In Memoriam Eric Handley, 12 November 1926 – 17 January 2013; Fellow of Trinity 1984 – 2013 We print below a slightly revised version of the obituary by Professor Richard Hunter (2001) that appeared anonymously in the Times on 6 February 2013, as well as some further observations by Dr Neil Hopkinson (1983).
Eric Handley was educated, like so many other classical scholars, at King Edward’s School Birmingham, and then during the hardest of the war years at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was taught by the legendary scholar of Hellenistic poetry, A.S.F. Gow; Handley liked to recall that the fact that he was only sixteen when he went to Trinity allowed him, as an alleged infant, to receive extra milk, helpful no doubt in rowing on the Cam, an activity of which he was fond. From Cambridge he went directly to a lectureship at University College London, where he remained for nearly forty years, broken only by Visiting Professorships in the United States and Australia; in 1968 he became Professor of Greek at UCL, and its fortunes and those of the Institute of Classical Studies remained very close to his heart throughout his life. Three very distinguished older colleagues at UCL, Otto Skutsch, the outstanding figure in the study of early Latin literature, T.B.L. Webster, a specialist in the Greek theatre, and the papyrologist Eric Turner were fundamental influences in shaping the future of Handley’s research, in which Greek comedy always occupied a central place. Texts of the greatest figure of Attic New Comedy, Menander, do not survive to the modern day in manuscripts, although Menander’s influence, through
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Fellows, Staff a n d St u den ts
Richard Hunter Eric Handley, Regius Profesor of Greek at Cambridge 1984–1994, who was at the forefront of the rediscovery of the New Comedy of Menander, has died at the age of 86. Handley was one of the best known ambassadors of British Classics, having served for seventeen years as Director of the Institute of Classical Studies in London, a home away from home for countless scholars and graduate students from all over the world, and for nine years as the Foreign Secretary of the British Academy.