In Memoriam Professor Jasper Griffin 1937-2019

In Memoriam

Professor Jasper Griffin 1937–2019

Balliol College

Oxford OX1 3BJ

Telephone: 01865 277777

Website: www.balliol.ox.ac.uk

front cover Portrait of Jasper Griffin by Bob Tulloch, coloured and monochrome pencils on a toned paper, 15” x 11”, 2008.

Celebrating the life of Professor Jasper

Griffin FBA

Literae Humaniores, Balliol 1956–1960

Dyson Junior Research Fellow, Balliol 1961–1963

Tutorial Fellow in Classics, Balliol 1963–2004

Public Orator, University of Oxford 1992–2004

Emeritus Fellow, Balliol 2004–2019

Memorial event at the Sheldonian Theatre

18 March 2023

The speeches in this booklet are as written by the authors and therefore the wording may occasionally differ from that actually spoken at the event, with the exception of the speech by Professor Gregory Hutchinson, which is a transcript of the speech he delivered.

The programme included ‘Where’er you walk’ from Handel’s Semele: Countertenor: Tom Dixon, Piano: Luca Morgante.

Christopher Taylor’s ‘Memories of Jasper’ were printed in the event programme, not spoken.

A video of the event is available on the Balliol website: www.balliol.ox.ac.uk/griffin-memorial-video

Contents Speeches

Sir Colin Lucas (Master 1994–2001 and Honorary Fellow) 6

Professor Oswyn Murray (Emeritus Fellow) 9

Professor Gregory Hutchinson (1975) 15

Professor Emily Wilson (1990) 18

Camilla Bingham KC (1988) 23

HE Philip McDonagh (1970) 29

Christopher Taylor (1958): 'Memories of Jasper' 35

Sir Colin Lucas (Master 1994–2001 and Honorary Fellow)

As a former Master of Balliol, it gives me pleasure to welcome you on behalf of the College to this celebration of Jasper Griffin – either friend, colleague or former tutor to all of you here this afternoon. You have in hand a programme, so there is no need for me to outline the sequence of today’s proceedings.

I have no wish to curtail the time available to the other speakers today. However, allow me to add a brief tribute of my own by way of preface.

When I first came to Balliol as a Fellow, I was pretty much in awe of all these new colleagues whom I felt to be much cleverer than me. This was undoubtedly true of Jasper and, while awe matured into respect and friendship, it remains the case that I always saw Jasper as the epitome of what an Oxford don ought to be and of what makes our colleges so special.

Others will speak today with more authority than I can about his brilliance in scholarship, erudition, and tutoring. As a colleague in College, he was of course a towering figure – not just physically but also as a formidable presence. He navigated across the quad like a great shipof-the-line under full sail. His quick-fire wit (to maintain the metaphor) was so regular and apposite that one could not remember them all. One of my favourites came when we went into Common Room lunch together after retirement. Looking round, I turned to him, saying rather dramatically: ‘It’s tragic, Jasper: I don’t know who half these people are.’ In a flash, he shot back: ‘What’s tragic is that they don’t know who we are!’

In College matters, he was a benign and wise influence – usually (I don’t think any academic willingly credits another with unlimited wisdom). When a recently arrived Fellow objected (in the days before passive smoking was an established issue) to the amount of cigarette smoke in College Meeting, it was Jasper who, confronted with the alarm of inveterate smokers like Maurice Keen (Fellow and Tutor in Modern History 1961–2000) and me, found the compromise formula

that smokers should sit at one table and the others at another – all in the same room, of course.

Jasper was conservative with a small ‘c’; he liked ritual and a bit of formal display. He was impatient with what he saw as cant, uninspected ideological fashion and student exaggerations. Though he did not ordinarily talk about his home life, I do remember the delight with which he recounted that when one of his daughters (I regret I cannot recall which) opened the front door to a particularly exotic-looking undergraduate, she called to her father: ‘There’s an oxymoron here to see you.’ But he was devoted and very loyal to his students and they to him, as we can see here today.

Since we are in the Sheldonian, it is only right to recall that Jasper was not just a pillar of his college; he was also a long-serving Public Orator of the University. He was supremely well-fitted to this role by his great presence, his command of Latin oratory, his intelligence and his wit and humour. A Vice-Chancellor does not have anything to do at Encaenia. So, in that role I always had plenty of time to observe Jasper as he brought forward the honorands one by one, anointing each with the chrism of his magnificent Latin eulogy in presentation to the Chancellor. I would watch the audience as some listened with obvious pleasure, some pretended to understand the printed Latin text and others like me openly read the elegant English translation. And, when the last honorand had been admitted, Jasper suddenly appeared as if by magic in the Orator’s pulpit to deliver the annual ‘state of the University’ address, often containing reflections on things that had amused or intrigued him and in later years (rather reluctantly, I felt) a report on significant donations to the University. In alternate years, he would be partnered by the Professor of Poetry in the opposite box in what was a delightful duel of wit, ingenuity and elegance.

My strongest memory of Jasper as Public Orator, however, is not in this building but when we went to Buckingham Palace with about ten other universities including Cambridge to present honorary doctorates to Nelson Mandela. Oxford came first of course, by virtue of age of foundation. Jasper delivered his eulogy in a sort of John Bull bluff English-accented Latin. He was followed by the Cambridge Orator

who spoke his Latin eulogy in that sort of singsong, rising and falling oratorical style and Italianate pronunciation that some see as the proper mode. The effect of the contrast was almost music-hall comic and a ripple of laughter ran around the other delegations. There followed the Chancellor of another university who proclaimed disdainfully that he was going to speak in proper Queen’s English and continued: ‘Nelson, old friend, we have been on a long road together.’ The same thought (‘not on Robben Island, you haven’t’) must have occurred simultaneously to Jasper and me, for Jasper gave one of his trademark loud sniffs . . .

Professor Oswyn Murray (Emeritus Fellow)

I want to talk about Jasper as a colleague. For me this is not a memorial but a celebration of the teaching and scholarship of a lifelong friend who for 40 years made every working day a joy by his presence.

Jasper and I were almost exact contemporaries; we were born two months apart in the same year, 1937. In terms of our careers we differed only in the fact that I had done National Service before coming up to Oxford whereas he came straight from school. As a result, he was always my senior: and unlike me, he was a Balliol man in the old sense, educated at Balliol from 1956, and remaining at Balliol as a Fellow from 1961 until his retirement in 2004, still actively engaged as an Emeritus Fellow until his death in 2019 – a total of 63 years. His father was a civil servant, whose career was allegedly held back by his Marxism. Jasper did not talk about him: he just claimed to have a ground-level acquaintance with Marxist theory which enabled him to see through the half-baked Marxism of the revolutionary students. Of his mother there is a story, related by Jasper himself. As a young child he learned by heart the whole of ‘The Lady of Shalott’, and proceeded to recite it to his mother. ‘Oh Jasper, you are a bore,’ she said. At Christ’s Hospital he was recognised as not a sportsman, and allegedly allowed to immerse himself in books. But in 1973, the finalists organised a game of cricket on the Master’s Field and persuaded Jasper to participate. He must, at some stage, have seen a clip of the great Wes Hall bowling for the West Indies, because when he assented to the suggestion that he should bowl an over he astonished us all by walking back almost to the boundary before beginning his run in to the wicket. His running was not exactly rapid, but purposeful and rather menacing – a sort of Heavy Brigade canter – and when he reached the wicket he sent down a straight and perfectly respectable delivery, repeating the whole process the requisite five further times before resuming a pretty inactive role in the field.

