William Spencer Barrett, 1914–2001
William Spencer Barrett, 1914–2001
Spencer Barrett in many ways seems to have been an old-style Oxford classics don. He did not move very far from his base. He did not lecture outside England (although he was certainly invited to speak in America) and not very often outside Oxford. He did not even visit Greece until middle age, and that was partly to confirm some details of the topography of Trozen about which, essentially, he had already made up his mind. His published work, though superb in quality, was modest in quantity, considering that he had such a long career. In 1964 his book Hippolytus was published, which became essential reading for any scholar working seriously on Greek Tragedy. Apart from Hippolytus, Barrett's most important publication was a sixty-five-page discussion of Sophocles' Niobe (and other plays on the same theme) in Richard Carden's book, The Papyrus Fragments of Sophocles.
Keywords: classics, Hippolytus, Trozen, Sophocles
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