Professor G. S. Kirk

Cambridge Greek scholar

Geoffrey Stephen Kirk, classical scholar: born Nottingham 3 December 1921; DSC 1945; Research Fellow, Trinity Hall, Cambridge 1946-49, Fellow 1950-70; Commonwealth Fund Fellow, Harvard University 1949-50; Assistant Lecturer in Classics, Cambridge University 1951-52, Lecturer in Classics 1952-61, Reader in Greek 1961-65, Regius Professor of Greek 1974-82 (Emeritus); Professor of Classics, Yale University 1965-70; Professor of Classics, Bristol University, 1971-73; Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge 1974-82; married 1950 Barbara Traill (one daughter; marriage dissolved 1975), 1975 Kirsten Ricks (née Jensen); died Rake, West Sussex 10 March 2003.

G. S. Kirk was from 1974 to 1982 Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge, the university where he spent most of his working life.

Cambridge immediately after the Second World War had a number of distinguished classical scholars, from whom Kirk learned much. But most of them were somewhat dry; the influence of A.E. Housman, with his exaggerated concern with textual criticism, had been unfortunate. In some quarters, this led to a reaction that took the form of sentimental sloppiness. Kirk, whom no one could accuse either of being dry or dull or of being sloppy and sentimental, was a delightful exception, and at this time his teaching and his personal example did enormous good.

Geoffrey Stephen Kirk was born in 1921 at Nottingham, the son of F.T. Kirk MC. He was educated at Rossall School, and in 1940 went up to Clare College, Cambridge, but after a year left in order to join the Navy.

Kirk was handsome and had great charm; in his own words, "The trouble was that I liked, in one way or another, practically all girls", and this liking was very often reciprocated. Being strong and athletic, he was well qualified to be a naval officer. He managed to get posted to the Levant Schooner Flotilla, and having learned some modern Greek was able to co-operate most effectively with the Greek resisters to the Germans, winning the Distinguished Service Cross. In Towards the Aegean Sea: a wartime memoir (1997), he gave a fascinating account of the exciting life which he led during the war, as well as of his undergraduate years at Cambridge.

Returning to Cambridge, he obtained a First Class in Part 2 of the Tripos, specialising in ancient philosophy. Almost immediately he became a Research Fellow of Trinity Hall, a post which he held for three years, during which he spent a year at the British School in Athens. Then after a year at Harvard as a Commonwealth Fund Fellow he became an official Fellow of Trinity Hall. Although from 1965 to 1970 he was Professor at Yale, he retained his Fellowship until 1971, when he became Professor of Greek at Bristol.

Three years later he succeeded Sir Denys Page as Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge. Unfortunately his tenure of the chair was somewhat disappointing. Following his divorce from his first wife, Barbara Traill, whom he had married in 1950, he had married Kirsten, formerly wife of Christopher Ricks, then Professor of English at the university. His home was then at Sudbury in Suffolk, and he would disappear to it at weekends, and it was left to others to conduct the kind of graduate seminars that were desirable. After his retirement he lived for some time in Bath, finally moving to Fittleworth in Sussex.

In 1954 he published Heraclitus: the cosmic fragments, a learned and intelligent study, which remains indispensable. In 1957 appeared The Presocratic Philosophers, in which he collaborated with J.E. Raven; in the second edition of 1983 he had a second partner in M. Schofield. For English-speaking readers this is a precious substitute for the standard edition of the Presocratics by H. Diels and W. Kranz; on the whole, the commentary is of high quality.

In 1970 Kirk brought out an excellent translation of Euripides' Bacchae. In 1962 he published The Songs of Homer, which he followed up in 1977 with Homer and the Oral Tradition. Learned and intelligent as they are, these books belong to an unfortunate phase in English and American Homeric scholarship, which assumed that Milman Parry's proof that the Homeric poems had many features of oral poetry showed that those poems themselves must have been oral. English and American scholars were neglecting important German work, which indicated that, though Homer's poems belonged to a tradition that had been oral, and retained many of its features, they were the work of a great poet or poets who used writing and they had a basic unity. Parry's son Adam understood this, and Kirk replied to him, not very effectively.

Kirk was the general editor of The Iliad: a commentary, which appeared in six volumes between 1985 and 1993; he himself was responsible for the two first volumes, dealing with the first eight books. His commentary contains much valuable matter, particularly in its treatment of the Catalogue of Ships, in spite of its adherence to the mistaken theories of such oralists as Sir Denys Page.

In 1970 Kirk published Myth: its meaning and functions in ancient and other cultures, and in 1974 the briefer study The Nature of Greek Myths. Kirk displays a remarkable acquaintance with other mythologies beside the Greek. His critical analysis of five different monolithic theories of myth, particularly the theory that all myths are associated with ritual and the structuralist approach, has done much good. Although Kirk's cool and somewhat sceptical approach has distressed some critics, his work on myth remains necessary reading for any serious student of the subject.

Hugh Lloyd-Jones