At Oxford as an undergraduate he won every University prize available to Classics students (it would be tedious to recount them), and made one of his closest friendships for life with the blind future

author

Ved Mehta (1956, Visiting Fellow 1988–1989 and Honorary Fellow 1999–2021), whom he used to accompany around the College, and whom many years later he caused to be elected as an Honorary Fellow. Shortly after graduating he married in 1960 the young and brilliant New Yorker Miriam Dressler (my closest colleague in ancient history teaching), a marriage in many ways of completely compatible opposites, and after a brief year at Harvard he returned to Balliol in 1963 as a Fellow and Tutor. When in 1989 to everyone’s surprise he was passed over for the Regius Professorship of Greek, I do not think he regretted it for more than a few hours: the move from Balliol to Christ Church would have been traumatic; and it was far better to remain in his own college as ad hominem Professor, Tutor, Steward of the Senior Common Room and ultimately one of the wittiest of all Public Orators, whose devastating Crewean orations spoken (outspoken) in English were the terror of successive Vice-Chancellors.

Along with his friend Maurice Keen he ran the Balliol Society; he was the centre of the hard-drinking and loud-singing Victorian Society and the College debating society. In the SCR he ruled supreme as the arbiter of elegance. Every new carpet, every picture was chosen and hung by him; I once reminded him that as a young Fellow he had been on the committee to build the new brutalist SCR: he was not pleased and simply remarked that we had come off lightly in a disastrous period of British architecture. His repartee and his ability to cap any quotation in Greek, Latin, English or German were legendary: he was the greatest wit of his generation. In later years we wondered whether he may even have modelled himself on Dr Johnson a little. Whenever a new meteorite or medical condition needed naming, a new scientific society needed a motto or a politician wanted a decorative classical quotation, Jasper could provide it instantly. In Governing Body, except for his staunch approval of the admission of women, he was generally on the conservative side in a moderate sort of way: he was happier with his friend and colleague Tony Kenny as Master (1978–1989) than in the days of Christopher Hill (1965–1978), but managed to sail through the revolutionary period with only occasional disgruntlement.

As a colleague he ran what was surely the most successful classical school of his age, helped by Tony Kenny (Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy 1964–1978), Jonathan Barnes (1961, Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy 1978–1994 and Emeritus Fellow), myself, and especially Oliver Lyne (Fellow and Tutor in Classics 1971–2005), who had been trained in Cambridge by the great literary scholar and translator Guy Lee; the two made the perfect literary team, but he was the man in charge because we were all in awe of him as a classical scholar. He was above all a kind and thoughtful leader, and his devotion to his students was an example to us all. I worked with him for 35 years, and none of us ever quarrelled with him, though we were often on different sides in College matters.

He entered into the rituals of College life. He was an unbeliever but happy to preach in Chapel, and even have his funeral there. He invented new rituals, perfectly formed. He created for himself the post of Argentarius, keeper of the College silver, so that every year in the summer, to the annoyance of the Marxist Christopher Hill, he could hold a viewing of the silver in the SCR, complete with champagne, strawberries and cream. Each year too the Griffins hosted a garden party in the Master’s Garden, for the College, academic colleagues, undergraduates and research students alike: ‘Ladies are encouraged to wear hats’ was the only instruction given in the invitation.

The mettle of College tutors is demonstrated in their behaviour at the annual Saturnalian feast of the Schools Dinner. Naturally Jasper chose the menu every year, including always an enormous platter of the ‘creepies and crawlies’ that he could not have at home because Miriam was allergic to them. He took part in the ritual games: the complex literary and aesthetic charades, and at the end of the evening such horse play as Staircase Golf (a game invented by Robert Ogilvie, which involved knocking a golf ball up all 18 staircases in College, thus waking up every sleeping finalist – until it was banned by the Dean.

In one year the students invented a series of spoof finals papers in which every tutor had to answer questions in the style of one of their colleagues on a different subject: This is:

Griffin on Roman Literature

ALL questions should be attempted. All candidates not showing an encyclopaedic knowledge will be given vivas on the collected works of Thackeray.

1. ‘Le photo, c’est l’homme.’ Who was Wackernagel?

2. ‘A group of extras in a Yugoslav film about the Napoleonic retreat from Moscow’ (Griffin). Discuss with reference to the Cantores Euphorionis.

3. ‘Ovid in Amores I imposes an individual stamp on conventional literary patterns’ (Williams). Ignore this question and write about the gods.

4. ‘Tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi.’ How would Virgil have sat in an armchair?

5. ‘Way ho.’ Which classical poet’s work was summarised in these two words?

6. What kinds of religious feeling find expression in the literature of the period? Discuss, ignoring where possible the actual texts, and moving on to an urbane discussion of manners at Versailles.

Jasper’s wit and the speed of his repartee were a constant joy to his colleagues and terror to his students. Only once is he recorded as having been lost for words in a tutorial: one pupil recalls:

I remember happy times many years ago studying Classics with your help, even though I was rather out-classed by the other Balliol Classicists. But they decided they liked me when I once read out my essay about The Iliad which was mostly cribbed from Walter Leaf. When I finished reading, Jasper said, ‘Thank you, Jeremy. Tell me, what do you know about Walter Leaf?’ My answer was, ‘Well, I think he was my great-grandfather’ and the whole class collapsed in laughter. Jasper was stunned into silence. After the class my

fellow students were ecstatic with joy, all saying. ‘Jeremy. that was incredible: we have NEVER seen Jasper completely lost for words!’

Certainly pupils never knew what to expect: he was at his best at the annual handshaking or public report to the Master on the work of students, given to their face. One of them remembers him saying, at handshaking with Christopher Hill: ‘Master, Bobby’s tutors look towards the Oxford Union somewhat as a wife looks towards a more beautiful mistress.’ Bobby was not of course aware of the potential resonance of this for Christopher Hill.

Oxford History of the Classical World

In July 1981 Robin Denniston, the Secretary to the Delegates of the Oxford University Press, summoned Jasper, me and John Boardman to a meeting in the Press. ‘With all these classical scholars lying around we should be able to produce a book for the general reader on the Classics,’ he said. ‘I want you three to edit it.’ How had he chosen us: both Jasper and I were pretty junior, and Boardman was a Reader but not yet the professor? We looked at each other askance, but no one could deny the need. John Cordy, the Classics editor, said, ‘The usual fee for an editor is 2½%. Oh dear, I can’t divide that between three.’ ‘Make it three,’ Boardman replied instantly, and we were hooked.

