Angus Morton Bowie (born 1949) is a British academic, Emeritus Lobel fellow in

Classics Classics or classical studies is the study of classical antiquity. In the Western world, classics traditionally refers to the study of Classical Greek and Roman literature and their related original languages, Ancient Greek and Latin. Classics ...

The Queen's College, Oxford The Queen's College is a Colleges of the University of Oxford, constituent college of the University of Oxford, England. The college was founded in 1341 by Robert de Eglesfield in honour of Philippa of Hainault. It is distinguished by its pred ...

. His research interests include

Homer Homer (; grc, Ὅμηρος , ''Hómēros'') (born ) was a Greek poet who is credited as the author of the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey'', two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Homer is considered one of the ...

Herodotus Herodotus ( ; grc, , }; BC) was an ancient Greek historian and geographer from the Greek city of Halicarnassus, part of the Persian Empire (now Bodrum, Turkey) and a later citizen of Thurii in modern Calabria ( Italy). He is known f ...

Greek lyric Greek lyric is the body of lyric poetry written in dialects of Ancient Greek. It is primarily associated with the early 7th to the early 5th centuries BC, sometimes called the "Lyric Age of Greece", but continued to be written into the Hellenisti ...

tragedy Tragedy (from the grc-gre, τραγῳδία, ''tragōidia'', ''tragōidia'') is a genre of drama based on human suffering and, mainly, the terrible or sorrowful events that befall a main character. Traditionally, the intention of tragedy ...

and

comedy Comedy is a genre of fiction that consists of discourses or works intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter, especially in theatre, film, stand-up comedy, television, radio, books, or any other entertainment medium. The term o ...

Virgil Publius Vergilius Maro (; traditional dates 15 October 7021 September 19 BC), usually called Virgil or Vergil ( ) in English, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He composed three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: t ...

Greek mythology A major branch of classical mythology, Greek mythology is the body of myths originally told by the Ancient Greece, ancient Greeks, and a genre of Ancient Greek folklore. These stories concern the Cosmogony, origin and Cosmology#Metaphysical co ...

structuralism In sociology, anthropology, archaeology, history, philosophy, and linguistics, structuralism is a general theory of culture and methodology that implies that elements of human culture must be understood by way of their relationship to a broader ...

, narratology, and other theories of literature.

Biography

After attending

St Peter's School, York St Peter's School is a co-educational independent boarding and day school (also referred to as a public school), in the English City of York, with extensive grounds on the banks of the River Ouse. Founded by St Paulinus of York in AD 627, ...

, Bowie studied for his undergraduate and graduate degrees at

Emmanuel College, Cambridge Emmanuel College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college was founded in 1584 by Sir Walter Mildmay, Chancellor of the Exchequer to Elizabeth I. The site on which the college sits was once a priory for Dominican mon ...

, under the academic supervision of

P. E. Easterling Patricia Elizabeth Easterling, FBA (née Fairfax; born 11 March 1934) is an English classical scholar, recognised as a particular expert on the work of Sophocles. She was Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge from 1994 to 2001 ...

. He was employed as a Lecturer from 1976 at the Greek Department of the

University of Liverpool , mottoeng = These days of peace foster learning , established = 1881 – University College Liverpool1884 – affiliated to the federal Victoria Universityhttp://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukla/2004/4 University of Manchester Act 200 ...

for five years. He received his PhD in 1979 and moved to Queen's College, Oxford, in 1981. In 1987 he taught a semester at Berkeley. Apart from Lobel Fellow and Tutor in Classics (from Praelector to Associate Professor), he also served as Senior Tutor (1981–1987) and Fellow Librarian at The Queen's College, as Chair of the

Faculty of Classics A faculty is a division within a university or college comprising one subject area or a group of related subject areas, possibly also delimited by level (e.g. undergraduate). In American usage such divisions are generally referred to as colleges ...

(2011–2014), and as Assessor of the University of Oxford for a year. An international conference on Greek comedy in honour of Bowie took place in May 2017. His younger brother,

Andrew Andrew is the English form of a given name common in many countries. In the 1990s, it was among the top ten most popular names given to boys in List of countries where English is an official language, English-speaking countries. "Andrew" is freq ...

, is an academic philosopher. On 4 May 2018, he delivered a eulogy at the funeral of his long-time partner, Peter Bayley, onetime

Drapers Professor of French The Drapers Professorship of French is a professorship in the study of the French language at the University of Cambridge. It was founded in 1919 by a donation from the Worshipful Company of Drapers, and was the first chair in French established at ...

at the University of Cambridge.

Contributions

Bowie's first book (based on his doctoral thesis) addressed the relationship between the language of the Lesbian poets,

, and spoken Aeolic. He showed that the language of

Sappho Sappho (; el, Σαπφώ ''Sapphō'' ; Aeolic Greek ''Psápphō''; c. 630 – c. 570 BC) was an Archaic Greek poet from Eresos or Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. Sappho is known for her Greek lyric, lyric poetry, written to be sung while ...

and Alcaeus was a true poetic diction, the traditions of which stem form a poetic ''Koine'', and that the origins of this ''Koine'' are presumably to be sought back in the Mycenaean period at least. His most influential book has been ''Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual and Comedy'' (1993; reprinted in 1994, 1995, 1996, 2005; and translated into Modern Greek in 1999), in which he traces patterns from mythology, rituals, and rites of passage in the extant Aristophanic comedies (usually found in a reversed form than expected). In a decade when structuralism was seen as outdated and restrictive by classicists, and deconstruction was becoming more and more popular, this book contributed to a positive re-evaluation of structuralist approaches to literature. Later (and contemporary) scholarship in the field has confirmed that "Future studies of myth and ritual in Aristophanes and other poets of Old Comedy, will surely be indebted to Bowie's important first steps". Bowie's Cambridge commentary on

is "particularly strong and up to date in its synthesis of historical and literary observations. In this sense his work outshines earlier, unsatisfactory English commentaries on Book 8". As for ''Odyssey'' XIII-XIV, also in the Cambridge 'green and yellow' series, "the text is Bowie's own, though he has not consulted the MSS. It is provided with a spare apparatus criticus. The bibliography is abundant and modern. The notes that accompany the commentary are exemplary. Bowie gives just the right amount of information, whether it is on the history of the word, or its usage, or background of a custom. Every so often he intersperses a prose summary of the text coming up, marvels of compression and lucidity."

Monographs and edited volumes

* (1981) ''The Poetic Dialect of Sappho and Alcaeus'' (New York). * (1993) ''Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual, and Comedy'' (Cambridge; New York). * (2004) with I. De Jong and R. Nünlist (eds.), ''Narrators, Narratees, and Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature'' (Leiden). * (2007) ''Herodotus: Histories, Book VIII'' (Cambridge). * (2013) ''Homer: Odyssey, Books XIII and XIV'' (Cambridge). * (2019) ''Homer: Iliad, Book III'' (Cambridge). Forthcoming: * ''Homer: Iliad 21–24'' (Greek and Latin Writers Series: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla and Arnoldo Mondadori Editore)

References

External links

* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Bowie, Angus 1949 births Living people People educated at St Peter's School, York Alumni of Emmanuel College, Cambridge Classical scholars of the University of Liverpool Fellows of the Queen's College, Oxford Classical scholars of the University of Oxford