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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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