So we set to work from 1981 to 1986 to produce the Oxford History of the Classical World (1986). We cornered our colleagues, rewrote their chapters and negotiated a reasonable contract for them. We worked in perfect harmony, we chose authors mostly young and in tune with the latest developments. The final result amazed us. The Press did us well in pictures and layout, and the book to our astonishment became the top best-seller in the OUP list for several years, until Denniston actually presented each of us with a red leather gold-tooled specially bound and boxed copy. The book has continued in print for 54 years, selling 77,000 in its first three years, and has so far sold an additional total of 58,000 in its e-book and paperback editions. At least three times the Press has contemplated replacing it, but no new editors could be found, and the old ones demanded expensive changes. It has been the standard work for a generation of general readers and college students alike:

will it ever be replaced, translated as it is into Spanish, Italian, Greek, Hungarian and Chinese?

Others will speak of his academic work, but I will end by reflecting on what unifies his influence as a teacher and a scholar. To him both activities were the same and the centre of his life. He had never finished a doctorate (it was to be in Hellenistic literature, completing the work of Pfeiffer on Callimachus) and after his appointment to a tutorial fellowship in 1963 for many years he wrote nothing, until some of us began to wonder whether he would ever produce the great work of which we knew he was capable. Then appeared his first and most heartfelt book, Homer on Life and Death (1980). It was dedicated to the memory of his younger brother Geoffrey, who had died as an undergraduate in 1962: we finally understood the grief that lay behind his inhibitions. This book is a profoundly literary work, aware of but untouched by the trendy technical scholarship of the time. Despite his mastery of the techniques of philology, he was an artist, not a technician. ‘Epic song can arise only out of suffering and sorrow.’ (Homer, The Odyssey, p. 8).

And this is surely the secret of Jasper’s influence as a teacher and a scholar. Late in his life Rosalind Thomas (Professor of Greek History, Dyson-Macgregor Fellow, Jowett Lecturer and Tutor in Ancient History) was talking to him about how as an undergraduate she and everyone else loved his lectures on Homer, which filled Balliol Hall. And he replied, ‘Well, you see, I realised that no one was interested in talking about the literature.’ He was a true literary scholar, perhaps the most important in classical literature of his generation, and that is what made him such a brilliant communicator in tutorials and in life. For it was the unity behind his writing and his teaching.

Professor Gregory Hutchinson (1975)

Regius Professor of Greek, University of Oxford

I’ve been asked to talk about Jasper’s scholarship. Oswyn has already said something on Jasper’s book on Homer, and Emily is going to say more about Jasper and Homer. So what I will do is put side by side his two – from a scholarly point of view – most important books: the book on Homer on Life and Death and Latin Poets and Roman Life.

I first encountered Jasper’s scholarship in early December 1974. That’s to say, almost 50 years ago. I was being interviewed at the time. Four rather scary people, including Oswyn, filled the room. But a particularly large proportion of it seemed to be filled by this figure who was at least a hero and probably a god. He discoursed on Homer in the most entrancing way. I hadn’t at all come across somebody treating Homer in such an imaginative and sensitive fashion.

Among the things on Homer that I had read was Lord’s book The Singer of Tales, which I was much taken with. So eager was I that I enquired: ‘Do you think that the things that you are saying are compatible with the theory that Homer is oral poetry?’ There was a pause. The god rejoined: ‘I think you will find, Mr Hutchinson, that we are the ones asking the questions. But since you ask—’, and then he gave a quick answer. It was so nicely done. Formidable, but friendly. The god was not angered, but amused.

Flying forward to the present, moderately busy bee as one is, when one alights on a page of Jasper, one can’t help but linger on the bright flowers. Jasper’s works, as Oswyn was intimating, come nearer to being works of literature than most of what we ordinary Classicists produce. This is partly because of the beautiful shaping of every sentence and every paragraph, and partly because of the immense quantity of memorable particulars in which the reader is plunged – scenes of death, scenes of bathing and drinking.

I think that the worlds that the two books create for the reader are made up in a very different way. The world of Homer on Life and Death is essentially a projection of the world of The Iliad, and to a lesser extent The Odyssey, as Jasper sees it. And he conceives of those poems not so

much as works that grow and alter as they go along, but rather a kind of universe made up of countless particulars which form into patterns and together convey a vision of humans in the face of death and the divine. The book on Latin poetry forms its world in a very different way. (‘Very different’ sounds rather Jasperian, I fear.) In that book, there are far more poems. There are considerably more poets, and quite a lot of types of poetry. And furthermore and absolutely essential, there is the material culture, the social behaviour, and the politics into which the book, in such an original way, embeds the poetry.

Not only are the worlds of the poems different; the style is different too. The book on Homer is written in quite simple language, often just conveying the dignity and nobility of Homeric language. There are occasional funny bits – I will not mention mashed potato – but on the whole, it’s a grave and moving book. The book on Latin poets has a very different style. It’s much more amusing and diverse. The vocabulary is much larger. It employs lots of words that I wouldn’t usually use myself – words like ‘louche’ and ‘the metaphorical feline’. The author, Jasper, is really enjoying himself, enjoying the poets who are enjoying themselves, for all their extravagant gestures of amorous despair.

The structure is interesting to compare. The book on Homer forms a kind of hierarchical ascent. It starts with things like Andromache’s headdress, and proceeds to people, and finally, to gods. The Odyssey makes its main appearance early in the book, and by the end of the book, we are entirely focused on The Iliad. And that too, from Jasper’s perspective, is a rise.

The book on Latin poets, in a way, is comparable. Its main focus are a sort of gang of poets: Horus, Propertius, Ovid, Tiberius, Catullus. These are all poets whom the author shrewdly appreciates in a rather man-of-the-world way. And he has great fun with them. But the antepenultimate and the penultimate chapter turn to Virgil. Jasper feels that Virgil is a more profound writer than the rest. The antepenultimate chapter is on the Georgics – bees again. And the penultimate chapter is on The Aeneid. So there’s a kind of ascent there. But in the last chapter, we go back to the slightly disreputable gang and the relation between the gang and Roman tragedy and comedy. So that we end the

book completely confused about the relation between what are called literature and life, and it’s the whole aim of the book to confuse you.

The books obviously have very different approaches to the relation between poetry and its context. This isn’t just because we know more about the first century BC than about the eighth century BC. In the book on Homer, when most of the time that Jasper brings in comparative material, it’s to show that Homer rises above this material in solitary uniqueness, whether the comparative material is Germanic epic, Assyrian documents, the epics of Homer’s own time. So the general rhetoric is to separate Homer from everything else.

And one can see that it’s not just a matter of a difference of historical period, when one looks at Jasper’s work on tragedy. There, he doesn’t make tragedy timeless, but he wants to avoid tying the tragedy too closely to a particular polis and its politics.

