Benjamin Farrington

Irish scholar and professor

Benjamin Farrington (10 July 1891 –17 November 1974) was an Irish scholar and professor of Classics, teaching in Ireland (1916–1920), South Africa (1920–1935), and Great Britain (1935–1956). Although his academic career spanned several disciplines, he is most well known for his contributions to the history of Greek science. Moreover, within the development of the discipline, his books were some of the first written in the English language that focused specifically on Greek science. In addition to his professional academic career he was also active in socialist politics, using his intellectual capabilities to speak and write on it. While beginning his academic career in South Africa in 1920 he became heavily involved in the Irish Republican Association of South Africa. In the process he wrote several articles for local South African newspapers about the need for Ireland to separate from England. In addition, he was instrumental in forming the Irish Peace Conference in Paris in 1922. Such political commitments inevitably influenced his teaching style, giving him the reputation in South Africa of being an intellectual Marxist. However, from the perspective of some critics, his Marxist commitments overshadowed his scholarly work, heavily tainting them. One of his better known pamphlets on socialism, written in 1940, is The Challenge of Socialism.

Farrington was born in Cork City, Ireland into an Anglo Irish family. His father was the city engineer and was a Congregationalist, a Protestant church in the Calvinist tradition. While finishing his thesis he also served as an assistant professor in Classics at Queen's University in Belfast from 1916–1920. In 1920 he moved to South Africa to teach at the University of Cape Town, serving as Lecturer in Greek (1920–1922), Senior Lecturer in Classics (1922–1930), and Professor of Latin (1930–1935). In 1935 he moved to England to become Lecturer in Classics at the University of Bristol (1935–1936), and then Professor of Classics at University College, Swansea (1936–1956), where he taught until his retirement.

Not long after settling in Cape Town in South Africa, Farrington began to attend the salon of Ruth Schechter, a member of the intelligentsia in her own right but also notable as the daughter of Solomon Schechter, the American Rabbi, and the wife of politician and lawyer Morris Alexander. Over the years Farrington and Schechter became quite close. Schechter left her husband and South Africa in 1933 and married Farrington in August 1935 in the United Kingdom. Ruth died in March 1942.