Robert Yelverton Tyrrell

Template:Short description Template:Good article Template:Use dmy dates Template:Use Hiberno-English Robert Yelverton Tyrrell Template:Postnominals (Template:IPAc-en ; 21 January 1844 – 19 September 1914) was an Irish classical scholar who was Regius Professor of Greek at Trinity College Dublin. He was a prominent figure in the "Dublin School" of classical scholarship, responsible for Trinity's advancement in prestige in that subject from the late 1860s, known particularly for his seven-volume edition (largely made with his former student, Louis Claude Purser) of the letters of the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero.

Born in Ballingarry, County Tipperary, Tyrrell was the son of a Church of Ireland curate, who died five years after Tyrrell's birth. His mother, Elizabeth, moved the family to Dublin, where Tyrrell was educated by his elder brothers and, briefly, at a local private school. He displayed an early talent for classical studies, particularly the composition of Greek and Latin verse, and entered Trinity College Dublin at the unusually young age of sixteen. He was a distinguished student, graduating in 1864 and attaining a fellowship in 1868.

Tyrrell became Professor of Latin in 1871 and, in 1880, Regius Professor of Greek. He played a leading role in the establishment of the literary journal Hermathena as well as the college miscellany , which collected humorous writings, often in Latin and Greek. After stepping down as Regius Professor in 1898, he became the college's Public Orator in 1899 and Professor of Ancient History in 1900. He was appointed as one of the founding fellows of the British Academy in 1901.

Several of Tyrrell's students went on to become influential in scholarship and the arts, including J. B. Bury, Francis Ysidro Edgeworth and William Ridgeway. He also taught Oscar Wilde, and supported him after Wilde was incarcerated for homosexual activity in 1895. As an academic, he promoted the detailed study of literary texts over that of historical and archaeological material, and was credited with a prominent role in improving the reputation and quality of classical studies at Trinity. He suffered from ill-health, brought on by an attack of thrombosis, from 1899, and died in 1914 at his home near Dublin.

Early life

Robert Yelverton Tyrrell was born on 21 January 1844 in Ballingarry in County Tipperary, Ireland. His middle name was taken from his godmother's surname; she was a descendant of the judge, legal scholar and peer Barry Yelverton.Template:Sfn Robert Tyrrell was a first cousin to the modernist writer and excommunicated Jesuit priest George Tyrrell.Template:Sfn

Tyrrell was the son of Elizabeth Tyrrell (Template:Nee) and of Henry Tyrrell,Template:Sfn a curate in the Church of Ireland at Ballingarry. Soon after Robert's birth, Henry Tyrrell was appointed as rector of Kinnitty in County Offaly. He died in 1849 of cholera, having caught the disease in Dublin, where it had broken out the same year and to where he had travelled in order to administer the last rites to his brother-in-law. The remaining family, consisting of three sons, three daughters and Tyrrell's mother, moved to Dublin.Template:Sfn

Tyrrell was mostly educated at home by his two elder brothers,Template:Sfn though he spent six weeks at Flynn's School,Template:Sfnm a private school on Hume Street in Dublin.Template:Sfn According to an 1893 portrait of Tyrrell by his former student, Henry Hinkson, in The Critic, he had an unhappy time at the school, partly due to his skill at composing verses in Latin and Greek: this attracted the ire of his teacher, who considered verse composition frivolous. Hinkson also wrote that it aroused the jealousy of Tyrrell's schoolmates, requiring him to "make amends for his superior attainments by a correspondingly deft use of his fists".Template:Sfn

In 1860, at the unusually young age of sixteen, Tyrrell matriculated at Trinity College Dublin.Template:Sfn All three Tyrrell brothers studied classics with distinction at Trinity;Template:Sfn Robert Tyrrell obtained a classical scholarship at the end of his first year: a rare achievement for a first-year student, particularly one of seventeen.Template:Efn He graduated in 1864 with a Double First, achieving the college's top marks in classics and fourth-highest marks in logic and ethics, and was also awarded the Vice-Chancellor's Prize in Greek Verse for a play about the Alexandrian mathematician Hypatia.Template:Sfn In 1867, alongside two fellow Trinity scholars (Thomas J. Bellingham Brady and Maxwell Cormac Cullinan), Tyrrell published (Template:Gloss), a volume of English verse translated into Latin.Template:Sfn

Academic career

Cover of a faded and slightly mildewed old magazine: beneath the title can be seen a signature ("J. McCawley?")