These books have lasted. Indeed, there are signs that the Roman book is coming to be freshly appreciated. It’s so remarkable that somebody should write these two books – so important and in such entirely different fields.

One of the things that makes these books so memorable an experience and which has caused them to last is that into them, Jasper puts so much of himself.

Professor Emily Wilson (1990)

Professor of Classical Studies, University of Pennsylvania

For my whole life, I’ve been living in Griffin hand-me-downs. My mother, Katherine Duncan-Jones, was a colleague and friend of Miriam Griffin at Somerville. Jasper and Miriam’s three daughters were a little older than my sister Bee and me, and they generously passed their wardrobes down to us – clothes that were far more exuberant than anything my own parents would have been willing to buy, even if they could have afforded such glamour. I fondly remember many marvellous garments with sparkly gold buttons, tassels and fringes. My favourite Griffin acquisition was a pair of bright orange corduroy flared pants, an iconic product of 1970s fashion that I owed entirely to the kindness of Griffins.

But once the sad day came when the orange pants no longer fitted me, I received new and even better gifts from the Griffin family that have remained with me ever since, in the form of Jasper’s magnificent work on Homer, as well as Miriam’s on Seneca. I first read Homer on Life and Death (1980) in high school, and it informed my decision to come to Balliol to learn from the great man himself. Jasper wrote two other books on Homer – as well as numerous encyclopaedia entries and chapters in collected volumes, an excellent article on Homeric speeches, and a wonderful commentary on Book 9 of The Iliad, the book which he rightly saw as central for the whole poem. All Jasper’s Homeric writings are slim and essayistic, not doorstopper monographs in the modern academic style. But this work together adds up to an extraordinarily effective intervention in the field of Homeric studies.

Jasper’s Homeric writing emphasises that The Iliad and The Odyssey are magnificent works of literature, with something profound to say about the human condition – and he argued that these qualities were underestimated or understated in much of 20th-century Anglophone Homeric scholarship. In a poignant review of Colin Macleod’s commentary on Book 24 of The Iliad Jasper praises Macleod’s presentation of The Iliad as a tragic poem that bears comparison with Sophocles, Dante and

Shakespeare: ‘Such language and such thoughts come like rain after long drought to anyone who has sometimes felt, looking at the scholarship of the last two generations, that the analysts chastised Homer with whips, and the oralists chastised him with scorpions, and the poems somehow emerged as less magnificent and less profound than he had initially thought them to be.’ Jasper himself was committed to showing us that Homer was indeed just as magnificent and profound as we had ever dreamed.

As we might expect from someone who was himself an orator, Jasper was particularly good on the power of Homeric speech. By careful combing and cataloguing of particular tropes, he showed that it is not subjective or anachronistic to find, for example, sharp distinctions between the style of one speaker and another, or between the mood and tone of The Iliad and The Odyssey, or to see psychological nuance and deep emotional impact in things left unsaid. But the analysis was never rhetorical in a dry sense – it was not about compiling a taxonomy for no particular reason. Jasper managed to convey the sense that Homer, and Literature in general, really are matters of life and death. In a very famous line of Book 9, Achilles’ old tutor, Phoenix, explains that he taught his student to be μύθων

(an artful speaker and a man of action) – a line that may seem paradoxical or oxymoronic, unless we understand how closely Homeric speech and action intertwine. Jasper’s Homer is about poetics, aesthetics and rhetoric, the arts of speech, but also about actions and experiences, life, death, magic and the gods.

His range of interests can be indicated by the topics he wrote about for The Homeric Encyclopedia, which include Pathos, the Embassy, the Nekyuia, Characterisation, The Odyssey, Paris, Helen and Death. Jasper drew sharp distinctions between the heroic vision of The Iliad and the more sentimental mood of The Odyssey – which he loved just as much. He was particularly good on Homeric pathos and emotional effects. As we might expect from a man famous for his waistcoats, he was attuned to the nuanced meanings of clothes and objects and proto theatrical scenes in the Homeric poems – showing, for instance, how Agamemnon’s weak grasp of political power is signified by his sceptre,

or what a world of grief and loss is revealed when Andromache pulls off her headdress.

There’s a common stereotype, probably with truth in it, that naive young students are often eager to find big life lessons in the great works of literature – and their stuffy old professors, people like me and many of you, crush their dreams with historicism, marching them through technical scholarship that theorises all the life out of it. Jasper’s work on Homer went in exactly the opposite direction. As he notes at the start of Homer on Life and Death, the book was prompted by seeing his students so caught up in scholarly debates about oral composition that they weren’t paying enough attention to the emotions, the poetry and the power of these great works. Jasper was certainly not a slouch about reading widely in scholarship, including scholarship he disagreed with or disliked. In his commentary on Iliad 9, for example, he devotes a significant amount of time to the notorious problem of the duals used for more than two ambassadors – while also insisting that this is not the most important element of the text. Jasper often presented questions of composition as a distraction from the more central issues of the poems’ artistry, emotional effects and meaning.

Jasper was open-minded about where truths and insights about Homer might be found, even in sources that had been dismissed or under-estimated by others. His insights often found support in ancient scholia; contemporary Homeric studies are only just catching up with the idea that these ancient testimonia have a great deal more to teach us than we have yet understood. He drew heavily on older German Homeric scholarship, where an emphasis on formal qualities of Homeric poetics was in some ways more in tune with his approach than the presumptions of American oralists. Jasper constantly compares Homer to other literary traditions – Near Eastern literature, the Hebrew Bible, the Irish epics, and later epic poetry, such as Dante or Milton or Beowulf – but these comparisons are frequently made without any claim of a historical relationship between the texts. Rather, Jasper assumed that all great literature has something profound to teach us about humanity, and that close and sympathetic reading of Homer next to other literary traditions can lead us to a much more precise

understanding of the special qualities of The Iliad and The Odyssey. On his reading, these poems have an unusually sophisticated concept of heroism and kleos as dependent on death – contrasting with the simpler model of heroism in Beowulf. Homeric humans and gods are constantly communicating with one another, and the supernatural runs through the material world; and yet, especially in The Iliad, mortality remains the central tragic fact of human life. Moreover, speech marks the gaps between people as well as their communication; even the greatest moments of connection – as between Priam and Achilles at the end of The Iliad – are only temporary and partial. A related essential quality of Homer, in Griffin’s account, is the lack of moralising, or explicit judgement: the poet lets the characters speak for themselves. Jasper was always aware of the power of pauses, gaps and silence in speech – perhaps marked only by a resonant sniff. Both silence and speech in Homer are important, for him, because they reveal human psychology and truths about human limitations and human courage that are felt all the more profoundly for not being drummed into us. ‘We are meant to judge, but not be bullied into judgment by the poet; his people, more human than the muse, help us do it.’ Despite Jasper’s forthrightness of manner, despite the waistcoats and the gold buttons, he had deep understanding of the emotional power of understatement, absence and subtlety in Homer.

