# Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Mahaffy, John Pentland

​MAHAFFY, Sir JOHN PENTLAND (1839–1919), provost of Trinity College, Dublin, author of numerous works on Greek literature and history, was born at Chapponnaire, near Vevey, Switzerland, 26 February 1839, the seventh and youngest child of the Rev. Nathaniel B. Mahaffy, a small landowner in county Donegal, by his wife, Elizabeth Pentland, who also came of a landowning family in county Monaghan. He was thus of Irish descent on both sides. His father acted as British chaplain at Lucerne from 1840 to 1843, in which year he exchanged the chaplaincy at Lucerne for a similar post at Bad Kissingen in Bavaria, and it was there that the boy was brought up till the age of nine. His parents then returned to Ireland and settled down on their property in Donegal. Young Mahaffy was educated at home until he entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1855. His career at the university was brilliant; he won a scholarship in classics, and graduated in 1859 as first senior moderator in classics and logics. He was elected to a fellowship in 1864, having taken holy orders earlier in the same year. In the life of the undergraduates he played a leading part; he was captain of the cricket eleven and shot in the Irish team at Wimbledon, besides taking an active interest in the music of the college. In 1865 he married Frances, daughter of William MacDougall, of Howth, co. Dublin. The issue of this marriage was a family of four children, two sons and two daughters. From his election to a fellowship down to his death he continued to serve the college in one capacity or another as tutor, professor, vice-provost, and provost, for a period of fifty-five years.
Mahaffy's interests were originally philosophical, and the first work which he published was a Translation of Kuno Fischer's Commentary on Kant (1866), but his election in 1869 as the first professor of ancient history in the university gave a new direction to his studies. For the next forty years Greek history and Greek literature were to form the main subject of his labours. In 1871 he published his Prolegomena to Ancient History, which ​although rendered obsolete in great measure by the progress of discovery has been declared by a competent authority to be the best book that he ever wrote [A. H. Sayce, Reminiscences, 1923, p. 126]. During the next few years he visited Greece twice, and the influence of his travels may be traced in his Greek Social Life from Homer to Menander (1874), as well as in Rambles and Studies in Greece (1876). His History of Classical Greek Literature (1880) was followed, after an interval of seven years, by The Story of Alexander's Empire (1887); then came in rapid succession Greek Life and Thought from Alexander to the Roman Conquest (1887), The Greek World under Roman Sway (1890), and Problems in Greek History (1892). The year 1890 marks the beginning of a new epoch in his literary activities. It was in this year that a quantity of mummy cartonnage was discovered by W. M. Flinders Petrie in the Fayûm, and handed over to Mahaffy for decipherment and publication. For the next ten years his interests were centred on the Egypt of the Ptolemies, and to this period belong the first two volumes of the Flinders Petrie Papyri (1891–1893), followed by a third volume produced in collaboration with J. G. Smyly, and The Empire of the Ptolemies (1895). For the rest of his life his interests were chiefly directed to the history of his university and of Ireland in general. An Epoch in Irish History, 1591–1660 (1904), The Particular Book of Trinity College (1904), and a monograph on the Plate in Trinity College (1918), were among the fruits of his researches in the field of Irish history. He was elected president of the Georgian Society, of which he was the founder, and from 1911 to 1916 he held the office of president of the Royal Irish Academy.
Mahaffy succeeded to a senior fellowship in 1899, and it was the general belief outside Trinity College itself that in view of his eminence in the world of letters and of his long service to his own college, he was certain of the succession to the provostship. When, however, the office became vacant by the death of Dr. George Salmon in 1904, he was passed over by the Crown in favour of Dr. Anthony Traill [q.v.]. Mahaffy had every right to anticipate that he would be appointed provost, although his was not the only name that might with propriety have been submitted to the King, and it is not too much to say that Traill's appointment came as a shock to the sentiment of the whole academic world. Mahaffy had to wait another ten years for the fulfilment of his hopes, and when, on Traill's death, he succeeded to the headship of his college (November 1914), he had reached the age of seventy-five. Two years later came the Irish rebellion of Easter week 1916, during which he directed the defence of Trinity College with coolness and resource. When the Irish Convention was summoned in 1917, it was at his invitation that it held its meetings in the Regent House of Trinity College. He was created G.B.E. in 1918. He died 30 April 1919, from the effects of a paralytic stroke.
