 2004. He also wrote books about English snobbery. What kind of mind produces all of that, and what shaped it?

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• 2. Scholarship and Two Universities

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  Christ's Hospital in Horsham, West Sussex, is a private school that awards places on scholarship. Griffin was one of those scholarship pupils. He left Horsham for Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Classical Moderations and Greats between 1956 and 1960. He graduated with a first class Bachelor of Arts degree. That result earned him a Jackson Fellowship at Harvard University, where he spent the academic year 1960 to 1961. His research at Harvard concentrated on early Latin poets. When the Harvard fellowship ended, Griffin returned to Oxford. His teaching career there would be long, and so would his publishing list.

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• 3. Forty Years at Balliol

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  The Dyson Junior Research Fellowship at Balliol gave Griffin a two-year research post, running from 1961 to 1963. He then became a tutorial fellow in Classics. He held that position for forty-one years. In 2000, Balliol added the designation of senior fellow. He retained that status until he stepped back from teaching. By the time Griffin left his tutorial post, his bibliography already stretched back more than two decades.

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• 4. Books Ancient and Modern

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  Homer on life and death appeared in 1980, published by the Clarendon Press and Oxford University Press. That same year, a companion study simply titled Homer came out through Oxford University Press. Latin poets and Roman life followed in 1985, from Duckworth. Faber and Faber published The mirror of myth: classical themes and variations in 1986. Cambridge University Press brought out Homer: the Odyssey in 1987.

  The Oxford history of the classical world appeared in 1986, co-edited with John Boardman and Oswyn Murray for Oxford University Press. That volume was later divided into two separate books. The first was The Oxford history of Greece and the Hellenistic world. The second was The Oxford history of the Roman world. Both appeared in 1991. Griffin later edited Homer: Iliad, Book nine for the Clarendon Press in 1995. In 1999 came Sophocles revisited, a volume of essays presented to Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones, published by Oxford University Press.

  Snobs appeared from Oxford University Press in 1982. Robinson published The art of snobbery in London in 1998, sixteen years later. Both titles placed a scholar of ancient literature in territory that classical scholars seldom occupy. New editions of his Homer volume and his Virgil study appeared from Bristol Classical Press in 2001, more than twenty years after the Homer text was first published.

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• 5. A Scholarly Household

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  Dr. Miriam T. Griffin, née Dressler, was a classicist in her own right. She and Jasper Griffin were married for more than fifty years. The couple had three daughters: Julia, Miranda, and Tamara. All three daughters survived both parents.

  The British Academy elected Griffin a Fellow in 1986, placing him among the leading scholars of the British humanities. Miriam Griffin was herself a noteworthy classicist. That standing was her own, not a reflection of her husband's career.

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