Quick Facts
Biography
Martin Ferguson Smith OBE, MA, MLitt, LittD (Dublin), FSA, FRGS (born April 26, 1940) is an Irish philosopher, and epigraphist.
Smith is an internationally renowned and respected publisher and translator of Lucretius. He has edited the edition of William Henry Denham Rouse in the Loeb Classical Library and has published his own translation of De rerum natura.
He earned his Master of Letters from D. E. W. Wormell at the University of Dublin with a work Lucretius: The Man and his Mission. He was Professor of Classics at the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Durham from 1988 to 1995. Since 1995 he has been an emeritus professor and lives on Foula, an island of the Shetlands.
Smith is the discoverer and publisher of a considerable part of the Greek inscription that the epicurean philosopher Diogenes of Oinoanda published in his hometown Oinoanda in the mountains of Lycia in the 2nd century AD (first parts discovered in 1884 and published in 1892). The results were published in four books and numerous articles. After retirement, he worked with Jürgen Hammerstaedt of the University of Cologne to further excavate and reconstruct the inscription.
In the last few years Smith has produced studies on the writers Rose Macaulay, Virginia Woolf, and Dorothy L. Sayers as well as the artists Helen and Roger Fry.
Awards
In 2004 he was awarded the International Theodor Mommsen Prize for Herculaneum Papyrology. In 2007 he was awarded the Order of the British Empire for 'Services for Science'.
Works
- Lucretius, On the nature of things. Translated, with introduction and notes by Martin Ferguson Smith. Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis / Cambridge 1969, revised edition 2001, (extracts online). - (Prose Translation) - Revised by: Robert Todd, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2002.02.08
- Lucretius, De rerum natura. With an English translation by W. H. D. Rouse (first 1924). Revised by Martin Ferguson Smith. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Ma., London 1975, second edition 1982, reprinted with revisions 1992 (Loeb Classical Library 181).
- Diogenes of Oinoanda: The Epicurean inscription. Edited with introduction, translation, and notes by Martin Ferguson Smith. Naples 1993. ISBN 88-7088-270-5 (Newest and most scientific edition of the Greek text)
- Diogenes of Oinoanda: The Epicurean inscription. Supplement. Edited with introduction, translation, and notes by Martin Ferguson Smith. Naples, 2003. ISBN 88-7088-441-4
- Martin Ferguson Smith: The philosophical inscription of Diogenes of Oinoanda. (Tituli Asiae minoris supplementary volumes, volume 20). Vienna, 1996. ISBN 3-7001-2596-8
- Jürgen Hammerstaedt, Martin Ferguson Smith: The epicurean inscription of Diogenes of Oinoanda. Ten years of new discoveries and research. Habelt, Bonn, Germany, 2014. - Recommencement by: Holger Essler, (online); Tiziano Dorandi, (online).
- Dearest Jean. Rose Macaulay's letters to a cousin. Manchester University Press, 2011.
- Virginia Woolf's second visit to Greece. In: English Studies 92, Issue 1, 2011, 55-83.
- Sayers and the Somersham Pageant. In: SEVEN. An Anglo-American literary review 28, 2011.