William Spencer Barrett

William Spencer Barrett FBA , nickname Spencer (born May 29, 1914 , † September 23, 2001 ) was a British Graecist .

Life

Spencer Barrett was the only child of William Barrett and Sarah Jessie Barrett, née Robbins. After attending the Derby School, he began studying Classics at Christ Church , Oxford , in 1933 . There he held the Ireland and Craven Scholarship , achieved First Class in Classical Honor Moderations in 1934 and won the Gaisford Prize for Greek Poetry and the Paravicini Scholarship in the same year . In 1937 he received a First Class in Literae Humaniores and the Derby Scholarship and in 1938 the Charles Oldham Prize . Barrett is considered a student of Eduard Fraenkel , who left Germany in 1934 and was appointed professor of Latin philology at Corpus Christi College , Oxford in 1935.

Barrett's first position was that of a Lecturer at Christ Church from 1938 to 1939. He then moved to Keble College , where he was Lecturer from 1939 to 1952 and from 1939 to 1981 Tutor in Classics . From 1946 to 1966 he was also the librarian of Keble College. As a staunch atheist , however, he was only able to become a Fellow of Keble College in 1952 after changing the relevant requirements of the college statutes . He remained so until his retirement in 1981. He was an Honorary Fellow of the college until his death. From 1968 to 1976 he was also a sub-warden. At the university level he was a lecturer in Greek Literature from 1947 to 1966 and finally a reader in Greek Literature until 1981. His student and successor at Keble College was Adrian S. Hollis .

During World War II , Barrett was a civilian in the Admiralty's Naval Intelligence Division from 1942 to 1945 . During these years he usually worked at night because his reports were due by eight in the morning. It is said that he kept his sleep pattern from four in the morning until noon afterwards, as the night work benefited him.

When Austin Farrer , the Warden of Keble College, died suddenly in 1968, Barrett was involved as a sub-warden with another amendment to the college statutes, which then no longer required that the Warden had to be an Anglican clergyman .

In 1965 he was accepted into the British Academy .

A rumored anecdote shows Barrett's dealings with the tax authorities. When a tax officer once questioned his tax return because he did not want to see the necessity of a computer for a classical philologist, Barrett was able to explain to him that in order to understand the poet Pindar it was necessary to know what Mount Etna looked like to a sailor, who passed him on a ship.

In 1939 Barrett married Georgina Margaret Elizabeth, the older daughter of William and Alma Georgina Annie Hill, with whom he had a son and daughter.

Research priorities

Barrett's main work is the edition including the commentary by Hippolytus des Euripides , which appeared in 1964. The critically edited text was based on the collation of ten medieval manuscripts out of a total of sixteen that were of value as witnesses to tradition. The commentary was unrivaled in its detail and critical quality.

Another area of ​​Barrett's work was Greek poetry ( Stesichoros , Pindar , Bakchylides ). In addition to three essays published between 1954 and 1978, Barrett left behind a number of unpublished essays on Greek poetry and an unpublished text-critical edition including commentary on Pindar when he died.

Fonts (selection)

• Bacchylides, Asine, and Apollo Pythaieus. In: Hermes 82, 1954, pp. 421-444.
• Euripides, Hippolytus. Edited with Introduction and Commentary. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1964, ISBN 0-19-814167-X . - Review by DJ Conacher, in: Phoenix 19, 1965, pp. 338-343, (online) ; William M. Calder III , in: Classical Philology 60, 1965, 277-282; Hugh Lloyd-Jones , in: Journal of Hellenic Studies 85, 1965, 164-171.
• Pindar's Twelfth Olympian and the fall of the Deinomenids. In: Journal of Hellenic Studies 93, 1973, pp. 23-35.
• Sophocles, Niobe. In: The papyrus fragments of Sophocles. An Edition with prolegomena and commentary by Richard Carden. de Gruyter, Berlin and New York 1974 (Texts and Commentaries, Vol. 7), pp. 171-235.
• The Oligaithidai and their victories. In: Roger D. Dawe , James Diggle , Patricia E. Easterling (Eds.), Dionysiaca. Nine Studies in Greek Poetry by Former Pupils Presented to Sir Denys Page on His Seventieth Birthday. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1978, pp. 1-20.
• Greek Lyric, Tragedy, and Textual Criticism. Collected papers. Edited by Martin L. West . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2007, table of contents with abstracts of the articles , further table of contents . - Review by Malcolm Davies, in: The Classical Review 58, 2008, pp. 335-338.

literature

• Adrian S. Hollis: William Spenser Barrett, 1914-2001. In: Proceedings of the British Academy 124, 2004, pp. 25-36.
• Adrian S. Hollis: Barrett, William Spencer (1914-2001). In: Robert B. Todd (Ed.), The Dictionary of British Classicists. Bristol 2004, I 54-55.
• William M. Calder III: CM Bowra on WS Barrett: An Unpublished Testimonium. (PDF) In: Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 45, 2005, 213–217.
• BARRETT, (William) Spencer , in: Who Was Who , A & C Black, 1920–2007, online edition by Oxford University Press , 2007, last accessed on August 14, 2008.

Web links

• Adrian Hollis: Spencer Barrett. Oxford don devoted to classics and his college. In: The Guardian , Wednesday 17 October 2001.
• British Academy: BARRETT, Mr. William .