his hair was tousled. When the immediate paroxysms were over, he waved me in with an impatient gesture of his free hand, holding the hanky ready with the other. Since there was no place to sit—the only chair was already carrying its own literary burden—I stood respectfully at the foot of the narrow, astonishingly short bed and tried my best not to stare.
To be honest, I was both scared and intrigued at the same time. I knew this germ-laden, wheezing gentleman was one of the greatest living authorities on the classical period of Greece and Rome. He was later to become the Camden Professor of Ancient History at Oxford, from 1970 to 1982. Brunt, the son of a Methodist minister, was born in 1918 and was eighty-eight when he died. He had scored a rare double first in his own time as an undergraduate and was then, at about thirty-six, still a comparatively young man. I figured he had already forgotten more that I might ever know. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was destined to spend at least an hour a week on my own with Brunt for three eight-week terms every year for the next three, a total of over seventy-two hours one-on-one. It was a schooling in the history of the period before and surrounding the birth of Christianity that few people have been privileged to receive. Above all, it taught me in depth about this crucial question: What constitutes genuine historical evidence, or in other words, what do we truly mean by “historical” and “historicity”? That question was to play an important role in the later controversy over The Pagan Christ.
“You’re Harpur, are you?” he coughed. I assured him I was. “You’re my eleventh student. The others will come in pairs for tutorials, but you’ll have to come by yourself.”
At the time, this had no significance for me. What I didn’t know was that when there were two students, one would read his weekly essay aloud; the other would be assumed to have written one if he made a useful contribution to the discussion. Thus, you could get away with just making notes on your research every other week. Being alone for each session, however, meant I had no option but to write an essay for Brunt every time. He explained that these essays should be about two thousand words long, which would be roughly twenty minutes of reading aloud. With a snuffle close to a snort, he said: “And I don’t want you just to regurgitate what you’ve read in the books I assign for each topic. I’ve read them; I know what’s in them already. What we want to know is what you think about what they think—backed by plenty of evidence.”
He was, as I later learned, a very gentle person, but he sniffled and dabbed his streaming eyes and fixed me with what I thought was an angry grimace, then shot out: “You do read Greek, don’t you?” When I nodded that I did, he fished around among the books on the chair and, coming up with a worn copy of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, stabbed a stubby finger down on a page and ordered: “Start translating from there.”
I was barely under way when he asked the same question about Latin, and hauled out a copy of Tacitus’s Annals. I exchanged Thucy-dides for it with a sense of relief. I could handle Tacitus’s Latin more easily than Thucydides’ elegant yet knotty Greek any day of the week.
He seemed to be quickly satisfied, and I began to feel a lot more confident. This sense was shaken, however, when he asked if I read French. “A little,” I said. “Do you read German?” “No,” I replied weakly. “Mmm, what a pity,” he sighed. He arranged the blankets under his chin and added: “Oh, by the way, your first tutorial will be on Wednesday at four p.m. Write an essay on the Athenian lawgiver Solon’s reforms.” He outlined a number of books to read in addition to the Greek sources. A sharp pang of alarm stabbed at my stomach: at least two of the books on the list were in German! My three years of study with Professor Brunt had commenced.
The next time I saw him, he was over his cold and ushered me through his door with a flourish of his lighted cigarette. Standing a scant five foot six or so, he peered up at my height with concern. Once he got me seated in the deeper of the easy chairs, he stood on the raised fender of the fireplace, his elbows crooked against the mantel. Staring down at me now, he seemed to feel more at ease. “You’re rather huge, aren’t you?” he observed. “The boat club will be glad to see you coming—the rugger club too.” In what I was soon to recognize was his habitual way, he sucked vehemently on his cigarette with his mouth open on either side of it. I was later told by other smokers that by hyper-aspirating thus one can maintain a kind of mild high because of an excess of oxygen being inhaled along with the smoke.
There was an awkward period of silence after he expressed his thoughts about the putative benefits that my size might confer on Oriel College’s athletic hopes. Then he abruptly said: “Start reading.” I pulled the product of my late-night labours (the technical term is my “lucubrations”) from my jacket pocket and, feeling a little self-conscious at being one grown man reading aloud to another who was perfectly capable of reading himself, began along the labyrinthine, even tortured paths of my reconstruction of Greek history. Occasionally he would mumble to himself, causing me to lose my place. Once or twice he challenged a statement and watched me try to defend myself. At the end he sat smoking for a few minutes and saying nothing. Finally he said: “That’s not too bad. Like a glass of sherry?”
I read him an essay every week during terms. It was an enriching encounter. We were ploughing a narrow furrow, but we ploughed it very deeply indeed.
Since Greats was a two-stream discipline composed of both ancient history (Greek and Roman) and philosophy, I had a philosophy tutor in addition to Peter Brunt. His name was Richard Robinson, a tall, slightly stooped, gaunt-looking man with sad eyes and a trace of an American accent though he had spent most of his life in England. He was in his early forties when I first met him and he died not all that long ago at just short of ninety-five years of age. He seemed a very solemn person and never spoke without giving his words considerable forethought. Robinson’s task was to instruct me not just in the philosophy of the ancient masters, Plato and Aristotle—in much greater depth than I had ever gone before and of course in their original Greek—but also in the writings and ideas of philosophers ever since, down to the modern empiricists. Robinson was a long-time atheist (he had written a book on atheist ideals as well as one on Plato’s theory of definition) and we often had lengthy discussions that edged at times into disputes over matters of faith and religion in general. We met once a week in term over three years and I knew him very well by the end. He would sit at the far end of a long oak table in his rather bare study and as I began to read my weekly offering he routinely propped his elbows on the table, let his head sink into his hands on either side and closed his eyes. Just when I felt certain that my essay had put him to sleep, he would snap his eyes open and critique or question something I’d said. Often he’d challenge my grammar. “There you go again. You keep splitting the infinitive,” he would splutter. I would apologize and soldier on.
It was a painful process at times, but he taught me to think more sharply than I ever had before. I learned a tremendous amount from him and learned also to respect the atheist position while in fundamental disagreement with it—as I remain today. I grew to like the man, but he did seem haunted by an unforgiving melancholy. Whenever I think of him I recall one day when my tutorial was scheduled for eleven a.m. Robinson had just been walking down the High before coming to our meeting. He told me that a few minutes ago he had been looking at the students crowded into a couple of coffee shops nearby. He fixed me with his sorrowful gaze and said: “You know, Harpur, happy people depress me so.”
The full richness of studying for three years at Oxford would take a book of its own to attempt to describe. There was the first long summer vacation when four of us bought an ancient London taxi and toured the Continent in it for over a month. There were other vacations where I worked cutting firewood and carrying out many other outdoor chores on a gorgeous Christian-run holiday estate on the edge of Exmoor National Park overlooking the Bristol Channel. There was always a mountain of assigned reading, but it could be done wherever one went. Several times I stayed with my uncle and aunt in Tullyhogue, Ireland, where one could always break the brain work by grabbing a fishing rod and going down to the river. The two terriers used to watch through the window, waiting
