Sir Fergus Millar (1935-2019): a tribute

Sir Fergus Millar, who died this week aged 84, was one of the greatest contemporary historians of the ancient world. Editor of the prestigious Journal of Roman Studies between 1975 and 1979, a Fellow of the British Academy from 1976, Camden Professor of Ancient History at Oxford from 1984 to 2002, and a Knight of the Realm from 2010, he was about as close as you could get to academic royalty. His field-defining contributions extended to many areas of ancient history, including the politics of the Roman republic, Roman imperial history, the Roman Near East, Roman political thought and its later reception, the history of the Jews, and even the background to the rise of Islam. (Probably the best, most-comprehensive introduction to his work in all these areas is the three-volume collection of his essays, Rome, the Greek World, and the East.)

As an undergraduate and then graduate student in Oriental Studies in the early 2010s, I got to know his work, if not the man himself, though I would often see him in the Oriental Institute, hard at work on his latest project. Taking a paper on early Islamic history, I remember learning from one of his many path-breaking articles that it was the great Jewish historian Josephus, in the first century of the Christian era, who first identified the Arabs as the descendants of Ishmael. In November 2017 I was fortunate enough to be elected to an Examination Fellowship at All Souls. Amidst the many kind messages of welcome and congratulation from current and former Fellows, one particularly stood out. Sir Fergus, I was told, had heard about my election, and would like to meet to talk about my work on Islamic history. He had himself been a Prize Fellow (as Examination Fellows were then called) of All Souls from 1958 to 1964, in a golden age for the college which also saw the election of the historians Keith Thomas – author of Religion and the Decline of Magic – and Peter Brown – the biographer of Augustine who practically invented the field of Late Antique history. 

During our first meeting, Fergus listened attentively as I explained the topic of my doctoral thesis to him, making pertinent observations and posing challenging questions, even though the subject I was working on – medieval Islamic mysticism – was outside his own already very broad field of study. When the conversation turned to his own life and work, he offered sage advice on how to make the most of the All Souls fellowship. (The mastery of languages – and difficult ones, if possible – was one of the vital skills of a historian, he thought, and so he encouraged me to develop my Hebrew.) Over the next year-and-a-half we kept in touch, and only last week he still found the time, despite his ill health, to respond to an invitation to an event in October in memory of Samuel Stern, the great Hungarian Jewish scholar of Islam, who was elected to a Research Fellowship All Souls in the same year as Fergus won his Prize Fellowship. Fergus promised he’d be there if his health allowed.

Judging to the tributes paid to him following his death, my experience was by no means unusual. “I was so intimidated when I finally got to meet him,” the popular historian of antiquity Tom Holland wrote on Twitter, “and yet he couldn’t have been kinder or more generous…He offered me support at a very rough time, when he had never even met me, and I will always be more grateful to him for it than I can say.” (Millar wrote an endorsement for Holland’s controversial 2012 book on the origins of Islam, which he called “required reading”.) Andrew James Sillett, a lecturer in Roman literature and history at Oxford, told of how, as a sixth former hoping to read Classics, he had naively emailed Sir Fergus asking for advice on what to read in preparation for his Oxford interview, and the Camden Professor had swiftly replied with a list of recommended readings. Peter Sarris, Professor of Byzantine History at Cambridge, similarly revealed that Millar had insisted on finishing a reference he was writing for a younger scholar before checking himself into hospital to be treated for a heart attack. And the Roman historian Liv Maria Yarrow remembered how he would always take the trouble to introduce people to those he knew, so much so that he once introduced an amused married couple to one another in a lift.

As kind and as generous as he was a person, Millar did not shrink from holding or expressing a view on controversial topics, particularly in connection to education. During one of our conversations, he told me of how grateful he was for the rigorous schooling he’d received – at Loretto School, the oldest boarding school in Scotland – in classics and English prose composition, and how he doubted whether the educational approaches favoured in more recent decades provided similarly adequate preparation for further study.

Unsurprisingly, he was particularly interested in the future of classics and ancient history as academic disciplines, and here his great contribution was to call for an expansion of our understanding of what constitutes the culture of the ancient world – and of the sources used to teach students about that world. “In a ‘Western’ culture based on a (very partial) fusion of Judaeo-Christian and classical traditions,” he wrote in the epilogue to his collected essays, “it is puzzling to reflect on how few students of Greek will ever have been offered the chance to read a private letter or papyrus, an honorific inscription put up by a Greek city – or the Septuagint, or the New Testament, or Josephus’ Antiquities, or Eusebius.” In his presidential address to the Classical Association in 1993 (printed in the first volume of his collected essays), he put the point even more sharply: “How many classes for the translation of Greek prose, I wonder, have ever found before them the opening words of the first chapter of Genesis?” And after quoting the Greek words of the Septuagint, he went on: “Yet this view of the nature of the world and of the divinity was, as time went on, to be at least as important, for millions of people whose language of culture was Greek – and later, as we will see, Latin – as anything contained in the pagan classics. It is therefore essential for us to see it too as part of ancient culture.” Such a view constitutes an alternative – and, it seems to me, useful and valid – perspective on the issue of ‘diversifying’ the classical curriculum.

Nor was he afraid to wade into the choppy waters of higher education policy: “In the modern British university,” he wrote in a 2013 letter to the Times, “it is not that funding is sought in order to carry out research, but that research projects are formulated in order to get funding. I am not joking when I say that a physics lecturer called Einstein, who just thought about the Universe, would risk being sacked because he brought in no grants.” He laid responsibility for this regression at the door of successive governments, whose policies – particularly the removal of tenure – had meant that academics were “faced with toeing whatever the current line is or losing their jobs.”

Yet if there is hope for the future of the humanities, then it lies in the example of scholars like Sir Fergus Millar: a master of several languages (including Hebrew and Aramaic as well as Greek and Latin), a careful and perceptive reader of primary sources, an academic who – as Mary Beard recalled in the TLS – knew how to disagree courteously, and a devoted and beloved mentor to many. It’s an example we’d do well not to forget.