I’m going to wrap up by reading a passage from Book 9 of The Iliad, in my translation. I’ve thought of Jasper often over the past dozen years while working on my translations of the Homeric poems, and I hope they don’t displease his shade in the land of the dead. I’ll read from Book 9 because Jasper wrote so well about this particular book, and because this is the scene in Homer that is closest to an Oxford tutorial scenario. The enraged, hot-headed Achilles has quarrelled with Agamemnon, and refuses to rejoin the Greek war effort – enabling the Trojans, led by Hector, to advance ever closer to the Greek fleet and camp. So Odysseus, Ajax, and Achilles’ old tutor, Phoenix, visit him in his tent, and each in turn begs him to give up his anger and come back to the community. Poor old Phoenix does his best with an adamantly unteachable student. Jasper, in his commentary, insists that the poem

itself succeeds in teaching us something, even if Phoenix does not: the episode shows us, without ever spelling it out, both ‘the bad consequences of the passions’ and how far even the greatest of mortals is from being a god. I’ll read an abridged bit of Achilles’ great speech of rage – which I hope may also help lead us into Camilla’s speech about Jasper as a tutor, who, like Phoenix, cared about his students, advocated for moderation and compromise between extremes, and loved to teach by anecdotes.

The speech was followed by a reading from Homer, The Iliad, translated by Emily Wilson (W.W. Norton & Co., to be published in September 2023): see www.emilyrcwilson.com/the-iliad-sept-2023.

Camilla Bingham KC (1988)

In the beginning, tutorials with Jasper were intimidating. The exhaustion didn’t help. You’d embark on the pilgrimage to Staircase XVIII slightly shaky from all the caffeine and chocolate consumed into the early hours as you continued the week’s increasingly fraught and usually fruitless search for something original or insightful to offer up to the great man. The essay title will have been hideously broad and as often as not only tangentially relevant to the Mods or Greats syllabus. ‘The depiction of love in Renaissance art’ is a week that sticks in my mind. ‘The influence of the Epic of Gilgamesh on Western literature’ was another of his favourites. So first-year tutorials with Jasper sometimes felt like an exercise in damage limitation. The modest goal was to emerge from Staircase XVIII not looking and feeling utterly foolish.

Jasper was of course enormously kind-hearted and his expectations of us were well managed. In the main that meant that he was gentle and long-suffering with his students. But his approach to the different factions among them owed something to the Roman mission. In Anchises’ phrase, Jasper would spare the downtrodden, but he sure knew how to war down the arrogant, there being no shortage of those among Balliol undergrads.

Jasper was a master of the quiet put-down. Adam Brown (1987) recalls voicing a degree of understandable satisfaction that he’d been awarded a prestigious First Craven Scholarship. Jasper moved swiftly to put that into perspective: sniff ‘We didn’t really think we could give you the Ireland, Adam. In your Latin prose you made virtus masculine.’

When a first-year student enthused with slightly too much swagger about his gap-year travels in Italy, Jasper was quick to shut him up: sniff ‘You don’t get any points for liking Venice.’

The late 1980s Mods A syllabus required us to read 24 books of Homer in the original. Fishing for approbation, one eager student announced that he’d read all of The Iliad, plus 12 books of The Odyssey. Jasper’s response? ‘So, when they say to you “What did you do at Oxford?” you’re going to reply, ‘I read half of The Odyssey.’

These were some of his direct put-downs. But as often as not he’d do it so subtly that it would take time for the recipient to digest quite what had happened. Henry King (1988) says: ‘I well remember being rather chuffed when he described one of my first-year essays as “elegant”. It was only when I came to understand Jasper better that I realised that the epithet “elegant” was Jasper’s code for “devoid of any serious analysis”.’

Ben Morison (1988) recalls delivering an essay on Callimachus which, for reasons unconnected with the title or subject matter, erred dramatically on the side of concision. As Ben finished reading page one, and it became apparent that there was no page two, Jasper looked up, eyebrows raised allusively, and said, ‘Sehr knapp, as the Germans would say,’ and made no further reference to the essay. The balance of the tutorial passed with Ben and his tutorial partners all wondering what it was to be ‘knapp’, but strongly suspecting that it wasn’t something unambiguously good.

In truth brevity was never a crime on Jasper’s statute book, but prolixity was strongly discouraged. Simon Pulleyn (1986) recalls a tutorial in which our dear mutual friend Chris Borg (1986) had produced very many pages of drivel on – something. Probably the Epic of Gilgamesh. After Chris had been droning on for more than 10 minutes, Jasper reached over and felt between finger and thumb the ominous sheaf of papers remaining in Chris’s hand. ‘Is there very much more of this, Chris?’

But if the brash, the bold and the verbose sometimes emerged from Staircase XVIII bruised, the diffident members of tutorial groups received constant encouragement and praise. Confronted with shy students, Jasper would proclaim it his mission to turn them into Balliol Men. And with effect from the 1980s, that inevitably included the women. Rebecca Armstrong (1983) fondly recalls how she received regular, earnest tips from Jasper on how she might transform herself into a Balliol Man. As she puts it, ‘It was a moment of some pride all round when Jasper pronounced the project a success.’

Jasper cared deeply for his students and their welfare. In the second year of his degree, a student found himself hospitalised at the John Radcliffe for an operation. It was typical of Jasper that in no time at

all, he was at Matthew’s bedside wielding a copy of the TLS. It was his practice to write to each of his students as they graduated. Not a generic email hewn from a template on his computer. A conspicuously personal letter would arrive via the Royal Mail in his unmistakeable hand, offering tailored wisdom and warmth as we dispersed into the big wide world. When he said that he wanted us to visit, he meant it.

Hospitality loomed as large in his life as it did in the literature that he so loved. Masses of students have fond memories of being entertained at the Griffins’ home in Oxford, a true recreation of a certain dwelling in Mycenae, with Jasper cast in the mould of Menelaus and Miriam costarring in the role of Helen.

David Thomas (1996) recalls that when he and some other undergrads excelled in a University Classics competition, Jasper lost no time in convening a party in his study replete with a vast salmon on a silver platter. As Delphine Strauss (1996) recalls, dinners in the OCR presided over by Jasper were always true feasts, with Jasper insisting on the full gamut of savoury and sweet courses so as to glory in tradition – and, I rather suspect, not just to glory in tradition.

On a more modest scale, no Classics student could forget those vile thimbles of sherry which were the fate of all students who found themselves with him in the slot before lunch or the slot before supper. To this day, a whiff of Tio Pepe takes me right back to Staircase XVIII. The Buttery was somewhere that he also entertained us regularly. Mostly the tipple on offer there was beer served in silver tankards whose rich history Jasper the Argentarius loved to relate. But on the day that Margaret Thatcher announced her resignation, he treated all of us to champagne.

He wasn’t one of those dons you’d see just once a week. He was in every corner of the College. Albeit slightly outside his comfort zone, it wasn’t unknown for him to be spotted through the thick smoke of the Lindsay Bar playing a game of table football. Squarely within his comfort zone, he was a dependable contributor at meetings of the Arnold & Brackenbury Society, where he was splendidly irreverent about his colleagues. His Saturnalian mode was one that, as students, we all adored.

