Anton Powell, ‘self-made’ classicist who advanced studies of Sparta – obituary

Anton Powell, who has died aged 73, was a leading figure among British classicists and a catalyst for a revolution in understanding of ancient Sparta, the most compelling challenge to Athens as the standard bearer of ancient Greek civilisation.

Yet Powell achieved high academic distinction through a self-made career, not by joining traditional institutions but by creating new ones and thereby shifting the focus of traditional scholarship away from the golden triangle of Cambridge, London and Oxford.

He was born Christopher Anton Powell in Leicester on March 26 1947. His father, Hugh Powell, was Professor of German at the Universities of Leicester and Indiana.

Powell learnt Greek and Latin at Wyggeston Grammar School, Leicester, in the 1960s, before studying Classics at Gonville and Gaius College, Cambridge, and at University College London, where he took a PhD in 1973.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Powell worked in London as a freelance tour guide, writer and teacher, taking visitors round intimate corners of the city, writing books on London walks and a history of Greece for children, and teaching at the Working Men’s College, St Pancras, Europe’s oldest surviving centre for adult education.

There, he introduced ancient history to a generation of students and wrote his first major book, Athens and Sparta, in which he constructed Greek political and social history from 478BC. The book, now in its third edition, remains a benchmark study.

He also launched a published seminar series, including volumes on Euripides and on Classical Sparta, which laid down a marker for the rest of his career.

In 1986 he moved to Nottingham, and in 1990 to Swansea, cities which he came to know intimately and for which he had a deep affection.

He held a lectureship in ancient history at Cardiff University from 1989 to 1993, and it was on his initiative that the Classical departments of the University of Wales founded the Institute of Classics and Ancient History, which he directed until 2008.

At the same time, he created his own scholarly publishing house, the Classical Press of Wales, which operated in close partnership with the institute through the 1990s, producing a series of successful monographs and conference volumes. There are now over 100 volumes on the CPW list, including 18 devoted to ancient Sparta.

Without any institutional funding, Powell assembled an international team of specialists for a Sparta project, which underpinned an astonishing renaissance of Spartan studies.

He was the natural choice to select the contributors and edit the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Sparta (2018), to which he contributed two utterly characteristic essays of his own: “Sparta; reconstructing history from secrecy, lies and myth”, and “Sparta and the imperial school of Britain”.

The latter drew a telling comparison between Thomas Arnold, architect of ideology and practice in Victorian public schools, and Lycurgus, the legendary founder of ancient Sparta’s institutions. A further brilliant article, on the treatment of Sparta by Thucydides, remains to be published.

Powell’s intellectual heroes included the Marxist ancient historian Geoffrey de Ste. Croix (1910-2000) and George Orwell. He shared their republican (although not always their socialist) sympathies, and their conviction that the work of writers and scholars is a vital form of political engagement.

His greatest debt to Orwell was an ear for the linguistic nuances of political and social propaganda, whether deployed by the writers of antiquity, or, often unconsciously, by their modern interpreters.

His interest in the ways in which political actors represented and misrepresented their policies and achievements, and the failure of most historians to escape from the narratives set out by the victors, was a common thread in his work.

Powell’s acute reading of propaganda was also striking in another field of ancient history on which he left a lasting mark – the history of the Roman civil wars, the fall of the Roman republic and the emergence of the totalitarian system of Emperor Augustus.

Powell commissioned, edited and contributed his own papers to volumes that re-evaluated the key figures of the Roman “revolution”: Julius Caesar, Sextus Pompeius (the son of Pompey the Great, almost airbrushed out of history by Octavian, who was to become the first emperor, Augustus), and the literary heritage of Augustus himself.

Imagined “counterfactual” histories of what might have occurred had losers triumphed provided him with the theme for another brilliant set of essays, Hindsight in Greek and Roman history, including his own “Anticipating Octavian’s failure”.

Powell’s understanding of the Roman revolution is expounded in his most controversial book, Virgil the Partisan (2008), which argued that Virgil, a homosexual, wrote his great poems as a lifelong supporter of the cause of Octavian/Augustus, whom he greatly admired.

Throwing down the gauntlet to much Virgilian scholarship, Powell wrote, with characteristic panache: “To use an image which Virgil and his model Hesiod might have recognised, we must put the hawk of history back among the doves of literature.”

In 2011 the book won the Alexander McKay Prize of the Vergilian Society of America.

In 2000 Powell founded a series, The Celtic Conference in Classics, a deliberate attempt to shift the focus away from Cambridge, London and Oxford. Building alliances with regional universities, and calling on his growing international contacts, conferences have been held in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, France, Germany, Portugal and Canada, and are set to continue after his death.

Both in life and in his writing Powell had an instinctive sympathy for ordinary working people, and was a close observer of their speech patterns (he was a fabulous mimic) and politics. In his last years he was a decided supporter of Brexit.

He is survived by his first partner, with whom he had two daughters, and his wife, the ancient historian Ioanna Kralli.

Anton Powell, born March 26 1947, died June 11 2020