The cover of the first edition of , published in 1869 under Tyrrell's editorship. The wine-cup on the cover and the epigraph (from a fragment by Euripides) reference the ancient game of , played by flicking the dregs of a wine-cup at other participants.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn

Early career

Tyrrell twice won prizes in the examinations to become a fellow of Trinity College, but did not secure the position until his third attempt in 1868.Template:Sfn Classical studies had held relatively little prominence at Trinity until the 1860s; few classics graduates had applied for fellowships at the college, preferring instead to seek careers in law or public service. Tyrrell's appointment, along with those of John Pentland Mahaffy in 1864 and Arthur Palmer in 1867, marked the beginning of a period in which the subject expanded greatly in numbers, publications and prestige.Template:Sfn These academics became known as the "Dublin School" of classics.Template:Sfn Tyrrell was elected Professor of Latin in 1871, succeeding William Hugh Ferrar,Template:Sfn who had died in office.Template:Sfn Tyrrell's lecture style was spontaneous, relying on question-and-answer with his audience: his student Louis Claude Purser later wrote that the lectures were highly effective, but not "by any means highly systematic", and that they might have been condemned as mere "desultory conversations" by an educational inspector.Template:Sfn

In 1869, Tyrrell co-founded (with Edward Sullivan)Template:Sfn and became the first editor of the Trinity literary magazine , which William Stanford, Tyrrell's biographer, describes as "a polyglot miscellany of Template:Hair space".Template:Sfn He remained its editor-in-chief for all the editions of its first run, which ended in 1881.Template:Sfn His contributions to included reports on college cricket matches written in the style of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides.Template:Sfn He was also a founding member of the editorial board of Hermathena, a more serious academic journal, established in 1873.Template:RefnTemplate:Efn He contributed to the first issue a review of John H. Hogan's edition of Euripides's Medea: the review was, in Stanford's words, "a savagely sarcastic scarification of Hogan's grammatical and metrical lapses". Tyrrell wrote that his intention was to discourage Hogan from editing any further works of the playwright "until he has made himself acquainted with the rudiments of Greek accidence and the structure of an iambic trimeter".Template:Refn

In 1879, Tyrrell published the first volume of an edition of the letters of the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero. This was the first attempt in an English-language work to establish the date of each of Cicero's letters and to arrange them in chronological order, though German scholars had attempted the same project and previous studies had attempted to date individual letters within the corpus.Template:Sfn Unusually for the time, Tyrrell's edition rejected the traditional practice of grouping letters by their addressee,Template:Efn referring to each of the 931 letters by a number.Template:Sfn

Regius Professor of Greek

From 1880 to 1898, Tyrrell was Regius Professor of Greek,Template:Sfn succeeding John Kells Ingram,Template:Refn who became the college librarian.Template:Sfn From 1885, Purser began to work with him on his editions of Cicero's letters, though only Tyrrell was credited on the 1886 publication of the second volume, and he remained the "senior partner", listed before Purser, for all succeeding volumes.Template:Sfn In 1887, he used his own name to have a textual note on the Frogs of Aristophanes, written by A. E. HousmanTemplate:Sndwho had failed his degree at Oxford and was working at the Patent OfficeTemplate:SfnTemplate:EfnTemplate:Sndpublished in The Classical Review; in 1892, he sponsored Housman's successful application to be Professor of Latin at University College London.Template:Refn In 1893, Tyrrell delivered the Percy Turnbull Lectures at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, which he published as Latin Poetry.Template:Refn

Tyrrell was a lifelong friend and supporter of Richard Claverhouse Jebb,Template:Sfn Professor of Greek initially at the University of Glasgow and, from 1889, at Cambridge, and often sided with him in academic debates, particularly against Mahaffy.Template:Sfn In a letter to Jebb of February 1883, Tyrrell congratulated him for "show[ing] Mahaffy in his true light, with slovenly Greek and disingenuous arguments";Template:Sfn from 1884, Tyrrell and Mahaffy quarrelled over the edition of the Greek historian Herodotus made by the historian Archibald Sayce, leading to what Stanford calls a "minor civil war" between their respective acolytes at Trinity.Template:Sfn