In my day there was a rather distinguished English literature don at Balliol called Carl Schmidt (Emeritus Fellow). For Jasper, the potential for some mischief with rhyme was irresistible: ‘It’s well known’, he’d declare with a twinkle in his eye, ‘that there is no word in the English language that rhymes with Schmidt.’

Of Oliver Taplin (Emeritus Fellow, Magdalen College): ‘If you’re thinking of doing the tragedy special subject for Mods, you really must go to Taplin’s lectures on the Philoctetes: only he knows why it’s such a great play.’

When it comes to command of poetry of all periods and all traditions, ChatGPT will never be a match for Jasper. Whatever the occasion, whatever the emotion, Jasper had a stanza of poetry that captured it, and he’d delight in fashioning an adaptation on the spot with immaculate metre and rhyme. Akhil Patel (1996) remembers dressing for Greats Dinner in a T-shirt bearing the slogan ‘Jasper Rules’ across the front. Quick as a flash Jasper greeted him like this: ‘What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed, far less on such a fine and manly breast.’

Not just poetry but quotations of all sorts punctuated Jasper’s speech and his teaching, and he would feign despair if we couldn’t name the provenance. One of his guilty pleasures was to bark out the front end of a quotation, and then pause to allow us students to complete it. Biblical and mainstream quotes we could sometimes field but there was a lot of proper recherché stuff which would have stumped the most literate of the literati and which left us shaking our heads. ‘O tempora! O mores!’ he would exclaim in purported anguish. ‘Has no one committed to memory’ – say – ‘the quatrains of Omar Khayyam?’

Jasper’s enthusiasm for his subject was hugely infectious. He saw it as self-evident that anyone given the opportunity to study The Oresteia in the original should grasp it with both hands. When one of his students gently queried whether it really made sense to choose the Aeschylus Greats option, given the challenge of the Greek and the length and complexity of the trilogy as a whole, Jasper was plain incredulous. ‘Young man,’ he sniffed. ‘It’s the Mount Everest of our studies. One day you’ll be standing in a boardroom looking at your fellow directors,

and you’ll be able to think to yourself that no one else here has read the Agamemnon in its original.’ He rested his case. In a similar vein, Nick Delfas (1990) recalls making a bid to avoid the study of Pindar, so as to free up time for rowing and time-wasting. Jasper quashed it in a sentence which Nick himself now inflicts on his own children: ‘If you don’t do difficult things when you’re young, you never will do them.’

Jasper had clear convictions on many topics. One of them, predictably, was that there was no finer degree than Greats. Felix Martin (1992) recalls having the temerity to visit Jasper after Mods to raise the possibility of swapping from Classics to PPE. Felix was nervous, obviously, but he’d prepared a speech which he felt captured the best of Demosthenes and Cicero. When the direction of Felix’s travel became clear, Jasper cut him off with a most emphatic of Griffin sniffs. ‘Felix, did you ever hear a butterfly say that it wanted to become a caterpillar? See you next week.’

Fiona Mylchreest (1988) was the very first of Jasper’s students to follow the combined Classics and English course. She writes this: ‘He humphed about the whole idea of diluting Greats. He did a great humph. But he loved that course. It was conceived for him. Who else had read Homer and Virgil and Spenser and Milton and Beowulf and everything in between in the original, and with such sensitivity? Who had a comparable perspective on tragedy? What a privilege it was.’

As a lecturer, his timing and his sense of ceremony were both superb. Harry Matovu (1981) remembers a lecture series he ran in Balliol Hall shortly after the publication of Homer on Life and Death. Hall was packed, as you’d expect. In Harry’s words, ‘At 11.05 the door opened and this tall, imposing figure swept up the centre of the Hall wearing a mortarboard, impossible tie and with black gown billowing behind him. The room fell silent and one had the sense that, as he noticed this, he slowed his gait down to the pace of a coronation. For the hour that followed he held the room in the palm of his hand. Everyone sat or stood in rapt attention as Jasper began to unveil the grandeur and the mystery of The Iliad. Here was subject matter fitting for one of the greatest teachers I have known, a true Renaissance man, who combined a deep artistic sensibility with a genius for exposition, and who had an

oratorical brilliance which married scintillating wit with profundity of thought. What a showman, what an artist, what a teacher.’

So true. The tributes that have poured into my email inbox from Jasper’s students in recent weeks are expressed in superlatives without hyperbole, and in heartfelt and emotional terms. For flavour, these are just a handful: ‘I am irrevocably changed as a result of him.’ ‘More than anyone else, he’s influenced my views on the universality of the human experience.’ ‘I worshipped him.’ ‘Whenever I read a perfect sentence, I think: that’s pure Jasper.’ ‘Jasper gave me the ability to understand humanity.’ ‘I hear Jasper often in my head.’ ‘Jasper opened the door not just of Homer, but of all the greatest achievements of Western art that followed, from the Sistine Chapel to the aching solos of Miles Davis, and so much more.’

In the beginning, tutorials with Jasper were intimidating. In the end, tutorials with Jasper were something I’d look forward to all week. I’d take the walk to Staircase XVIII with a spring in my step. Caffeine and chocolate were still in play, but I knew that every moment spent with him was a privilege.

So now, perhaps, a fine stentorian voice is ringing out somewhere up on the peaks of Mount Olympus. A large, kindly, bespectacled man sporting a gaudy waistcoat and a fob watch is up there holding court and one of his favourite texts. Hephaestus is on hand, and there is a strong whiff of dry sherry in the air. Periodically there can be heard a variety of eloquent sniffs. If he’s watching us now, he’s probably loving the ritual, and his only regret is likely to be that so very few of the ladies are wearing hats.

HE Philip McDonagh (1970)

I am deeply honoured by the invitation to speak this afternoon in the presence of Jasper’s daughters Julia, Miranda, and Tamara and so many of Jasper’s friends. In these few words I will try to convey, first, what Jasper’s kindness meant to me as an Irish person at Balliol in the early years of the Troubles. Secondly, I will describe the strength I drew in later decades from my continuing friendship with Jasper and Miriam. Aristotle has a word spoudogeloios. This was Jasper: ‘serious-about-truthand-having-the-capacity-for-laughter’. In The Great Gatsby, the narrator states about his father, ‘we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way.’ ‘Communicative in a reserved way’ is another phrase that describes Jasper well.

I travelled to Balliol for interview in December 1969. My flight from Dublin to Heathrow was diverted to Birmingham. In Birmingham, I accepted the airline’s offer of a coach ride to Heathrow. There I took a taxi to my uncle’s house in London. My uncle drove me to Paddington station. We phoned ahead to Balliol to explain that I was somewhat delayed. At the interview the following morning – an open fire: Robert Ogilvie (1950, Fellow and Tutor in Classics 1957–1970), Russell Meiggs (Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History 1939–1970), and Jasper – the first question I was asked was this: ‘Mr McDonagh, you had certain vicissitudes in your transport arrangements. Do you know where Oxford is?’

