Martin Ferguson Smith


Martin Ferguson Smith, is a British scholar and writer. After education at Shrewsbury School he proceeded to Trinity College, Dublin, where he was a Foundation Scholar in Classics and won several academic prizes, including the Tyrrell Memorial Gold Medal for Greek and Latin verse and prose composition. After gaining First Class Honours and a Moderatorship Prize, he carried out postgraduate research under Donald Ernest Wilson Wormell for a thesis entitled Lucretius: The Man and His Mission.
From 1963 to 1988 Smith taught Classics at the University College of North Wales, Bangor, from 1977 as Professor. From 1988 he was Professor of Classics at Durham University. Problems with his eyesight compelled him to take early retirement from university teaching in 1995. He continues to be associated with Durham University as Professor Emeritus in the Department of Classics and Ancient History.
Smith married Elizabeth Mary Dempsey of Dublin on 4 April 1964. The marriage was dissolved in 1981. He has a daughter and a granddaughter. Since 1995 he has lived on the remote and rugged island of Foula in Shetland. In “retirement” he has continued to be very active in research and writing, not only on classical subjects, but also on modern ones. In 2007 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire "for services to scholarship".

Research

As a classical scholar, Smith has a high international reputation for his work on two writers who made it their business to expound the doctrines of the Greek philosopher Epicurus.
One is the Roman poet Lucretius, author of De Rerum Natura. Smith’s translation of the six-book work was first published in England in 1969 and reissued, with revisions, in the United States in 2001. He is also the editor of the Loeb Classical Library text of the poem, accompanied with an introduction, critical and explanatory notes, bibliography, and index, and with the translation of W. H. D. Rouse revised to make it accord with the new text.
The other author is Diogenes of Oinoanda, who, probably early in the second century AD, presented his exposition of Epicurean philosophy in a Greek inscription carved on the wall of a stoa in the centre of his home-city in northern Lycia, in the mountains of southwest Asia Minor. The inscription, which may have occupied 260 square metres of wall-space and contained about 25,000 words, is the longest known from the ancient world. The wall that carried the inscription fell down or was deliberately demolished in later antiquity, and its blocks were reused as building material in various parts of the city. 88 pieces of the inscription were discovered by French and Austrian epigraphists between 1884 and 1895, but many decades of inactivity followed. In 1968 Smith inaugurated a long series of new investigations at Oinoanda that have now continued for half a century and much more than tripled the number of known fragments of one of the most remarkable documents to have survived from the ancient world. The latest tally is 305. Smith worked first by himself, then in collaboration with the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, and most recently with international teams led, until his early death in 2016, by Martin Bachmann, vice-director of the German Archaeological Institute in Istanbul. In this third phase Smith has worked in very close collaboration, both on and off the site, with Jürgen Hammerstaedt of the University of Cologne.
Smith has published his work on Diogenes’ inscription in five books and about 75 articles. The latest book and the series of articles in the journal Epigraphica Anatolica, in which the numerous and important discoveries made since 2007 are presented, were co-authored with Jürgen Hammerstaedt.
A documentary film, A Gigantic Jigsaw Puzzle: The Epicurean Inscription of Diogenes of Oinanda, directed by Nazim Güveloğlu was released in 2015 and can be viewed at http://www.metu.edu.tr/videos/giganticpuzzle. Smith takes a prominent and completely unrehearsed part in the film, which has won awards in Athens, Split, Sicily, and elsewhere.
Since 2010 Smith, while continuing to be closely involved with classical studies and especially Diogenes of Oinoanda, has also established a considerable reputation for his highly original research and writing on a variety of twentieth-century figures. These include the writers Rose Macaulay, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Katharine Tynan, the artists Helen and Roger Fry and Tristram Hillier, the art critic Clive Bell, the trade unionist and social reformer Madeleine Symons, and Richard Williams Reynolds, schoolteacher of J. R. R. Tolkien.

Elections and awards (selection)

Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, 1975-
Leverhulme Research Fellow, 1987-1988
Member of the Council of Management, British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, 1987-1994
Member of the Asia Minor Commission, Austrian Academy of Sciences, 1990-2007
Awarded the degree of Doctor in Letters by the University of Dublin, 1993
Awarded the International Theodor Mommsen Prize for Herculaneum Papyrology, Pozzuoli, Italy, 2004
Appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire, June 2007
Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, 2016-
Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, 2018-
Corresponding Member of the German Archaeological Institute, 2020-

Publications (selection)

Lucretius: On the Nature of Things. Sphere Books, London, 1969.
Lucretius: De Rerum Natura. With an English translation by W. H. D. Rouse, revised by Martin Ferguson Smith. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA/London, 1975, 1982, 1992.
Lucretius: On the Nature of Things. Hackett, Indianapolis/Cambridge MA, 2001., .
Classics in Albania. The Albanian Society, Ilford, 1984.
Diogenes of Oinoanda: The Epicurean Inscription. Bibliopolis, Napoli, 1993.
The Philosophical Inscription of Diogenes of Oinoanda. Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien, 1996.
"Excavations at Oinoanda 1997: The New Epicurean Texts", Anatolian Studies 48 125-170.
Supplement to Diogenes of Oinoanda: The Epicurean Inscription. Bibliopolis, Napoli, 2003.
Jürgen Hammerstaedt & Martin Ferguson Smith, The Epicurean Inscription of Diogenes of Oinoanda: Ten Years of New Discoveries and Research. Rudolf Habelt, Bonn, 2014.
Dearest Jean: Rose Macaulay’s Letters to a Cousin. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2011. . Reissued with minor revisions 2017. .
"Dorothy L. Sayers and the Somersham Pageant of 1908", Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review 28 79-96.
"Virginia Woolf’s Second Visit to Greece", English Studies 92 55-83.
"'Suicidal Mania' and Flawed Psychobiography: Two Discussions of Virginia Woolf", English Studies 95 538-556.
"Virginia Woolf and 'The Hermaphrodite': A Feminist Fan of Orlando and Critic of Roger Fry", English Studies 97 277-297.
"'New' Portraits by Roger Fry of Helen Fry and Vanessa Bell", The British Art Journal 17, no. 3 34-39.
"The British Connection: The Secret Son of Brig. Gen. Daniel Harris Reynolds", Arkansas Historical Quarterly 76, no. 2 144-176.
Madeleine Symons, Social and Penal Reformer. , .
“Letters from Rose Macaulay to Katharine Tynan”, English Studies 99 517-537. https://doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2018.1483621
Jürgen Hammerstaedt & Martin Ferguson Smith, “Diogenes of Oinoanda: The New and Unexpected Discoveries of 2017, With a Re-edition of Fr. 70-72”, Epigraphica Anatolica 51 43-79.
“The First Visit of Tristram Hillier to Portugal”, The British Art Journal 20, no. 1 90-97.
Martin Ferguson Smith & Helen Walasek, “Clive Bell’s Memoir of Annie Raven- Hill”, English Studies 100 823-854.
“A Complete Strip-off: A Bloomsbury Threesome in the Nude at Studland”, The British Art Journal 20, no. 2 72-77.