Later career

Tyrrell left the Regius Professorship in 1898; he was succeeded by his former student J. B. Bury,Template:Sfn then appointed in 1899 as the university's Public Orator and, in 1900, as Professor of Ancient History.Template:Refn The move was not regarded as a good fit with Tyrrell's academic interests – he was a literary scholar rather than a historian – but may have been intended to prevent Bury from leaving Trinity to seek a professorship elsewhere. Stanford further explains it through the belief that "in those days, Fellows of Trinity were deemed to be omniscient".Template:Sfn

Tyrrell suffered from thrombosis of the legs from 1899, which forced him to give up his previous participation in sport (particularly rackets and tennis), affected his physical and mental energy and,Template:Sfn in Stanford's words, "ravaged his fine features".Template:Sfn In 1904, he was considered for the position of college provost, though ultimately passed over in favour of Anthony Traill, who was appointed by the Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, in March.Template:Sfn In the aftermath of Traill's appointment, Tyrrell was co-opted as a Senior Fellow, which required him to resign both his professorship and his office as Public Orator. Tyrrell was also elected as the college registrar in the same year, with a total salary (in 1906) of £1,386 14s (). In 1913, by which point his health was in decline, he was not re-elected as registrar, and was instead appointed senior dean and catechist, responsible for the religious education of the student body.Template:Refn

Tyrrell was a Commissioner of Education for Ireland;Template:Efn he was called to testify in 1899 before a royal commission on the state of education on the island and the possibility of reforming it.Template:Sfn He was also chosen, in 1901, as one of the founding fellows of the British Academy.Template:Sfn He died on 19 September 1914, at his home in Greystones, in County Wicklow near Dublin,Template:Sfn after what Purser describes as a "tedious illness".Template:Sfn

Personal life

From Tyrrell's Latin translation of "The Bridge of Sighs" (1844) by Thomas HoodTemplate:SfnTemplate:Efn

Tyrrell married the poet Ada Shaw,Template:Sfn the daughter of his Trinity colleague, the economist and journalist George Ferdinand Shaw, in 1874; they had three sons and three daughters.Template:Sfn His grandsons included the bishop Richard Hanson and, by his daughter Ada, the economist Lucius Thompson-McCausland.Template:Refn Tyrrell was known for his sarcastic wit and opposition to temperance hotels, which served no alcohol; he compared the concept with "a celibate brothel".Template:Sfn His writings were often parodic in nature, including pastiches of Herodotus and, frequently, of the English poet Robert Browning.Template:Sfn He was a friend of the Jesuit priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who described him as "a fine scholar and an amiable man, free from every touch of pedantry".Template:Refn Who's Who listed his chief recreation as "light literature and the drama": he expressed regret, in one of his commentaries on Cicero, that no historical romance had yet been written on the relationship between Catullus and his lover Lesbia.Template:Sfn

Tyrrell was agnostic, though Stanford describes him as a "mild" one. In 1935, Newport J. D. White, who also served as catechist of Trinity, recalled giving one of Tyrrell's sons a failing grade in his religious examination: while Traill, whose son had received the same result, castigated White for daring to fail a fellow's son, Tyrrell thanked him, saying that "a gentleman's education" should include a grounding in Christianity.Template:Refn In 1903, during a period of debate over the "Irish University Question",Template:Efn Tyrrell published a sonnet called "Holy Ireland", in which he denigrated the influence of Catholicism upon the country. He expressed the same opinion in a book review of the same year, and attracted further censure when he attempted to write to defend himself from complaints against his words.Template:Sfn

Honours, legacy and assessment

Tyrrell was awarded honorary degrees or doctorates by the universities of Edinburgh (in 1884),Template:Sfn Queen's University of Ireland and Cambridge (in 1892),Template:Sfn Oxford (in 1893), St Andrew's (in 1906) and Durham (in 1907).Template:Sfn He is most remembered for his edition of the letters of Cicero,Template:Sfn though the work is generally considered to have been made largely obsolete by twentieth-century developments in textual criticism.Template:Sfn The Cambridge Concise History of English Literature describes Tyrrell's "devotion to ancient and modern literature ... combined with a keen wit and a felicitous style".Template:Sfn In 1941, Stanford described Tyrrell's as "the finest career in classical literature that the College [Trinity] has yet known".Template:Sfn

