Farewell Peter Green

In Athens in the 1960s the classicist Peter Green enjoyed a good, and I imagine bibulous, lunch in Plaka with his friend William Golding. At the end, Green asked Golding what he would like to do next: “See the bloody Parthenon, I suppose”. So they plodded up the Acropolis, and at the top, Golding plonked himself down on a marble block, his back to the Parthenon, looking towards the cement works of Eleusis and said: “Ah … Now this is what I call the right way to look at the Parthenon”.

Green has sadly just died, at the age of ninety-nine. But this anecdote, told in his book The Shadow of the Parthenon, is absolutely characteristic of his engaging and quirky charm. He was a committed philhellene, but at the same time he felt that the Parthenon had become a cultural cliché, weighed down by the “moral and aesthetic superiority” we have projected onto it.

Born and bred in the UK but based in the US for most of his classical career, Green wrote a string of influential books on Greek history. But I shall remember him as one of those twentieth-century figures, who – as the study of Classics became more narrowly professionalized – actively promoted its links with wider cultural and literary concerns. He goes with Donald Carne Ross, John Sullivan and Erich Segal: Carne Ross had worked as a producer for the BBC’s Third Programme, commissioning the first version of Christopher Logue’s War Music; Sullivan worked on English literature as well as classical, when that was not a fashionable combination; Segal is now probably better known for Love Story and his work on Yellow Submarine than for his studies of ancient comedy. Interestingly, they all have in common a transatlantic career: Green, Carne Ross and Sullivan migrating from the UK to the US, Segal taking the other direction.

Green very much fitted that general pattern of interests. He was as committed to literary translation as to history (and lines of his translation of Ovid found their way into Bob Dylan lyrics). He wrote historical novels set in antiquity. And after graduating from Cambridge, he worked first reviewing fiction in the Daily Telegraph, and television in the Listener, before returning to Classics. Needless to say, he was one of the longest-serving reviewers in the TLS, going back well over fifty years.

I did not know Green especially well, but we had good and bibulous lunches when we met at conferences, and he was always kind to (and interested in) my children, if I had dragged them along too. He was also always full of surprises. Most memorable to me was his connection with the modernist poet and friend of Jane Harrison, Hope Mirrlees (1887–1978) – a connection which emerged in a curious way.

When I submitted the manuscript of my book on Jane Harrison to Harvard UP, one of the anonymous reports I received was from someone who obviously had a lot of information, not in the public domain, about Mirrlees, a major character in my story. The press of course, rightly, would not tell me who had written that report, but somehow I sniffed out that it must have been Green. I nerved myself to ask him, and it turned out that, around the beginning of the Second World War, when he was what we would now call a sixth-former, he had spent weekends and holidays with Mirrlees and her mother, and had a lot to say about them and their set-up (which included, as I had learnt elsewhere, T. S. Eliot coming to stay and slipping fags to Mirrlees senior).

I shall always be grateful that Green’s long life and sharp memory made my book a lot better.

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