It is by his contributions to the study of the literature, the life, and the history of the ancient Greeks that Mahaffy as a writer must be judged. Few authors, indeed, have been more versatile, and his range extended to subjects as remote from Hellenism as the Decay of Modern Preaching (1882), the Art of Conversation (1889), the architecture and furniture of the great houses of Ireland, and the introduction and diffusion of the domestic ass. On all these things he wrote well, and in his treatment of some of them he made valuable contributions to Irish history. His earliest effort, the Commentary on Kant, provoked a reply from Mill, then at the height of his influence; and his Sketch of the Life and Teaching of Descartes (1880) is an excellent piece of work so far as it goes. But it is not on these multifarious writings that his reputation rests. Indeed, it is probable that the estimate of him as a student of things Greek has suffered from the variety of his interests; he was supposed to be superficial, because people thought that knowledge so extended must be shallow. ‘The Provost's talents, though brilliant, were versatile rather than profound’, is the verdict in one of his obituary notices. Nothing could be more unjust. Honours such as he received from universities and learned societies (he was a corresponding member of the academies of Berlin, Munich, and Vienna, and of the Lincei at Rome, an honorary D.C.L. of Oxford, and an honorary fellow of Queen's College—these were but a few of the distinctions conferred on him) are not commonly the rewards of the mere popularizer. Although, as he himself says in one of his prefaces, his object was to set down results rather than processes of investigation, an essay such as that on the Olympian Register in his Problems in Greek History affords a presumption that, had he chosen, he could have exhibited the processes of investigation equally well with the results. He had no claims to exact scholarship, but he had in him much of the stuff of which ​historians are made; industry and imagination, a memory that was superb, and a curiosity that was insatiable. His greatest gift was his power of seeing things in the concrete; of so visualizing the past as to make it as real to us as the life we live and see around us. Hence it is that the books which bear the most distinctive impress of his individuality are the three volumes which treat of the social life and civilization of the Greeks from the age of Homer to the age of Hadrian. The first of these, Greek Social Life from Homer to Menander, marks an epoch in the treatment of the subject. The books which had hitherto been written were little more than works of reference. Since Mahaffy published his original and brilliant sketch no writer on these subjects, in this country at least, has ventured to make dullness his professed aim. His History of Greek literature is a solid and useful book, and many of his literary judgements are acute and fresh, but in originality both of conception and treatment it cannot be put on the same level as the three volumes referred to. As an historian, he had limitations and defects. He was interested in persons, rather than in the play of forces or the operation of laws; his strength certainly did not lie in the grasp of historical principles. It was perhaps inevitable that one to whom the past became as real as the present should sometimes allow the present to intrude into the past. Some of his parallels, it must be admitted, are fanciful or far-fetched. In justice to his memory, it should never be forgotten that he was above all things a pioneer. His judgements, both literary and political, anticipated in many instances the verdict of the next generation. To exalt Euripides above Sophocles is one of the commonplaces of latter day criticism; it was not a commonplace when Mahaffy wrote his Social Life. It needs, at the present moment, neither courage nor insight to pronounce that the democratic principle is fraught with peril to the higher interests of civilization; it needed both the one and the other when Mahaffy first pointed this moral. He, too, was one of the very few scholars in this or any other country who appreciated at the outset the revolutionary character of the discoveries of Heinrich Schliemann, and he was one of the first to grasp the importance of papyrology.
When it is remembered that Mahaffy came to the study of papyri with no previous palæographical training, we may well be surprised at the measure of success which he achieved. He was at his best in the guessing of the sense of obscure passages, the suggestion of supplements, and the lucid summarizing of results; for the task of accurate decipherment he lacked the patience and the attention to detail which are indispensable. To form a just estimate of his powers in this field we must look to the third volume of the Petrie Papyri, where he had the assistance of Smyly, or to the Introduction which he contributed to Dr. B. P. Grenfell's edition of the Revenue papyrus (1896). His Empire of the Ptolemies, an indirect result of his papyrological interests, still remains far the best account in English of that period.
Mahaffy's reputation was not merely that of a man of letters or university professor. For nearly half a century he was one of the best-known figures in the social life of his generation. He was an inveterate diner-out, and a constant attendant at congresses and other gatherings of the learned. His versatility extended far beyond the range of his literary interests. He was a firstrate shot and angler, and a learned and accomplished musician. He was an excellent man of business, and although his provostship was brief and in troublous times, he succeeded in carrying out some useful reforms in the government of Trinity College. Thanks in part to a boyhood spent on the Continent, he could speak German like a native and French fluently. But it was as a wit and raconteur, as one of the most brilliant talkers of his time, with a fund of apposite anecdote, that he was so widely known and so generally welcome in society. ‘Ireland is a place where the inevitable never happens and the unexpected always occurs’, is a fair specimen of his epigrammatic power. Like Dr. Johnson, he had the gift of stripping a subject of unessentials and arriving at once at the heart of things. His caustic wit made him unpopular, especially in his own university, and it is probable that this unpopularity stood in the way of his promotion. His wit was never really ill-natured, but he loved creating a sensation, even though he excited resentment, and he had a curious incapacity for anticipating the effect of what he said. Those who were present at the Historical Congress at Berlin in 1908 are not likely to forget the scene that was occasioned by his remark that the reason why English scholars, in dealing with questions of authorship, attached far more importance than the Germans to the argument from style, was that English scholars had been drilled in writing Latin and Greek prose, ​while the Germans had never written a piece of either in their lives. But if he was unpopular in certain circles, he had many attached friends, for he was generous and warm-hearted, and his judgements of men were never tainted by jealousy or bitterness.
Mahaffy played hardly any part in politics until the meeting of the Convention in 1917. He was both by temperament and conviction an aristocrat, and the Ireland for which he cared and to which he belonged was the nation of Burke and Goldsmith, of Grattan and Charles Lever. He never tired of decrying the cultural pretensions of Celtic Ireland, and he was contemptuous of the provincial note of Irish nationalism. In the Convention he recommended a federal scheme on the Swiss model with provincial autonomy for Ulster.
Portraits: by Sir W. Orpen in the Modern Art Gallery, Dublin; by Walter Osborne, 1900 (Royal Academy Pictures, 1900); and by James Wilcox in the Provost's House, Trinity College; a bas-relief by Carre in the chapel, and a bronze bust by Miss Shaw in the rooms of the Philosophical Society, Trinity College.
[Obituary notices in the newspapers, especially The Times, the Irish Times, and the Spectator; Hermathena, No. XLII, 1920 (with complete bibliography); A. H. Sayce, Reminiscences, 1923; A. S. Hunt in Aegyptus, i, 2, 1920 (of firstrate importance for Mahaffy's papyrological work); private information; personal knowledge.]
E. M. W.