The Classicism of Hugh Trevor-Roper
1 THE CLASSICISM OF HUGH TREVOR-ROPER S. J. V. Malloch* University of Nottingham, U.K. Abstract Hugh Trevor-Roper was educated as a classicist until he transferred to history, in which he made his reputation, after two years at Oxford. His schooling engendered in him a classicism which was characterised by a love of classical literature and style, but rested on a repudiation of the philological tradition in classical studies. This reaction helps to explain his change of intellectual career; his classicism, however, endured: it influenced his mature conception of the practice of historical studies, and can be traced throughout his life. This essay explores a neglected aspect of Trevor- Roper’s intellectual biography through his ‘Apologia transfugae’ (1973), which explains his rationale for abandoning classics, and published and unpublished writings attesting to his classicism, especially his first publication ‘Homer unmasked!’ (1936) and his wartime notebooks. I When the young Hugh Trevor-Roper expressed a preference for specialising in mathematics in the sixth form at Charterhouse, Frank Fletcher, the headmaster, told him curtly that ‘clever boys read classics’.1 The passion that he had already developed for Homer in the under sixth form spread to other Greek and Roman authors. In his final year at school he won two classical prizes and a scholarship that took him in 1932 to Christ Church, Oxford, to read classics, literae humaniores, then the most * Department of Classics, University of Nottingham, NG7 2RD. It was only by chance that I developed an interest in Hugh Trevor-Roper: in 2010 I happened upon his Letters from Oxford in a London bookstore and, reading them on the train home, was captivated by the world they evoked and the style of their composition.
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