Greek scholar Sir Kenneth Dover dies at 89

LONDON — Sir Kenneth Dover, 89, a distinguished historian of Greek culture who gained wider fame by admitting his wish to kill a troublesome colleague, has died.

Dover died Sunday in a hospital in Cupar, Scotland, St. Andrews University announced today, without disclosing the cause of death.

Dover shockingly admitted his loathing for Trevor Aston, a fellow historian at Corpus Christi College in Oxford University, in his 1994 autobiography, “Marginal Comment.” Aston, according to Dover, had become an embarrassment because of his drunken and irrational behavior.

“It was clear to me that Trevor and the college must somehow be separated, and my problem was one which I feel compelled to define with brutal candor: how to kill him without getting into trouble,” wrote Dover, who was president of Corpus Christi at the time of Aston’s death.

Aston died from a drug overdose in October 1985 on the day he was notified of divorce proceedings by his second wife, and several days after a heated confrontation with Dover. There was no evidence that Dover had any role in the death.

Would Dover have tried to kill Aston had he not committed suicide?

“Oh no, no no,” Dover told The Associated Press in 1994.

“Well, I think it just wasn’t practicable,” he said.

Dover confessed a feeling of relief when Aston died, and he also shocked some readers of his 1994 book by including details of his own sex life.

“But even if his judgment of tone in respect of the latter was naive, Dover had taken a principled decision to write autobiography in a confessional mode, one of the oldest traditions of the genre, and he thought that some reactions to his book ostensibly preferred hypocrisy to truthful handling of one’s feelings and experiences,” said Stephen Halliwell, head of the School of Classics at St. Andrews.

In a brilliant academic career capped by his 1978 election as president of the Royal Academy, Dover caused ripples with candid work on sexuality.

His 1968 commentary on Aristophanes’ play “Clouds” elucidated the sexual jokes in the text.

Ten years later, he produced “Greek Homosexuality” in which his liberal attitude was ahead of the times.

“No argument which purports to show that homosexuality in general is natural or unnatural, healthy or morbid, legal or illegal, in conformity with God’s will or contrary to it, tells me whether any particular homosexual act is morally right or morally wrong,” Dover wrote.

“No act is sanctified, and none is debased, simply by having a genital dimension.”

Dover was on the faculty of St. Andrews University from 1955 to 1976 before taking the Oxford appointment (1976-86), and was chancellor of St. Andrews from 1981 to 2005.

His books included commentaries on Thucydides, Theocritus and Aristophanes; “Ancient Greek Literature” (1980), “Greek and the Greeks” (1987), “The Greeks and Their Legacy” (1989), “Greek Popular Morality in the Times of Plato and Aristotle” (1994), “The Evolution of Greek Prose Style” (1997) and a popular history, “The Greeks” (1981) written in conjunction with a television series for the British Broadcasting Corp.

His wife, Audrey, died earlier this year; he is survived by a son, a daughter and three grandchildren. A funeral was planned for March 26 at Kirkcaldy Crematorium.

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