Professor Vivienne J. Gray(1947-2025)

A tribute by Jessica ​Priestley

Vivienne at a student’s wedding, 2013.

On 2nd February 2026, a day of papers was held at the University of Auckland in honour and memory of Vivienne J. Gray (née Forbes), the University’s Emeritus Professor of Classics and Ancient History, who died on 9th June 2025. Speakers remembered Vivienne as a fine scholar, an inspiring teacher, and a loyal friend. One of the speakers that day was Denis Feeney, who fondly recollects Vivienne’s lectures on Greek History in the third year of his BA in the 1970s: ‘She whirled in, and within five minutes we were in Greece, as she described the landscape and setting that made Greek history come alive for the rest of the term… [I]t was mesmerising to be in the presence of someone who knew Greece at first hand and who so obviously just loved the place.’ Vivienne’s deep enthusiasm for Greece and its ancient literature was infectious. ‘Vivienne was always having fun with the texts,’ Simon Oswald recalls. She inspired different generations of students during her lengthy tenure at the University of Auckland from 1974 to 2012, many of whom went on to pursue research or teaching careers of their own.
 
Vivienne did not come from a university family. Neither of Vivienne’s parents had gone to university—her father ran the motorcycle business Forbes & Davies. Vivienne attended her local state school, Onehunga High (which had recently opened in 1959), where she excelled in Mathematics and particularly enjoyed her classes in English with ‘Mr Hammer’, French (in a Dutch accent) with Eddie Van Sambeek, and Latin (for which her teachers were Cherry Hankin, who would later become a scholar of Katherine Mansfield, and Dawn Moffatt). According to an old school friend, the school had ‘an old-fashioned principal [J.C. McCarthy] who once ticked her off and told her to use her talents’. Vivienne’s talents saw her distinguish herself at a national level in French and become the school’s Dux.
 
In 1965 Vivienne commenced her undergraduate studies at the University of Auckland in what were the final years of the career of Professor E.M. Blaiklock. Alongside Blaiklock, Vivienne probably learnt Greek from Will Richardson, John H. Betts, John Whitehorne, and Chris Dearden. She remembered well being taught by Peter Crawley, who fostered her enduring admiration for the Latin poetry of Lucretius. Vivienne’s student days at Auckland then overlapped with the appointment of Professor W.K. Lacey, who took over the chair in 1969 following the retirement of Blaiklock (a position that would next be filled by Vivienne herself). Vivienne graduated in 1969 with a Master of Arts with First Class Honours. She was awarded the John Mulgan Prize for Greek twice and a Senior Scholarship in Latin. Vivienne’s cohort of students was one that Peter Crawley singled out for special mention in Classics in Auckland (Auckland, 1983): ‘…the Latin Honours class of 1968…consisted of four women and four men, whose readiness to turn every session into a vigorous discussion developed a stimulating atmosphere of camaraderie which outlasted their student days’ (Classics in Auckland, p. 100).
 
Vivienne won a Postgraduate Scholarship and left for the University of Cambridge in 1970. At this time, none of the men’s colleges at Cambridge admitted women. Vivienne went to the recently founded women’s college, New Hall, which received its Royal Charter while she was there in 1972. This was an era when students from Australia and New Zealand would traditionally take a second BA degree in Classics. By her second term at Cambridge, Vivienne had impressed Professor Moses Finley sufficiently for him to tell her that she was wasting her time, and it was no doubt he who arranged for her to enrol in the PhD. Peter Crawley noted (with what sounds like a certain degree of pride for his former student) that ‘She was the first Auckland graduate to be accepted as a Ph.D. student without having first to pass Tripos papers’ (Classics in Auckland, 1983, p. 132, n.102).
 
Vivienne’s doctoral work at Cambridge was supervised by Guy Griffith, who steered her towards Xenophon, the research path for which she would later become internationally renowned. Her dissertation title was: The treatment of military operations and military leaders in Xenophon’s Hellenika: the paradigmatic factor. Following the award of her degree, Vivienne returned to Auckland in 1974 to take up a lectureship. One of the tutors in the department at the time recalls that ‘Vivienne came in as a breath of fresh air. Almost at once she was volunteering to organise the forthcoming national classics conference...it being Auckland's turn to host. Open, direct, keen.’
 
From 1970 it became possible for women of doctoral standing to apply for a Rhodes Visiting Fellowship to spend two years pursuing independent research at Oxford. Vivienne applied and in 1978 was awarded a Fellowship at Lady Margaret Hall. She took up the Fellowship in the years 1979-1980 before returning once more to her position in Auckland. In 1987 Vivienne was appointed Professor of Classics and Ancient History following Professor Lacey’s retirement. She had by this stage published several articles in esteemed journals on Xenophon, Diodorus Siculus, and more generally on mimesis in Greek historical theory. Vivienne was the second woman in New Zealand to become a Professor of Classics, after Agathe Thornton (whom she admired).
 
