Gilbert Murray

He came from an Irish Catholic family and his ancestors fought at the Battle of the Boyne and in the 1798 Rebellion.

His family all supported Irish Home Rule and were critical of the British government's actions elsewhere in the Empire.

George Gilbert Aimé Murray (2 January 1866 – 20 May 1957) was an Australian-born British classical scholar and public intellectual, with connections in many spheres.

He was an outstanding scholar of the language and culture of Ancient Greece, perhaps the leading authority in the first half of the twentieth century.

He is the basis for the character of Adolphus Cusins in his friend George Bernard Shaw's play Major Barbara, and also appears as the chorus figure in Tony Harrison's play Fram.

His father, Sir Terence Aubrey Murray, who died in 1873, had been a Member of the New South Wales Parliament; Gilbert's mother, Agnes Ann Murray (née Edwards), ran a girls' school in Sydney for a few years.

Then, in 1877, Agnes emigrated with Gilbert to the UK, where she died in 1891.

Murray was educated at Merchant Taylors' School and St John's College, Oxford.

He distinguished himself in writing in Greek and Latin: he won all the prizes awarded by Oxford.

From 1889 to 1899, Murray was Professor of Greek at the University of Glasgow.

There was a break in his academic career from 1899 to 1905, when he returned to Oxford; he interested himself in dramatic and political writing.

They met first in 1900.

From Euripides, the Hippolytus and The Bacchae (together with The Frogs of Aristophanes; first edition, 1902); the Medea, Trojan Women, and Electra (1905–1907); Iphigenia in Tauris (1910); The Rhesus (1913) were presented at the Court Theatre, in London.

He wrote an appendix on the Orphic tablets for her 1903 book Prolegomena; he later contributed to her Themis (1912).

Francis Fergusson wrote

"In general the ritual had its agon, or sacred combat, between the old King, or god or hero, and the new, corresponding to the agons in the tragedies, and the clear 'purpose' moment of the tragic rhythm. It had its Sparagmos, in which the royal victim was literally or symbolically torn asunder, followed by the lamentation and/or rejoicing of the chorus: elements which correspond to the moments of 'passion'. The ritual had its messenger, its recognition scene and its epiphany; various plot devices for representing the moment of 'perception' which follows the 'pathos'. Professor Murray, in a word, studies the art of tragedy in the light of ritual forms, and thus, throws a really new light onto Aristotle's Poetics."

Murray's openly expressed pro-Home Rule and anti-imperialist views, combined with his failure to support the cause of retaining compulsory Greek, antagonised his colleagues at Oxford University, who were mostly Conservative and Unionist.

Murray was drawn into the public debate on censorship that came to a head in 1907 and was pushed by William Archer, whom he knew well from Glasgow, George Bernard Shaw, and others such as John Galsworthy, J. M. Barrie and Edward Garnett.

After 1908 he was Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford.

In the same year he invited Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff to Oxford, where the Prussian philologist delivered two lectures: Greek Historical Writing and Apollo (later, he would replicate them in Cambridge).

A petition was taken to Herbert Gladstone, then Home Secretary, early in 1908.

He was one of the scholars associated with Jane Harrison in the myth-ritual school of mythography.

In 1910, he recalled, only New College, Balliol College and Jesus College continued to send pupils to his lectures; the absence of undergraduates from Christ Church, to which his Chair was attached, was particularly noticeable.

He was a lifelong supporter of the Liberal Party, lining up on the Irish Home Rule and non-imperialist sides of the splits in the party of the late nineteenth century.

He supported temperance, and married into a prominent Liberal, aristocratic and temperance family, the Carlisles.

Until 1912 this could not have been staged for a British audience, due to its depiction of incest.

In the United States Granville Barker and his wife Lillah McCarthy gave outdoor performances of The Trojan Women and Iphigenia in Tauris at various colleges (1915).

The translation of Œdipus Rex was a commission from W. B. Yeats.

From 1925 to 1926, he was the Charles Eliot Norton Lecturer at Harvard University.

He had published his own journal, called the Hibbert Journal.

Murray is perhaps now best known for his verse translations of Greek drama, which were popular and prominent in their time.

As a poet he was generally taken to be a follower of Swinburne and had little sympathy from the modernist poets of the rising generation.

The staging of Athenian drama in English did have its own cultural impact.

He had earlier experimented with his own prose dramas, without much success.

Over time he worked through almost the entire canon of Athenian dramas (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides in tragedy; Aristophanes in comedy).

He served as President of the Ethical Union (now Humanists UK) from 1929 to 1930 and was a delegate at the inaugural World Humanist Congress in 1952 which established Humanists International.

He was a leader of the League of Nations Society and the League of Nations Union, which promoted the League of Nations in Britain.

Murray died in Oxford in 1957, aged 91.

His ashes were interred in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey.

Murray was born in Sydney, Australia.