Geoffrey Kirk

Geoffrey Stephen Kirk, (December 3, 1921March 10, 2003) was a British classicist who served as the 35th Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge.

Geoffrey Stephen Kirk was born in December 1921 in Nottingham.

His parents were Frederic Kirk, an educational administrator at Northampton Polytechnic and World War I veteran, and his wife Enid.

Having spent part of his childhood in the Hertfordshire town of Radlett, he was educated at the independent Rossall School in Lancashire.

The following year, Kirk was elected to succeed Page and became the 35th holder of the chair.

Trinity College, Cambridge duly admitted him to its fellowship.

In 1939, he won a scholarship to study classics at Clare College, Cambridge.

In 1941, after only one year at Cambridge University, Kirk volunteered to join the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve.

His supervisor at Cambridge was Robert Rattenbury, whom Hugh Lloyd-Jones later called "a sound scholar but by no means an inspiring teacher".

When Kirk said he was leaving to join the Navy, Rattenbury remarked: "Good Heavens! Well, I don't suppose I shall be seeing you again!"

Kirk served in the Levant Schooner Flotilla, an Allied naval organisation operating in the Aegean Sea.

He rose to command a caïque, one of the Aegean fishing boats which were used by the Allies to stage landings on the Greek coast.

Having learnt some modern Greek, he distinguished himself through his communication with Greek resistance forces and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross in August 1945.

In 1946, he graduated BA with First Class Honours.

Kirk's first academic position was a research fellowship at Trinity Hall, Cambridge.

However, he spent much of his time away from the college.

A stint at British School at Athens (1947—1948) was followed by a period as a Commonwealth Fund Fellow at Harvard University, lasting from 1949 to 1950.

Kirk began his career as a lecturer and fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge in the 1950s.

He also held professorships at Yale and Bristol University.

In 1950, Kirk married the artist Barbara Traill, with whom he had one daughter.

He then took up a permanent position at Cambridge.

Working as an assistant lecturer in ancient Greek literature, he was elected a fellow of Trinity Hall.

The 1950s and 1960s witnessed the publication of several monographs which helped to establish his international reputation as a scholar of archaic Greece: he edited the fragments of the philosopher Heraclitus (1954), wrote a study on the poems of Homer (1962), and, together with classicist John Raven, co-edited a volume on pre-Socratic philosophy (1958).

Unusually for his time, Kirk attained a series of promotions in his first decade as a tenured academic: he was made a university lecturer in 1952 and a reader in 1961.

He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1959 at just thirty eight years of age.

In 1965, Kirk returned to the United States and took up a professorship of classics at Yale University.

During this period, he also spent a year as the Sather Professor of Classical Literature at the University of California, Berkeley and delivered the 1968 Sather Classical Lectures entitled Myth: Its Meaning and Functions.

He held this appointment until 1970.

Having published the content of his Sather Lectures in 1970, his work on Greek literature continued with a translation of the Bacchae (1970) by the tragedian Euripides and a second monograph on Homer (Homer and the Oral Tradition, 1977).

Having spent five years in North America, Kirk returned to the United Kingdom when offered the chair of Greek at the University of Bristol in 1971.

However, his tenure did not last long: in 1973, Denys Page had retired from the Regius Chair of Greek at Cambridge.

In 1974, having gained a reputation as a leading Hellenist through the publication of his first major study (Heraclitus: the Cosmic Fragments, 1954), he succeeded Denys Page as the Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge.

After his retirement in 1983, he dedicated himself to his Iliad commentary but began to suffer from depressive illness.

He published widely on pre-Socratic philosophy and the work of the Greek poet Homer, culminating in a six-volume philological commentary on the Iliad published between 1985 and 1993.

Born into a middle-class family in Nottingham, he began studying classics at Clare College, Cambridge but joined the Royal Navy during World War II.

He was deployed to the Aegean Sea as part of the Levant Schooner Flotilla and distinguished himself through his command of modern Greek.

His service, for which he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, became the basis for his 1997 memoir Towards The Aegean Sea.

Later in life, he reflected on the events of his wartime service in a 1997 memoir entitled Towards The Aegean Sea.

After the End of World War II, Kirk returned to Cambridge to resume his studies towards the Classical Tripos.

He was most influenced by his tutor at Clare College, the historian of ancient Greece N. G. L. Hammond, and by the Hellenist Harry Sandbach.