Introduction
Francis Macdonald Cornford FBA (27 February 1874 – 3 January 1943) was an English classical scholar and translator known for influential work on ancient philosophy, notably Plato, Parmenides, Thucydides, and ancient Greek religion. Frances Cornford, his wife, was a noted poet. Due to the similarity of their forenames, he was known to family as "FMC" and his wife as "FCC".
Early life and family
Cornford was born in Eastbourne, Sussex, on 27 February 1874. He attended St Paul's School, London.
In 1909 Cornford married the poet Frances Darwin, daughter of Sir Francis Darwin and Ellen Wordsworth Darwin, née Crofts, and a granddaughter of Charles Darwin. They had five children:
- Helena (1913–1994), married Joseph L. Henderson in 1934
- John (1915–1936), poet and Communist who was killed in the Spanish Civil War
- Christopher (1917–1993), artist and writer; the father of Adam Cornford
- Hugh Wordsworth (1921–1997), medical doctor
- Ruth Clare (1923–1992), the mother of Matthew Chapman
Academic career
Cornford was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a Fellow from 1899 and held a teaching post from 1902. He became the first Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy in 1931 and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1937. He used wit and satire to propagate proposals for reforming the teaching of the classics at Cambridge, in Microcosmographia Academica (1908).
He died on 3 January 1943 in his home, Conduit Head in Cambridge. He was cremated at Cambridge Crematorium on 6 January 1943.
Works
- Thucydides Mythistoricus (1907) argued that Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War was informed by Thucydides' tragic view.
- From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation (1912) sought the deep religious and social concepts that informed the early Greek philosophers. He returned to this in Principium Sapientiae: The Origins of Greek Philosophical Thought (posthumous, 1952).
- Microcosmographia Academica (1908), an insider's satire on academic politics, was the source of catch phrases such as the "doctrine of unripeness of time", "principle of the wedge", and "principle of the dangerous precedent".
- According to the preface to The Republic of Plato, translated with an introduction and notes (OUP, 1941), it "aims at conveying... as much as possible of the thought of the Republic in the most convenient and least misleading form."