Robert Yelverton Tyrrell

Robert Yelverton Tyrrell FBA
Born	(1844-01-21)21 January 1844 Ballingarry, County Tipperary, Ireland
Died	19 September 1914(1914-09-19) (aged 70)
Occupation	Classical scholar
Relatives	George Tyrrell (cousin)
Academic background
Alma mater	Trinity College, Dublin
Academic work
Institutions	Trinity College, Dublin
Notable students	Francis Ysidro Edgeworth Louis Claude Purser Oscar Wilde

Robert Yelverton Tyrrell FBA (/ˈtɪɹ.əl/ TIRR-əl; 21 January 1844 – 19 September 1914) was an Irish classical scholar who was Regius Professor of Greek at Trinity College, Dublin.

Early life

Robert Yelverton Tyrrell was born on 21 January 1844 in Ballingarry in County Tipperary, Ireland. His middle name of "Yelverton" was taken from his godmother's surname; she was a descendant of the judge, legal scholar and peer Barry Yelverton. Robert Tyrrell was a first cousin to the disgraced modernist writer and excommunicated Jesuit priest George Tyrrell.

Tyrrell was the son of Elizabeth Tyrrell (née Shea) and of Henry Tyrrell, a curate in Ballingarry. Soon after Robert's birth, Henry Tyrrell was appointed as rector of Kinnitty in County Offaly. He died in 1849 of cholera, having caught the disease in Dublin, where it had broken out the same year and to where he had travelled in order to administer the last rites to his brother-in-law. The remaining family, consisting of three sons, three daughters and Tyrrell's mother, moved to Dublin.

Tyrrell was educated at home by his two elder brothers, then briefly at a private school on Hume Street in Dublin, before matriculating at the city's Trinity College, in 1860, aged sixteen. He obtained a classical scholarship at the end of his first year: an unusual achievement for a first-year student and particularly rare for one of seventeen. He graduated in 1864 with a Double First, achieving the university's top marks in classics and fourth-highest marks in logic and ethics, and was also awarded the Vice-Chancellor's Prize in Greek Verse for a play about the Alexandrian mathematician Hypatia.

Academic career

The cover of the first edition of Kottabos, published in 1869 under Tyrrell's editorship. The wine-cup on the cover and the epigraph (from a fragment by Euripides) reference the ancient game of kottabos, played by flicking the dregs of a wine-cup at other participants.

Tyrrell subsequently became a fellow of Trinity College in 1868, and Professor of Latin there in 1871. From 1869 he became the first editor of the Trinity literary magazine Kottabos. He also founded the "more solemn academic journal" Hermathena in 1873.

From 1880 to 1898, Tyrrell was Regius Professor of Greek, and from 1900 to 1904 professor of ancient history. He was a lifelong friend and supporter of Richard Claverhouse Jebb, Professor of Greek initially at the University of Glasgow and, from 1889, at Cambridge, and often sided with him in academic debates, particularly against Tyrrell's Dublin colleague, John Pentland Mahaffy. In a letter to Jebb of February 1883, Tyrrell congratulated him for "show[ing] Mahaffy in his true light, with slovenly Greek and disingenuous arguments". Among Tyrrell's students was the future economist Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, who graduated from Trinity in 1865. He also taught the poet and playwright Oscar Wilde, who read classics at Trinity between 1871 and 1874. According to Wilde's friend and biographer Frank Harris, Wilde described Mahaffy as a greater influence upon him, but Tyrrell as a better scholar: Harris quotes Wilde as calling him "intensely sympathetic and crammed with knowledge" and joking that "if he had known less, he would have been a poet".

Tyrrell was a Commissioner of Education for Ireland and chosen in 1901 as one of the original fellows of the British Academy. He was also awarded honorary degrees from Queen's University of Ireland, Edinburgh (in 1884), Cambridge (in 1892), Oxford (in 1893), St Andrew's (in 1906) and Durham (in 1907).

Tyrrell is most remembered for his seven-volume edition of the letters of the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, which Tyrrell produced, largely with his former student Louis Claude Purser, from 1879. The Cambridge Concise History of English Literature describes Tyrrell's "devotion to ancient and modern literature ... combined with a keen wit and a felicitous style".

Works

Amongst his published works were:

• Hesperidum Susurri (1867), with Thomas J. Bellingham Brady and Maxwell Cormac Cullinan
• Contributions to Kottabos, a Trinity College, Dublin, magazine (from 1868)
• ΕΥΡΙΠΙΔΟΥ ΒΑΚΧΑΙ The Bacchae of Euripides with a revision of the text and a commentary (1871)
• a translation of The Acharnians of Aristophanes into English verse (1883)
• an edition of Cicero's Letters (7 vols., the later vols. with Dr. Purser, 1879–1900)
• Dublin Translations into Greek and Latin Verse, editor (1890)
• Latin Poetry (1893)
• Sophocles (1897)
• — (1901). Anthology of Latin Poetry. London: MacMillan and Co. OCLC 1435723545 – via Internet Archive.
• Terence (1902)
• Echoes of Kottabos (with Sir E. Sullivan) (1906)
• Essays on Greek Literature (1909)

Works cited

• Barbe, Lluis (2010). Francis Ysidro Edgeworth: A Portrait with Family and Friends. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. ISBN 978-1-84980-322-9.
• Chisholm, Hugh (1922). "Tyrrell, Robert Yelverton" . In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica (12th ed.). London & New York: The Encyclopædia Britannica Company.{{cite encyclopedia}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
• Ellmann, Richard (1988). Oscar Wilde. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-394-55484-1.
• Harris, Frank (1916). Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions. New York: Brantano's. OCLC 904345488 – via Internet Archive.
• Jebb, Richard Claverhouse (1871). "Tyrrell's Bacchae". The Dark Blue: 651–656.
• Jeffares, A. Norman (1982). Anglo-Irish Literature. MacMillan International Higher Education. ISBN 9781349168552.
• Morell, Thomas; Maltby, Edward (1815). Lexicon Graeco-prosodiacum (in Latin). Vol. 1. Cambridge: J. Smith. OCLC 1048312270 – via Google Books.
• Purser, Louis Claude (1916). "Robert Yelverton Tyrrell". Proceedings of the British Academy. 7: 533–539.
• Purser, Louis Claude (1927). "Tyrrell, Robert Yelverton" . In Davis, Henry William Carless; Weaver, John Reginald Homer (eds.). Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement . p. 541 – via Wikisource.
• Sampson, George (1972) [1941]. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature. Revised by R. C. Churchill (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-07385-5.
• Stanford, William Bedell (May 1941). "Classical Studies in Trinity College, Dublin, Since the Foundation". Hermathena. 57: 3–24. JSTOR 23037614.}
• Stanford, William Bedell (Summer 1973). "Articles on Classical Subjects in Hermathena". Hermathena. 115: 1–12. JSTOR 23041893.}
• Stanford, William Bedell (Winter 1978). "Robert Yelverton Tyrrell" (PDF). Hermathena. 125: 7–21. JSTOR 23040586. Archived from the original (PDF) on 20 October 2021.}
• Stray, Christopher, ed. (2020). Sophocles' Jebb: A Life in Letters. Cambridge Philological Society. ISBN 978-1-913701-01-7.
• Sturgeon, Sinéad; Clinton, Georgina (2009). "Tyrrell, Robert Yelverton". Dictionary of Irish Biography. doi:10.3318/dib.008703.v1. Retrieved 17 December 2024.