I may not have known where Oxford is but I did know what Oxford is. No one from my school in Dublin had ever gone to Oxford or Cambridge. When our Classics teacher, John Wilson, suggested applying, it was through a belief in education for its own sake. Without hesitation, Mr Wilson nominated Balliol as the college to put down first on my list. My mother’s father had been President of the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in the fateful year of 1916. My father was a civil servant working in the sphere of Anglo–Irish relations. Our parents borrowed money for me to come to Balliol. This was a considerable act of faith, worthy of Balliol’s decision to offer me a place. Jasper, as my tutor over my first five terms, lived up to our family’s trust. It was natural for my brother Bobby McDonagh (1972) to apply to Balliol in 1971.

Of course, Jasper, Oswyn, Tony, and Oliver were a team:

The goodliest fellowship of famous knights

Whereof this world holds record.

Tony and his wife Nancy, Oswyn and his wife Penny, and Linda Lyne are here today. So is Mary Keen. Maurice was another important friend. Trespassing slightly on the territory of the Classics tutors, he quizzed me on whether the book Aristotle’s Man might not be a portrait of the great philosopher’s butler.

There is time to offer only a few glimpses of Jasper in my undergraduate years and the years immediately following. I want to convey something of his availability, his discreet concern for our welfare, his humour, and those epiphanies of deeply felt sympathy. During our first Long Vacation, Jasper found time to exchange letters with me on the subject of Latin verse composition. There was a conversation in the Buttery about Desdemona. Jasper insisted that Shakespeare was very different from his contemporaries in setting plays in Continental Europe and presenting women of integrity such as Desdemona, Juliet, and Hermione. Jasper spoke once of the different responses he noticed in different students to their Catholic upbringing. He was properly in two minds about my engagement in JCR and Union politics. The day after I lost my JCR position, we recited Tennyson together during a chance meeting in the Lodge:

I perish by this people which I made . . .

Later, Jasper made the not unwelcome joke that I was a ‘monarch without a throne’. In my fourth year he asked me where I was now staying. This was potentially a long story, as I had moved during the term from the home of Lidia Pasternak Slater to St Benet’s Hall. I began, ‘My landlady was going to be Boris Pasternak’s sister . . .’ at which Jasper cut in and asked, ‘What happened? Did she fail the medical?’

I used to attempt a rendition in the style of Peter O’Sullevan of Santa Claus winning the Derby. Jasper wrote to me saying that my achievement in Greats was worthy of one of my own racing commentaries. It will be remembered that Santa Claus came from another county to get up close home.

The Jasper who was ‘serious-about-truth’ adverted to the challenge of having a family and at the same time pursuing teaching, research, and College administration. As he spoke of children growing up, he seemed to mean what Patrick Kavanagh means in his poem about family memory:

We will be choked with the grief of things growing . . .

At Balliol, classical studies were a door to friendship and a window on the world’s promise – even if, as my Dad said, the purpose of Classics was to make us happy without the money we weren’t going to earn anyway. I’m sure my near-contemporary Tom Brown (1969), from the unionist tradition in Northern Ireland, received the same consideration from Jasper as Bobby and me.

In the 1990s I was posted to London by the Department of Foreign Affairs to work on the peace process. It would take a very long speech to do justice to the contribution of Balliol to peace in Ireland from the time of Jowett (Master 1870–1893) to the present – including of course the contribution of our Chancellor Lord Patten (1962 and Honorary Fellow), the writings of Tony Kenny, and the role of Maurice and Mary Keen in the British–Irish Association.

In the 1990s, Republican prisoners were an important part of the peace process. Some members of the then cabinet were opposed to gestures which they saw as politically motivated concessions. In the summer of 1995, having visited the prisons, I shared our dilemma with Jasper. Jasper, as if without thinking, recalled at once that in the 1964 US Presidential election, Barry Goldwater had a slogan, ‘In your heart you know he’s right.’ But, said Jasper, the Democrats framed a counterslogan, ‘In your guts, you know he’s nuts.’ ‘In your heart, you know they’re right’ or ‘In your guts, you know they’re nuts’: over the years I have often used this distinction as a tool of political discernment.

‘The stranger,’ said Jasper, ‘could be a god in disguise.’ He was speaking at High Table about hospitality in Greek literature. Miriam said gently that one shouldn’t assume that Balliol’s guests want to talk about Classics – to which Jasper responded, ‘But Philip likes this.’ Jasper was right. My discussions with Jasper and Miriam over many years mattered

to me very much. Following the war in Iraq, I wrote a paper, impossible to publish at the time, on the origins of ‘just war’ thinking. I consulted Jasper and John Hume. My argument was that Cicero’s goal in tracing some lineaments of ‘just war’ was merely to ‘soften the misery of history’ – Jasper’s translation of rei tristitiam mitigare. I recall Miriam decisively quoting Cicero’s two-word commentary on the destruction of Corinth: nollem Corinthum; and Jasper’s almost off-hand comment, ‘The Romans thought the Carthaginians were a cruel people.’ When I became interested in the presence of Jewish and Christian influences in first-century Rome, Jasper wrote to me in Moscow with a reading list drawing on Miriam’s work among others. In 2016, Jasper and Miriam helped give me the confidence to deliver a paper in Princeton on Greek and Roman conceptions of peace.

Jasper’s friendship helped me in my work as a diplomat and pointed towards the work I’m trying to do now on values in international relations. To discuss the basic questions of human existence, it seems to me that we need to return to the roots of our culture to grasp fifthcentury ideas about disintegration and regeneration in politics, and the importance of reverence, or whatever is the opposite of hubris, as a precursor to day-to-day politics. The Christian church fathers and 18thcentury Enlightenment thinkers would benefit from tutorials with Jasper and Miriam on classical sources that appear to have been overlooked. They should speak to Oswyn about the 18th-century Irish Huguenot ancient historian John Gast, whose vision was so different to Gibbon’s or Mommsen’s; or to Tony about language as a lens through which to understand human origins and human society. Our tutors were serious about teaching and learning – about communicating something above and beyond a skill, above and beyond knowledge and proficiency; they were leading us, in fact, towards something completely different . . . among other things, towards a world in which we remain capable of understanding two sides to an argument.

Some of my best conversations with Jasper and Miriam occurred against the background of their respective illnesses; the silver bow of Apollo had already found its mark. Jasper dreamt of doing more work on the Suppliants of Euripides. We discussed shepherds – why

do shepherds know more than ploughmen or cowherds, and why do they come to the crib in Bethlehem? At the commemorative event for Miriam in Somerville, I said to Jasper, ‘It was profound and moving.’ Jasper replied, ‘You and I are only moved by what is profound.’

