Readers of BMCR may be familiar with the 2nd-century AD Epicurean philosopher Diogenes, a citizen of Oinoanda, a town in what is now southwestern Turkey and was once Lycia. If so, this is probably due to Diogenes’ commitment to the revelation of his doctrine on the enormous inscription in a stoa in his home town. This inscription, which may have amounted to 25,000 words (the largest known from the ancient world), formed part of a wall that was later demolished and its stones scattered. Discovered in part in the 1880s, it has more recently been excavated, assembled, edited and published by teams of archaeologists and epigraphers led by Martin Ferguson Smith. Since 1968 Smith and his colleagues have been discovering inscribed stones, over 300 in all, which by now probably amount to about a third of the original wall. The Oinoanda inscription has a claim to be regarded as a wonder of the ancient world, not just because of its sheer size—over 250 square metres in all—but also as a unique source of information about Diogenes’ doctrines.
Smith’s autobiography has been published alongside an annotated English translation of the inscription, the latest of his many contributions to the analysis of Diogenes’ thinking.[1] The contents of the two books overlap in two ways. First, the autobiography, as one might expect, includes a substantial account of Smith’s work on the inscription, beginning with his first visit to Oinoanda in 1968. Second, much of the life recorded in Martin the Epicurean has been informed, as the title suggests, by his adherence to Epicureanism. This is referred to in his narrative but is also hinted at in the cover image of a drift of flowers in the fields of his home on the island of Foula in Shetland, which serves to remind the reader that the school Epicurus founded in Athens was known as the Garden.
Much of the life-story reported here follows a conventional pattern: a detailed narrative of family life, schooling, academic achievement. At times the detail can seem excessive, as in the account of the author’s birth, where we are given not only the date but the exact time and his birth weight. The account of his time at Shrewsbury School paints a grim picture of actual and threatened sexual abuse, but also of the inspired eccentricity of his teacher Frank McEachran (‘Kek’) and his passion for memorised poetry (‘spells’).[2] Smith’s undergraduate years at Trinity College Dublin were much happier, and he was lucky in his teachers, W.B. Stanford, H.W. Parke, and D.E.W. Wormell, the last of whom introduced him to Lucretius. Like Shrewsbury, Trinity had its resident eccentric, the historian R.B. McDowell (1913-2011), the Junior Dean in Smith’s time there, a man whose verbal mannerisms were much mimicked.[3] At both school and university, Smith excelled in Latin and Greek, and it is refreshing to read the long line of awards that he gained: no false modesty there, just a full record of high achievement. He is however also frank about occasions when he acted in ways he now sees as shameful.
Smith’s academic career began at the University College of North Wales, Bangor (1963-88), where he worked in a small department of six staff, including R.E. Wycherley and M.L. Clarke. He had a happy time there and made friends in several of the other colleges in the federal University of Wales, but comments that after 25 years of service, he was given ‘not a word of thanks.’ In 1988 he moved to a chair at Durham University, founded in 1832 and so the third oldest in England. Here too he had agreeable colleagues, including Peter Rhodes (Ancient History) and Tony Woodman (Latin). The student intake came from a wider catchment area than at Bangor and included ex-pupils from public (i.e. private) schools who were likely to have studied ‘full Classics’ (Latin, Greek, Ancient History). However, problems with his eyesight that had begun at his graduation grew worse, and on medical advice he took early retirement in 1994.
Smith had been brought up as a Quaker (his mother’s family were related to the Cadburys), but at Trinity Lucretius led him to the Epicureanism celebrated in the title of his book, and since then he has, like Housman, regarded himself as ‘a high-church atheist’. He gained an MLitt for a thesis on Lucretius and went on to publish a translation of De Rerum Natura (1969) and then a Loeb edition (1975). By then he had become intrigued by references to Diogenes in his Lucretian reading and had begun to visit Oinoanda. From 1968 till his final visit in 2012 he returned there almost annually. His narrative offers an excellent account of the joys and pains of the work on the ‘gigantic jigsaw puzzle’ of the inscription. The joys included, as well as those of discovery, his warm relations with the local villagers and the pleasure of collaboration with other scholars; the pains, the sheer difficulty of the work, being badly let down by one collaborator, the trials of travelling to and from a remote upland site, and cumbrous dealings with Turkish officials.
Pains and pleasures also feature in Smith’s account of his personal relationships. A first marriage was often difficult and eventually failed; a second was immediately annulled when he realised that his Romanian bride wanted only to gain British citizenship. The greatest pleasure came from the birth of the daughter of his first marriage, who has been, he candidly declares, of even greater importance to him than Diogenes and Oinoanda. Such bonds surely assume a special importance for a man who for the last 30 years has lived in self-imposed isolation on the island of Foula, one of the most remote places in the United Kingdom and on the same latitude as the southern coast of Greenland. Foula has neither doctor nor nurse, and Smith has no access to a television or smartphone, though he has a remarkable collection of Lucretiana and has recently gained an efficient broadband connection. He might be seen as a hermit, but he is an Epicurean, and certainly no stylite.
After his retirement in 1995 Smith continued to work on Diogenes, but chance also led him into research on 20th-century English writers. His paternal grandmother was a cousin of Thomas Babington Macaulay, and letters written by the novelist Rose Macaulay (1881-1958), most famous for The Towers of Trebizond (1956), had descended in his family and eventually reached Smith in the late 1980s. He edited the letters, written to her cousin Jean Smith, and they were published in 2011.[4] This led Smith into new territory and ended with his publishing several articles on Virginia Woolf and other members of the Bloomsbury set. His research in this area led to his finding that some of the received wisdom on this subject was incorrect, something that led him to issue critiques of previous accounts.[5] Some of this work, as on Woolf’s visit to Athens, in a sense took Smith back from the 20th century to the classical world.
This is the autobiography of a scholar who has both studied and practised Epicureanism. The final sentences of his book deserve to be quoted:
The only thing I dread is outliving my physical or mental capacities and losing my ability to live independently, both for my own sake and for the sake of those who might feel obliged to shoulder the burden of looking after me when my life is no longer worth living. To avoid that, living on Foula may be advantageous, in that its remoteness reduces the chances of being resuscitated.
Notes
[1] Urbi et Orbi: The Epicurean Inscription and Prescription of Diogenes of Oinoanda. Rome: TAB Edizioni 2026.
[2] McEachran (1900-75; see ODNB), a friend of T.S. Eliot, taught W.H. Auden in the 1920s and Mary Beard in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His best-known books were Spells (1954) and More Spells (1971).
[3] If Smith’s narrative had not been almost entirely free of annotation, it might have mentioned A. Leonard (ed.), The Junior Dean R. B. McDowell: Encounters with a Legend (Dublin: Lilliput, 2003).
[4] M.F. Smith (ed.), Dearest Jean: Rose Macaulay’s Letters to a Cousin (Manchester UP, 2011).
[5] Some of his articles were collected in his In and Out of Bloomsbury: Biographical Essays on Twentieth-Century Writers and Artists (Manchester UP, 2021).