Hugh Lloyd-Jones

Sir Peter Hugh Jefferd Lloyd-Jones FBA (21 September 1922 – 5 October 2009^[1]) was a British classical scholar and Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford.

Lloyd-Jones was educated at Westminster School where he developed an interest in Modern History before being converted to Classics by his Headmaster, J. T. Christie.^[2] He pursued undergraduate and postgraduate studies at Christ Church, Oxford. His studies were interrupted by the Second World War, during which he learned Japanese and served in the Intelligence Corps in India, turning down the opportunity to work at Bletchley Park in order to serve in Burma. He ended the War as a Captain.^[2]

Lloyd-Jones took a first degree in Greats in 1948 and gained several University prizes. For a while he was a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and while there met his first wife, Frances Hedley, a Classics student at Newnham College, whom he married in 1953. The couple had two sons and a daughter and were divorced in 1981. In 1951 Lloyd-Jones returned to Oxford where he became the first holder of the E. P. Warren Praelectorship at Corpus.^[2]

Lloyd-Jones supervised many distinguished D. Phil. students, including Martin Litchfield West. In his inaugural address as Regius Professor in 1961 he called for a reduction in the emphasis laid on composition taught to undergraduates and suggested that Honour Moderations might have to be reformed to encompass studies taken from ancient philosophy and history as well as the traditional literature and language.^[1]

He contributed editions of Menander's Dyscolus (1960) and of Sophocles (1990, together with Nigel Wilson) to the Oxford Classical Texts, and editions and translations of the Aeschylean fragments (1960) and of Sophocles (2000) to the Loeb Classical Library.^[1]

Lloyd-Jones was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1966^[3] and was a member of five foreign academies, holding honorary doctorates from the universities of Chicago, Tel Aviv, Göttingen and Thessaloniki. His retirement from the Regius Chair in 1989, after twenty-nine years, was marked by a knighthood.^[2]

He married secondly Mary R. Lefkowitz, Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, in 1982, and spent his last years at their home in Wellesley.

Major publications

• Lloyd-Jones, Hugh, Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983)
• ________ Classical Survivals: The Classics in the Modern World (London: Duckworth, 1982)
• ________ Greek Comedy, Hellenistic Literature, Greek Religion, and Miscellanea: The Academic Papers of Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1990)
• ________ Greek Epic, Lyric, and Tragedy: The Academic Papers of Sir Hugh Lloyd Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1990)
• ________ Greek in a Cold Climate (London: Duckworth, 1991)
• ________ The Justice of Zeus (2nd ed. Sather Classical Lectures, no. 42. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983)
• ________ Mythical Beasts (London: Duckworth, 1980)
• ________ Myths of the Zodiac (New York: St. Martin's, 1978)
• Lloyd-Jones, Hugh, ed., Females of the Species: Semonides on Women (Park Ridge, NJ: Noyes, 1975)
• Lloyd-Jones, Hugh, and Nigel Guy Wilson, Sophoclea: Studies on the Text of Sophocles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1990)
• ________ Sophocles: Second Thoughts (Hypomnemata, no. 100. Götttingen : Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1997)
• Lloyd-Jones, Hugh, and Nigel Guy Wilson, eds., Sophoclis Fabulae, Scriptorum classicorum bibliotheca Oxoniensis (Oxford Classical Texts) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)

References