In November 2019, I was visiting Tony and Nancy. Tony mentioned that Jasper was in the last days of his life, in the Radcliffe. We walked over to see him. It was almost fifty years to the day since my interview for a place at Balliol. I found myself reciting Gerard Manley Hopkins (1863):

How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years . . .

It crossed my mind that Jasper would know if the poem’s first line, ‘Felix Randal the farrier, O is he dead then?’ is not only English colloquial speech, but also an echo of Horace: ‘Ergo Quintilium perpetuus sopor/urget . . .’

Instead of anything like this, I said: ‘Jasper, thou art cabined, cribbed, confined.’ As Tony wrote later in the College Record, ‘Jasper, in a muffled voice, capped the quotation.’

Jasper’s parents were civil servants who worked in the Post Office. Perhaps Jasper, like me, had come a long way to Balliol. In Tagore’s play about a peaceful death, the dying child, Amal, keeps thinking of a post office:

Has the King sent me a letter to the Post Office? Is it on that road winding through the trees which you can follow to the end of the forest when the sky is quite clear after rain? Fakir, do you know the King who has this Post Office? . . . I shall say, ‘Make me your postman, that I may go about, lantern in hand, delivering your letters from door to door . . .’

According to Yeats, the deliverance won by the dying child rose before Tagore’s imagination when once in the early dawn he heard someone singing an old village song: ‘Ferryman, take me to the other shore of the river.’

Jasper understood how lives are lived with a longing for the other shore – ripae ulterioris amore – and was never content with untruth in any form. Acts of creative, painstaking, benign, and fruitful engagement

with us his students were his aēdones, his nightingales: the nightingales that disprove the complete dark . . .

But let me end not with Callimachus, but with William Butler Yeats, and not with Jasper only but with Jasper, Oswyn, Tony, Oliver, and Maurice:

Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, And say my glory was I had such friends.

Christopher Taylor (1958): 'Memories of Jasper'

Jasper came up to Balliol in 1956 to read Lit. Hum., setting out on a glittering career of mopping up virtually all the classical prizes. I came up from Edinburgh University in 1958, having bypassed Mods in virtue of my senior status, and joined the third year to read Greats, in the same year as Jasper.

Though we must have met at the preliminary meetings with our tutors, I have no clear memory of him till a few days into term. Everything was still very strange to me, and I feared that I might be in the wrong place. But when, after a lecture, two of the Balliol contingent invited me for a drink, I instantly knew that it was going to be all right. One was Roger Tomkys (1956), the other a big man with ginger hair, a jolly rosy face and a cheerful expression. This impression of cheerful friendliness remained central to my view of Jasper throughout, and always will.

Those who remember the Balliol of that period will, I think, acknowledge that there was a sharp distinction between ‘hearties’ or ‘bloods’ on the one hand and ‘grey men’ on the other. The former were mainly products of the better-known public schools, inclined to a certain boisterousness in their behaviour, though some were very studious as well. They had their own drinking club, the Annandale Society (‘the Anna’), and their own debating society, the Arnold and Brackenbury Society (‘the A and B’). The grey men were by contrast, well, grey, i.e. mainly middle class, mostly state educated, serious in their attitude to work and to life generally, and altogether decorous. It was one of Jasper’s most endearing characteristics that he fitted without affectation into both camps. I don’t know whether he was in the Anna, but he was prominent in the A and B, to the extent of inviting me, one of the greyest of the grey, as his guest to one meeting. There was no follow-up, since I was obviously a fish out of my depth, but it was typical of Jasper’s kindness to think that I should be given the opportunity. He was more successful with the Leonardo Society, a

high-minded paper-reading society embracing both hearties and greys, to which he introduced me to my great benefit.

Jasper was thus very kind to me in our first two terms, but it was not until the Easter vac. that I came to know him really well, on a trip to Greece made by a group comprising Roger Tomkys, Miriam (then in effect Jasper’s fiancée, though this was not yet public knowledge), Jasper and myself. Over many miles as our talk ranged widely I noticed that Jasper and I tended to take diametrically opposed views especially on matters of religion, I dogmatically conventional, he free-thinking. As I took such matters pretty seriously, I was surprised to find that despite the settled opposition of views between us I liked him more the longer the trip went on. I was responding to his sheer charm, to his lightness of touch, his grace of expression and above all to the fact that he never lost his temper or sulked.

The Easter vac. of our next, final, year was significant too, in that we were both involved in a car crash which we were lucky to survive unscathed. We were being driven to Anglesey to a reading party for Greats and PPE finalists, organised by our philosophy tutor Dick Hare (1937 and Fellow 1947–1966). The driver was one of the PPE men, later a distinguished economist. Unfortunately both the car and the driver proved unreliable. After a series of mishaps and breakdowns we were driving late in the evening in the vicinity of Snowdon. I had dropped off, to be woken by the violent swerve of the car, and in the beam of the headlights caught a glimpse of a wire fence straight in front of us. As we crashed through it I was hurled violently about, bracing myself for the final impact which, astonishingly, never came. I think that the car may have overturned and perhaps righted itself. My first thought was that we had to get out before it caught fire, but the first words which I spoke were ‘Are you all right, Jasper?’ We all were; the three of us stepped out without a scratch. After that I don’t remember anyone saying much. When we made the last of many phone calls to Dick to tell him that we were not coming at all that night his response was ‘Might have been a lot of talent lost there.’ That was very true; all seven of the reading party got firsts.

Jasper’s life was scarred by tragedy early, when his younger brother Geoffrey (Queen’s, 1958), to whom he was very close, died of cancer while still an undergraduate, when Jasper was just beginning his Fellowship. In my view this left him with a profound pessimism which underlay the jollity. One of his major works, Homer on Life and Death, is dedicated to Geoffrey in a beautiful epigraph from Homer: Apollo of the silver bow struck him, a bridegroom without an heir.

(Od. 7, 64–5)

A central theme of that book is the ultimate emptiness of the heroic ideal of posthumous honour as the supreme end of life. The dead hero such as Achilles in Hades in Od. 11 sees the honour for which he has sacrificed everything as worth less than the life of the lowest serf. I venture to suggest that Jasper’s dedication of the book to his brother indicates that he saw him as sharing the tragedy of the Homeric heroes. Without the consolation of any hope of life after death, he saw, I believe, both lives as just that, tragically unfulfilled.

I conclude on a personal note. In 1970, when I was on sabbatical at Harvard with my wife and family we learned that her father was terminally ill, and she immediately returned home with the children. To save them a difficult and tedious journey I rang Jasper and asked him if he would meet them at Heathrow and drive them to her home in north London. He agreed immediately. I said ‘Jasper, I’ll never forget this’ and I believe that I kept my word. We saw a good deal of each other in his later years, and even when his powers were failing he maintained the gentleness and consideration which were so characteristic of him. He combined these endearing characteristics with a sardonic sense of humour; he would have been tickled to know that those attending his funeral service in Balliol Chapel had to pass through a Christmas fair, complete with a carousel of galloping horses directly outside the main entrance to the College.