Martin Ferguson Smith

A documentary film, A Gigantic Jigsaw Puzzle: The Epicurean Inscription of Diogenes of Oinanda, directed by Nazim Güveloğlu was released in 2015 and can be viewed at http://www.metu.edu.tr/videos/giganticpuzzle. Smith takes a prominent and completely unrehearsed part in the film, which has won awards in Athens, Split, Sicily, and elsewhere.

Since 2010 Smith, while continuing to be closely involved with classical studies and especially Diogenes of Oinoanda, has also established a considerable reputation for his highly original research and writing on a variety of 20th-century figures. These include the writers Rose Macaulay, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Katharine Tynan, the artists Helen and Roger Fry and Tristram Hillier, the art critic Clive Bell, the trade unionist and social reformer Madeleine Symons, and Richard Williams Reynolds, schoolteacher of J. R. R. Tolkien.

Smith has published his work on Diogenes’ inscription in five books and about 75 articles. The latest book and the series of articles in the journal Epigraphica Anatolica (2007–2012, 2016, 2018), in which the numerous and important discoveries made since 2007 are presented, were co-authored with Jürgen Hammerstaedt.

One is the Roman poet Lucretius (c.98–c.55 BC), author of De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things). Smith’s translation of the six-book work was first published in England in 1969 and reissued, with revisions, in the United States in 2001. He is also the editor of the Loeb Classical Library text of the poem, accompanied with an introduction, critical and explanatory notes, bibliography, and index, and with the translation of W. H. D. Rouse (1924) revised to make it accord with the new text.

Smith married Elizabeth Mary Dempsey (1935–1997) of Dublin on 4 April 1964. The marriage was dissolved in 1981. He has a daughter and a granddaughter. Since 1995 he has lived on the remote and rugged island of Foula in Shetland. In "retirement" he has continued to be very active in research and writing, not only on classical subjects, but also on modern ones. In 2007 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) "for services to scholarship".

From 1963 to 1988 Smith taught Classics at the University College of North Wales, Bangor (now Bangor University), from 1977 as Professor. From 1988 he was Professor of Classics at Durham University. Problems with his eyesight compelled him to take early retirement from university teaching in 1995. He continues to be associated with Durham University as Professor Emeritus in the Department of Classics and Ancient History.

Martin Ferguson Smith, OBE, FRGS, FRHistS, FSA (born 26 April 1940, Birmingham, England) is a British scholar and writer. After education at Shrewsbury School (1953–1958) he proceeded to Trinity College, Dublin (1958–1963), where he was a Foundation Scholar in Classics and won several academic prizes, including the Tyrrell Memorial Gold Medal for Greek and Latin verse and prose composition (1960). After gaining First Class Honours and a Moderatorship Prize (1962), he carried out postgraduate research under Donald Ernest Wilson Wormell for a thesis entitled "Lucretius: The Man and His Mission" (MLitt, Dublin, 1965).

The other author is Diogenes of Oinoanda, who, probably early in the second century AD, presented his exposition of Epicurean philosophy in a Greek inscription carved on the wall of a stoa (colonnade) in the centre of his home-city in northern Lycia, in the mountains of southwest Asia Minor (Turkey). The inscription, which may have occupied 260 square metres of wall-space and contained about 25,000 words, is the longest known from the ancient world. The wall that carried the inscription fell down or (more likely) was deliberately demolished in later antiquity, and its blocks were reused as building material in various parts of the city. 88 pieces of the inscription were discovered by French and Austrian epigraphists between 1884 and 1895, but many decades of inactivity followed. In 1968 Smith inaugurated a long series of new investigations at Oinoanda that have now continued for half a century and much more than tripled the number of known fragments of one of the most remarkable documents to have survived from the ancient world. The latest tally (October 2017) is 305. Smith worked first by himself (1968–1973), then in collaboration with the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara (1974–2003), and most recently (from 2007) with international teams led, until his early death in 2016, by Martin Bachmann, vice-director of the German Archaeological Institute in Istanbul. In this third phase Smith has worked in very close collaboration, both on and off the site, with Jürgen Hammerstaedt of the University of Cologne.