The Presocratic Philosophers by Geoffrey S. Kirk

From 1971 to 1974 Kirk was professor of classics at Bristol University. A prose translation of Euripides' Bacchae, with helpful introduction and notes, also appeared in 1970. This offered a critical review of recent approaches to the study of myths, especially the structuralist theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and placed Greek mythology in a wider context by comparing it to the mythical systems of other cultures.Ī useful version for the general public, The Nature Of Greek Myths, followed in 1974. His Sather lectures were published as Myth: Its Meaning And Functions (1970). In 1968, he was Sather professor of classical literature at the University of California at Berkeley. It formed an excellent introduction to these and other aspects of Homeric scholarship.įrom 1965 to 1970, Kirk held the chair of classics at Yale University. His first book, Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments (1954), was followed in 1957 by The Presocratic Philosophers, a comprehensive study, coauthored with JE Raven, that has remained, through subsequent revisions, a standard work.Īppointed fellow of the British Academy in 1959 and reader in Greek at Cambridge in 1961, Kirk then published The Songs Of Homer (1962), a brilliantly clear-headed analysis of the state of Homeric studies, which took account of Milman Parry's theories about oral poetry as well as the archaeological and historical context of the poems. He was a Common- wealth Fund Fellow at Har vard University from 1949 to 1950, and then fellow and director of classical studies at Trinity Hall until 1970. He graduated in 1946, and was offered a research fellowship at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Some of these exploits have a distinctly Odyssean flavour and they left him with a deep knowledge and love of Greece and its people. His colourful, sometimes hair-raising, experiences in the navy, and later in Greece, were chronicled by him in a characteristically understated and ironic style in his memoir, Towards The Aegean Sea (1997). He enlisted in the Royal Navy in 1941, and was commissioned a year later.

He was edu cated at Rossall School in Lancashire and got a first in classics at Clare College, Cambridge.

The Presocratic Philosophers by Geoffrey S. Kirk