Miriam Griffin
Oxford classical scholar whose biography of Nero challenged popular views of him as a brutal tyrant
MIRIAM GRIFFIN, who has died aged 82, was an American-born classical scholar and the author of major studies of Seneca and his pupil Nero.
Though deeply interested in ancient philosophy, especially Stoicism, Miriam Griffin wrote primarily as a historian concerned with how Roman thinking was related to political circumstances and actions.
As well as Nero and Seneca, she ranged widely over Roman Republican and Imperial history, Roman historiography, and many other Latin authors including Cicero and Tacitus, building bridges between historians of the Graeco-roman world and students of its philosophies.
A generous, kind and warm colleague and mentor to generations of students, Miriam Tamara Dressler was born into a Jewish family in New York on June 6 1935. Her father, Leo, was a schoolmaster who taught everything from mathematics to music theory to Latin; her mother, Fanny, was a typist and housewife. Miriam went on to take a BA at Barnard College where, according to family lore, she had to decide on graduating whether to become a physicist, a classicist or a concert pianist.
She subsequently determined to apply to read Literae Humaniores (Greats) at Oxford (“where I wouldn’t be such a freak”) and went on a Fulbright scholarship to Somerville. While at Oxford, she met Jasper Griffin, a fellow student. After they both graduated with Firsts in 1960, they married.
Miriam Griffin went on to do a Dphil in Roman history under Ronald Syme, who would become a great friend, with a dissertation on “Seneca: The Statesman and the Writer”. Then, after stints as a teaching fellow at Harvard and as a research fellow at St Anne’s College, Oxford, she returned to Somerville, where she was fellow and tutor in Ancient History from 1967 to 2002. Her husband, meanwhile, had a fellowship at Balliol and went on to become Public Orator and Professor of Classical Literature in the University of Oxford from 1992 until 2004.
Her book Seneca: a Philosopher in Politics (1976) examined the problematic connection between Seneca’s prose works and his career as a first-century Roman statesman, showing that while his Stoic philosophy illuminated his statesmanship, there were notable exceptions to this rule.
Later on, in 2013, she would publish Seneca on Society, in which she explored his seven-book treatise De Beneficiis (a work concerning the award and reception of gifts and favours in society, within the context of Stoic ethics) in its historical and philosophical context.
Miriam Griffin described her Nero: The End of a Dynasty, first published in 1984, and running into three editions, as “a hybrid: biographical in its account of the emperor’s personality and problems, historical in its analysis of his fall in terms of the interaction of that personality with the political system”.
Among other things she took issue with the popular portrayal of the emperor as (in Charles Merivale’s phrase) an “arch tyrant, the last and most detestable of the Caesarean family”, showing that no Roman ruler had had so great an influence on the visual and dramatic arts.
The book also broke new ground in the emphasis it placed on weaknesses inherent in the political system of the early Roman Empire (for example, the lack of an effective rule about succession which made incumbent rulers vulnerable to rival contenders) in explaining Nero’s downfall, and the way she related the weaknesses in his character to such systemic problems.
Miriam Griffin edited the journal The Classical Quarterly from 2002 to 2007 and was a long-standing editor of the Clarendon Ancient History Series for Oxford University Press.
Her other publications include two volumes of collected studies on Roman philosophy (edited with Jonathan Barnes); with Werner Eck, she worked on the senatorial decree of AD20, giving the official version of the trial of Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso; and with the epigrapher Benedetto Bravo, she published an article on a new fragment of Livy that no one else had succeeded in identifying.
After the death in 2005 of her old friend Peter Brunt, Ronald Syme’s successor as Camden Professor of Ancient History at Oxford, she worked with Alison Samuels to edit all his unpublished papers – a huge project – in his memory.
When her last article, written jointly with Andrew Lintott, was published, she was amused that one reviewer complained that it did not pay enough acknowledgement to the work of Miriam Griffin.
A festschrift, Philosophy and Power in the Graeco-roman World, was published to mark her retirement in 2002, though she continued to teach and supervise at Somerville. She served under five principals and was delighted that two of them, Alice Prochaska and Fiona Caldicott, attended the final launch party she gave, just two and a half weeks before she died, for a volume of her collected papers, entitled Politics and Philosophy at Rome, edited by Catalina Balmaceda and due to be published by OUP later this year.
Although she was not an observant Jew, Miriam Griffin’s Jewish identity was extremely important to her. Late in life, with the help of her youngest daughter, she began to study Hebrew; she also decided to fast for Yom Kippur.
Her 58-year marriage to Jasper Griffin was a true union of souls. He survives her with their three daughters.
Miriam Griffin, born June 6 1935, died May 16 2018