Benjamin Farrington (1891-1974) was a pioneer in the study of ancient science. His book Greek Science and its Meaning for Us (1944) was for a long time the standard work on the subject.
Born in Cork in 1891, Farrington was studying in Dublin during the lock-out strike of 1913. He was impressed by the oratory of James Connolly, a trade union leader who was later executed for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising.[1] After a few years in Belfast as assistant, Farrington taught at the University of Cape Town from 1920 to 1934. In 1936 Farrington was appointed to the chair of Classics in University College Swansea, where he remained until his retirement twenty years later.
In the 1920s Farrington’s radical views led him to join leftist groups in Cape Town. He connected with members of the South African left, including the zoologist Lancelot Hogben and the Germanist Frederick Bodmer. Back in the UK he became friendly with his near-contemporary E.R. Dodds, another Irishman and supporter of Sinn Féin. Farrington joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1936 after being convinced by the promulgation of Stalin’s Constitution of 1936, promising universal suffrage and total equality for all. He was also a member of the Britain-China Friendship Association (BCFA): in 1952 he was part of a BCFA delegation that went on a visit to China. In a split in the CPGB in which members gave allegiance to Russia or China after the Sino-Soviet split of the 1950s, Farrington chose China, praising Mao’s “extraordinary grasp of the details of concrete social reality”.[3] Eventually, he left the CPGB after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.
Farrington wrote both introductory books and argumentative books, and some of the former were written from a left-wing perspective. An example of this is his The Civilisation of Greece and Rome, published in 1938 by Gollancz, who included it in their Left Book Club. His Science and Politics in the Ancient World, published in 1939, was provocative and argumentative. In the Classical Review, Keith Guthrie wrote:
“Professor Farrington succeeds in evoking hearty agreement, in exhilarating, tantalising and annoying. […] We are tantalised because his case is so nearly good, and might have been very good. If only he would avoid ridiculous overstatements bound to alienate […]. Lastly, the book annoys, because […] it abounds in misleading statements or half-truths” [2]
This profile is taken from Christopher Stray’s essay ‘Benjamin Farrington: Scholarship, Science and Communism’ (2023) — abridged by Kevin Lee.
[1] William Anderson, James Connolly and the Irish Left, 1994.
[2] Keith Guthrie, Review of Farrington, Science and Politics in the Ancient World, in The Classical Review. 54 (1940): 34-5.
[3] Tom Buchanan, East Wind: China and the British Left, 1925-1976. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, 144.
