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Sir Denys Lionel Page (11 May 19086 July 1978) was a British classicist and textual critic who served as the 34th Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge and the 35th Master of Jesus College, Cambridge. He is best known for his critical editions of the Greek lyric and Greek tragedy.
Coming from a middle-class family in Reading, Page studied classics at Christ Church, Oxford, and served the college as a lecturer for most of the 1930s. He spent the Second World War working on Ultra intelligence material at the Government Code and Cypher School based at Bletchley Park. In 1950, he was elected Regius Chair of Greek at Cambridge which he held until his retirement in 1973. Initially a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Page was appointed master of the university's Jesus College in 1959. He died of lung cancer in 1978.
Having published an edition of the poets Sappho and Alcaeus with fellow Oxford classicist Edgar Lobel, Page went on to write what became for some time the standard edition of the remaining Greek lyric poets, Poetae Melici Graeci ( PMG, 1962). His other notable publications include commentaries on Euripides Medea (1938) and Aeschylus Agamemnon (1957). In 1971, he was knight bachelor for his services to classical scholarship.
In 1926, he won a scholarship to study classics at Christ Church, Oxford. Although Page came from a modest background compared to most of his peers, he settled in well at the college and made a number of friends, including the future Lord Chancellor Quintin Hogg and the Labour politician Patrick Gordon Walker. Among his tutors at Oxford, the archaeologist John Beazley and the Hellenist John Dewar Denniston exerted the greatest influence on his future work. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1930 and was awarded a Derby Scholarship. The award enabled him to spend a year at the University of Vienna with the German philologist Ludwig Radermacher.
Page assumed an active role in college affairs. In 1936, he strongly opposed the candidacy of the Irish scholar E. R. Dodds for the Regius Chair of Greek which was hosted at Christ Church. Dodds was elected to the position in spite of Page's reservations. In 1937 he was appointed to the office of junior censor at the college – the Censor Naturalis Philosophiae, responsible for undergraduate discipline. However, he resigned the position a year later to marry Katharine Elizabeth Dohan, daughter of the American archaeologist Edith Hall Dohan. They had four daughters, one of whom is the Assyriology Stephanie Dalley.
Similarly to his time at Oxford, Page actively participated in the running of the university. Having been elected to the council of Trinity College soon after his arrival, he was chosen to replace classicist E. M. W. Tillyard as the Master of Jesus College in 1959. He held this position until his retirement in 1973. Many contemporaries considered Page suitable for the position of vice-chancellor, but he was never elected. According to classicist Hugh Lloyd-Jones, his failure to obtain the office was a consequence of his staunch opposition to the students involved in the Garden House riot, a violent protest against the Greek military junta. Having played as a bowler while at Christ Church, Page also served as the president of Cambridge University Cricket Club from 1971 to 1973.
His tenure at Cambridge saw the publication of a number of books on Greek poetry. In 1955, Lobel and Page published a critical edition of the poems of the Lesbos poets Alcaeus and Sappho, followed by a book on the same authors ( Sappho and Alcaeus). He was also the sole author of studies on Homer Odyssey ( The Homeric Odyssey, 1955) and the Iliad ( History and the Homeric Iliad, 1959). His most comprehensive work, an edition of all lyric poets apart from the Lesbians, appeared in 1962 under the title of Poetae Melici Graeci. Resuming his earlier work on the tragedian Euripides, he took over from the recently deceased Denniston an edition of Aeschylus Agamemnon, which was published in 1957 as a rival to Eduard Fraenkel edition of the play.
An accomplished textual critic, Page was not among the leading literary critics of his generation. His focus lay narrowly on philological questions and, according to Lloyd-Jones, he sometimes exhibited a tendency towards dogmatism when dealing with literary matters. His 1955 book The Homeric Odyssey, in the view of contemporary reviewer J. A. Davison, suffers from these weaknesses and is among his most poorly received publications.
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