Professor Miriam Griffin

Leading classicist who debunked the view of Nero as an autocratic bully

ONE OF Oxford University’s most eminent tutors in ancient history and throughout her life a champion of female classicists, Professor Miriam Griffin (née Dressler), has died in her 82nd year.

A spirited New Yorker with a sharp and unforgiving eye for detail, Griffin fell easily into the world of Oxford scholarship. She was in her time regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on the history of Jews and Christians in the Roman Empire (which she had been responsible for introducing into Oxford’s ancient history curriculum), but had built her reputation on a ground-breaking study, published in 1976, of the Roman philosopher and politician Seneca. Eight years later, she produced a masterly biography of the emperor Nero (Seneca’s pupil), expertly challenging the view that he was nothing but a bully and an autocrat, and pointing instead to his patronage of the arts and the theatre.

Regularly consulted by the media on everything Roman, for some years she edited The Classical Quarterly and in 2013 produced a superb study of Seneca on Society, an absorbing analysis of Seneca’s De Beneficiis, which dealt with the ethics of giving gifts.

But her academic career was grounded in her work and popularity as a caring tutor; among her former pupils can now be numbered leading authorities on the classical world who once sat at her feet; they include Tessa Rajek, Professor Emerita at the University of Reading, and Hannah Cotton, Shalom Horowitz Professor of Classics at the Hebrew University Jerusalem.

Griffin was passionate in her patronage of female classical scholars in academia. On October 5, 2013 she arranged the first Women in Classics dinner at Oxford, attended by 31 women.

Miriam Tamara Dressler was born in New York, the only child of Leo, a schoolteacher of Latin, mathematics and music theory, and Fanny (née Natelson), a typist. Having completed a degree at Barnard College, New York, she was accepted to read Greats (Latin & Greek language and Ancient and Modern Philosophy) at Somerville College, Oxford, where she was a Fulbright scholar. Graduating with a First, she completed a D Phil in 1960 under the supervision of Sir Ronald Syme, then regarded as the greatest living authority on the politics of classical Rome.

In 1960, she married Jasper Griffin, a fellow classicist who from 1992 until 2004 was Professor of Classical Literature at Oxford and the University’s Public Orator. Appointed to a Junior Research Fellowship at St Anne’s College in 1967, Miriam Griffin was elected to a full fellowship at Somerville, and taught ancient history at Trinity College. Retiring in 2002, she continued to research, publish and teach even when diagnosed with leukaemia in 2014.

Griffin lived long enough to attend the launch of a volume of her collected papers, which will be published later this year. She is survived by her husband, their three daughters and a granddaughter.

GEOFFREY ALDERMAN

Professor Mary Griffin: born June 6, 1935. Died May 16, 2018