Martin Litchfield West (1937–2015)

Abstract

Almut Fries In the late 1950s a gifted Classics undergraduate at Oxford was advised by E. R. Dodds, then Regius Professor of Greek, that he should turn his attention to prose works rather than poetry on the ground that little remained to be done there in the field of textual studies. Fortunately, the young man did not follow this no doubt honest and well-intentioned recommendation-for his name was Martin West. This is one of the many anecdotes that circulate in Oxford about Martin West, whom I knew for nearly fifteen years and whose friendship I enjoyed for the last eight or so. The story is true-he himself recounted it, with characteristic self-irony, in his acceptance speech for the 2000 Balzan Prize (reprinted in Hesperos (2007), the Festschrift for his 70 th birthday)-but even if it were not, it is a good one because it encapsulates the scholarly personality of the man who long before his sudden death, on 13 July 2015, had become the world's foremost expert on early Greek poetry and its manifold connections in space and time. Never subject to changing intellectual fashions or afraid of challenging established doctrines (or of being challenged himself), Martin pursued his chosen path to the point of leaving a legacy which easily proves Dodds' opinion wrong and which few, if any, can ever hope to emulate. Born in Hampton, Middlesex, on 23 September 1937, Martin went to St. Paul's School in London, still one of the leading independent schools for boys in Britain, before he came up to Balliol College Oxford to read Classics in 1955. Classical education in those days, both at school and initially at university, largely consisted of translation from and into Greek and Latin, prose and verse. It was this rigorous training, combined with supreme talent (even 'genius' would not be too grand a word), that provided the basis for his extraordinary feeling for language and style. In Oxford he soon came to attend the legendary text-based seminars which Eduard Fraenkel had introduced on the German model. Taught by Wilamowitz and Leo, among others, Fraenkel not only impressed his students with his immense learning and love of ancient literature, but also led them to understand the essence of classical philology (in the continental sense). Throughout his life Martin saw himself as standing in this tradition-a portrait of Wilamowitz hung above his desk at home, and he often returned to