The name E.R. Dodds recalls some of classical scholarship's most epoch-transcending titles: The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) as well as the Oxford commentaries of Plato's Gorgias (1959) and Euripides’ Bacchae (1960). But everybody has to start somewhere, and Rediscovering E.R. Dodds is an invitation to consider not only Dodds the enshrined scholar, but also Dodds the human, himself once a nobody, who lived in trying times and had to overcome many hurdles. These hurdles and his beginner's luck, panache and intellectual strategies are retraced in Stray and Pelling's first chapter, a primer on Dodds's curriculum, and Stray's chapter ‘An Irishman Abroad’. Long before Dodds's public-facing intellectual persona would take on the towering contours it retains today, Dodds was an Ulsterman of modest means at Oxford during the First World War.

Asked to stay away from Oxford for supporting the Irish nationalists of the Easter Uprising in 1916, Dodds spent much of 1917 in Dublin, where he frequented literary salons. In his autobiography Missing Persons Dodds describes this time as a return to his origins, freshly sampling their delights and surprises (like a life-changing meeting with the journalist, linguist and Plotinus translator Stephen MacKenna) in a chapter titled ‘Rediscovering Dublin’. Reprising this title, the editors introduce Rediscovering Dodds as aiming to complement Dodds's autobiography. It has to be said that Dodds's autobiography is light, brief, more a series of sketches or snapshots, and of those, only a few; and what is more, autobiography by its nature has a delicate and complex relationship with the truth. So, while I do not propose to knock Rediscovering Dodds's raison d’être, I would venture a guess that complementing is not the whole point of this collection, which goes far beyond that stated aim.

Chapter 3 by R. Gagné, ‘The Battle for the Irrational: Greek Religion 1920–50’, is by far the longest contribution and something of a pièce de résistance within the book, addressing issues central to Classics itself and not just Dodds's memoir. Gagné surveys the historiography of Greek religion from the perspective of ‘the Irrational’ as a concept, its shifting meanings across the French, German, occasionally Austrian, Italian as well as the English ideological academic landscapes. Gagné's chosen slice of history ranges from what he calls the belle époque (pre-war Europe and up until about 1920) of German folklorists, late Victorian anthropology and evolutionary theory, via the interwar years characterised by the spreading interest in psychology, psychoanalysis and the interior religious life of antiquity, to Neohumanism (also called ‘Third Humanism’ – of the ‘Third Reich’) and its antisemitic currents, when Greek religious studies made it their business to argue for Christianity's Hellenic origins as a way to write Judaism out of history, and its temporal bookend is the Parisian Centre Gernet (established by J.-P. Vernant in 1964). Gagné's inquiry excavates a dizzying number of names of forgotten scholars and their work, and covers a phenomenal range of parallel, criss-crossing, part divergent and part entwined academic currents. And yet, readers are left wanting more.

We might have seen Gagné engage more critically with the legacy of Religious Studies’ disciplinary enmeshments with colonial history, and we might have seen some discussion of the continuities between evolutionism, colonial anthropology, racism and antisemitism, or an arc to Dodds writing educational policy for post-war Germany, and his appreciation of Bruno Snell. The latter topic is, in any case, covered by D. Phillips's chapter. The former touches on a far bigger issue, on which readers might want to start with E. Varto (Brill's Companion to Classics and Early Anthropology [2018]). Gagné's piece is quietly spectacular, in that it begins to address a long-overdue need for detailed and in-depth engagement with the issues of Classics’ formative role in the story of anthropology. As such, it does and does not sit easily in a book about Dodds, whose impact on the field it mentions only tangentially, while simultaneously embodying a scholarly extension of it.

Dodds wrote poetry and frequented literary circles in both Ireland and England, becoming a personal friend of, among others, the eccentric poet Edith Sitwell, Irish poet and playwright Louis MacNeice as well as W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden. T. Walker's chapter dives into Dodds's archival papers at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, to emerge with Dodds's thoughts on the better and worse incarnations of ‘the irrational’ in the work of different poets. P. McDonald's chapter takes us to a performance of a badly staged Agamemnon, Dodds, Yeats and MacNeice quipping, and the inner workings of the literary friendships; and J. Dillon shines a light on Dodds's relationship with S. MacKenna, the Plotinus translator. All three draw upon archival materials as well as Dodds's autobiography, and the book's closing chapter presents a clutch of memoir-essays and personal recollections of Dodds by other scholars. One gets an intimate impression of Dodds as a devoted friend, a facilitator of meetings, orchestrator of publications, connector of people, worlds and writings arising out of very disparate contexts.

One of Dodds's more secretively pursued passions was the study of psychics and clairvoyance. He entertained an active association with London's Society for Psychic Research (SPR), ‘including five decades as one of the Society's senior decision makers’ (p. 89), as we learn in N.J. Lowe's chapter. Although this was a lifelong interest, Dodds kept his psychic and paranormal pursuits carefully segregated from his official academic career. His papers on psychic matters are in the SPR collection in Cambridge, housed separately from his Oxford Bodleian papers. Lowe's chapter, ‘The Rational Irrationalist: Dodds and the Paranormal’, is eye-opening, combining archival research in the Cambridge SPR library with incisive readings of Dodds's autobiography. Among notable omissions and suspiciously vague timelines, Lowe uncovers Dodds as a somewhat less reliable narrator than we might like him to be, implicitly calling into question everything we think we know about Dodds's life and intellectual affiliations.

But ‘a book can be great even if, in the long term, nobody believes its most exciting claims’ (p. 127), one can agree with R. Parker, whose chapter revisits the intellectual and institutional landscape immediately surrounding (more punctually than in Gagné's panorama) the genesis of The Greeks and the Irrational, spotlighting inter alia Dodds's keen reading of Erich Fromm. S. Scullion retraces Dodds's work on Greek tragedy as a themed set, from a 1925 Hippolytus paper that cited Freud's (then brand-new) work on the Id to ‘On misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex’ written in the mature stage of his career. Taking readers back to World War II Oxford, R.B. Rutherford describes the circumstances of Dodds's work on the Gorgias commentary and his ripening views of philosophy's serious responsibility to society, and of Plato as an author earnestly committed to particular ethical and political ideals (instead of metatextually detached from his characters). T. Morgan's ‘Pagans and Christians: Fifty Years of Anxiety’ investigates the patrologist scholars who influenced Dodds's religious thinking, and how he in turn influenced their field. A. Sheppard parses Dodds's role in Neoplatonic Studies as a connector-node between people in a network that only he could fully oversee, foregrounding Dodds's energetic and purposeful agency, of which facets are reflected all across the pages of this collection.

Rediscovering Dodds sits just in between the stools of history of scholarship, of ideas, biography and memoir. One recommendation I have for students wishing to read this is to have Wikipedia, Google or some other reference machine at the ready. In the process of rediscovering Dodds, readers come across a barrage of names of long forgotten people, clubs, societies, artistic and political groupings, publications, institutes, traditions and events that were once common currency, but are no more. The publisher could have included a glossary of proper nouns, or three-word explanations in the text, to satisfy basic reader curiosity. It is a most perturbing side-effect of rediscovering Dodds that one has to note, in passing, the oblivion of many others – it is a sobering reminder that, sooner than we think, we will once again be nothing.