As an academic, Tyrrell advocated a conservative view of the curriculum characterised by "pure scholarship", a view of classical research which prioritised linguistic expertise and the study of ancient literary texts.Template:Sfnm In this he was supported by his Trinity colleagues Palmer, Thomas Maguire and John Isaac Beare, as well as Jebb and other Cambridge scholars, and opposed by Mahaffy, Bury and other historians, including Sayce and several of his Oxford colleagues. In the words of a twentieth-century history of Trinity, Tyrrell and his supporters "regarded history as a spare-time amusement and archaeology as mere manual labour".Template:Sfn He criticised other classical scholars for what he considered over-reliance upon the discoveries of archaeologists, writing negatively of "Schliemannism" and ironically comparing the Linear B tablets discovered at Knossos by Arthur Evans with the "baleful signs" given to the hero Bellerophon in the Iliad.Template:Sfn Tyrrell's work, along with that of other academics of the "Dublin School", has been praised for its mixture of rigour, common sense and humour, and rated as an important counterweight to the influence of German scholarship in British classical academia.Template:Sfn

The publication of was credited with helping to shift Trinity's reputation as the "silent sister", a disparaging nickname granted on account of the college's comparatively small record of scholarly work by comparison with the other ancient universities of the British Isles.Template:Sfn Similarly, his 1867 co-publication of Template:Sndits name referring to the nymphs who lived at the far western edge of the world in Greek mythologyTemplate:Sndwas the first substantial work of translation from English into Latin to come from Dublin: such exercises were considered a hallmark of the most prestigious classical education in the period.Template:Sfn

Notable students

Among Tyrrell's students were the future economist Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, who graduated from Trinity in 1865,Template:Sfn and the Jesuit priest John Sullivan.Template:Sfn He also taught the archaeologist William Ridgeway, the translator and educationalist W. J. M. Starkie, the classicists J. I. Beare, W. A. Goligher and G. W. Mooney, the papyrologist Josiah Gilbert Smyly, and Ernest Alton, later provost of Trinity.Template:Sfn Other future literary figures, including the poets Arthur Perceval Graves and T. W. Rolleston, the folklorist John Millington Synge and the writer William Kirkpatrick Magee, studied at Trinity during his tenure and may have attended his lectures.Template:Sfn

Along with Mahaffy and other fellows, Tyrrell was a mentor of Oliver St. John Gogarty, a medical student with a penchant for poetry and classical literature, who later became a writer.Template:Sfn On hearing an obscene limerick said to have been composed by Gogarty, Tyrrell, who enjoyed the irreverence of Latin epigrammatists like Martial and Catullus, praised Gogarty with a quotation from Shakespeare for his "service of the antique world".Template:RefnTemplate:Efn Tyrrell appears in Gogarty's semi-autobiographical novels As I Was Going Down Sackville Street and Tumbling in the Hay: in the latter, Gogarty describes him as a finely dressed epicure, popular with the students, and as "a worthy, if ever there was oneTemplate:Snd, which ... is the Greek for a gentleman".Template:Refn Gogarty also briefly mourns Tyrrell, along with Mahaffy and the Trinity philosopher Robert Macran, in his 1939 poem "Elegy on the Archpoet William Butler Yeats, Lately Dead".Template:Sfn

Tyrrell also taught the poet and playwright Oscar Wilde, who read classics at Trinity between 1871 and 1874.Template:Sfn According to Wilde's friend and biographer Frank Harris, Wilde described Mahaffy as a greater influence upon him, but Tyrrell as a better scholar: Harris quotes Wilde as calling him "intensely sympathetic and crammed with knowledge" and joking that "if he had known less, he would have been a poet".Template:Sfn After Wilde was imprisoned in May 1895 for gross indecency,Template:RefnTemplate:Efn Tyrrell signed Harris's petition of November of that year to Aretas Akers-Douglas, the Home Secretary, calling for his release; he later wrote a positive review of , Wilde's letter-memoir of his imprisonment.Template:Sfn

Works

Tyrrell's published works include:

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Works cited

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