Life
1844-1924; b. Hillsborough, son of Presbyterian minister; ed. Belfast
Acad. Inst.; ed. Lincoln College, Oxford, fellow and tutor, Corpus Christi
College, 1869; high master of Manchester grammar school (Owens College),
1877-88, and Victoria University, Manchester, to 1889; professor of Greek,
Queen’s College, Belfast, later QUB, 1890-1924; knighted 1909; author
of three books on Roman society. ODNB DUB
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References
W. B. Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (1984):
Sir Samuel Dill, son of Presbyterian minister in Hillsborough, Co Down;
ed. Queen’s College, Belfast in 1864, went to Oxford and became Fellow
of Corpus Christi; Professor of Greek in Belfast in 1890; Roman Society
in the Last Century of the Western Empire (1898, 2nd ed 1899); Roman
Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius (1904, 2nd ed. 1905, 3 rep.);
and Roman Society in Gaul in the Merovingian Age, ed. and issued
by C. B. Armstrong in 1926; defined his subject as ‘the inner life
and thoughts of the last three generations of the empire of the West’;
‘the inner life of the time’, not ‘external history and
the machinery of government. Especially drawn to Marcus Aurelius, he believed
that the second century overcame the abominations of the first ‘dignified
and elevated by a great reform of conduct ... to rise to a higher spiritual
life and to win the succour of unseen Powers’. (Stanford, p.159-60.)
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