Vivienne’s first book appeared in 1989. In the mid-1980s, she had taken a year of leave, during which she returned to Cambridge and worked on what would become The Character of Xenophon’s Hellenica (Duckworth, 1989). In its preface, Vivienne described it as ‘a book that seeks to discover the character of the Hellenica as a piece of historical writing rather than assess the literal truth of the events it describes’. She also set forth with refreshing frankness her credo: ‘I believe that the value of written history is the discovery of the mentality of the writer and the society that produced the writer. This is worth far more to me than the knowledge of the strategy that won the battle of Cyzicus. It is a human thing.’ A glimpse of Vivienne’s own society at this time is provided by her friend Graham Zanker, who overlapped with her at Cambridge during this period of leave. He recalls their training together for the 1985 Cambridge half marathon: after each training session, they slaked their thirst with beer at the home of M.M. Mackenzie, which ‘led to a heady merriment that inspired … keenness to tackle the next one’. He adds that he and Vivienne ‘breezed home in the actual race’. Vivienne herself remarked gratefully that ‘Cambridge has given me much hospitality’ (The Character of Xenophon’s Hellenica, preface).
 
During the 1990s Vivienne’s research continued to flourish. Articles appeared on Herodotus and Arrian, as well as Xenophon, and she published her second book, The Framing of Socrates: the literary interpretation of Xenophon’s ‘Memorabilia’ (Franz Steiner Verlag, 1998), in which she analysed how Xenophon had constructed his image of Socrates. In 1997 the University of Auckland appointed Vivienne to the position of University Public Orator, a role she held until 2012 that involved researching and presenting speeches in honour of the recipients of honorary degrees. Her predecessor had been Nicholas Tarling, Professor of History, who passed on his Cambridge doctoral robes and bonnet to Vivienne on his retirement and liked to call her ‘Oratrix’, perhaps implicitly recognising her particular distinction as a woman who had attained a position that had for centuries been the preserve only of men. On her appointment, Vivienne drew an analogy to the poetry of Pindar, one of her favourite poets: ‘…it is a tradition of words crafted to praise that I am looking forward to being a part of’ (University of Auckland News, April 1997).

Vivienne on an Auckland Graduation Day, c. 1995.

In 1998 Vivienne was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML). One of her former students Hyun Jin Kim remembers how Vivienne faced her illness with ‘the utmost dignity and steely resolve’. She took leave from her work for treatment. At the time of her diagnosis, the median survival time for CML patients was 3-5 years, but a scientific breakthrough in treatment was imminent. In the early 2000s, Vivienne was involved in trials for Glivec, one of a new class of drugs called tyrosine kinase inhibitors that block enzymes responsible for cell division and signalling. Since 2001, these drugs have dramatically improved survival rates for CML patients, and Vivienne was among those patients to benefit. Her career could continue, but the leukaemia never went away and required careful monitoring and management. From time to time she would mention that her ‘leukaemia was playing up again’—a characteristically understated acknowledgment of her hospital stays. 
 
Vivienne’s illness did not prevent her from continuing to make important contributions to Classics through her research and teaching. She returned to teaching in 2001, and this began a period in which she supervised several MA students who went on to further studies overseas (including Emily Baragwanath, Hyun Jin Kim, Alisa Bowden, Simon Oswald, and me). She was also the doctoral supervisor for Anneka Rene and Abigail Dawson, who remembers Vivienne as ‘a stellar academic who had great depths of humanity… She was and still is an inspiration to me’.  Students of this era all recall inspiring classes on Herodotus and Greek lyric in particular. In a class on Book 1 of Herodotus’ Histories, Vivienne read the great opening polysyllables Hērodotou Halikarnēsseos, and then, smiling mischievously, remarked how lucky it was that Herodotus had not come from nearby Cos. Classes for the Greek MA were usually so small (one or two students) that they took place in Vivienne’s office, ‘her big LSJ dictionary dignified with its own table centrally located’, as Simon Oswald recalls. ‘In particular, I recall a scene that played out so many times it became a trope: Alisa or I would offer a nuance or interpretation of a word that would pique Vivenne's interest by differing from her own in a way subtly enough to potentially be correct and (I'd like to imagine) with grand ramifications for the understanding of the overall text or passage. She'd stand up from her desk, walk around and out front to the sacred LSJ, bend forward slightly to read silently the respective entry, stand up straight, take off her glasses, smile, and begin an explanation prefaced with the words "I was right ..."’
 
During the 2000s and 2010s Vivienne published numerous articles on Xenophon, Thucydides, Isocrates, and Herodotus (including an article on Herodotus’ story of Arion, of which she was especially fond). She also produced Xenophon on Government (Cambridge University Press, 2007), which included a scholarly commentary on Xenophon’s Hiero and Constitution of the Spartans and the pseudo-Xenophontic Constitution of the Athenians. In the final years before her retirement in 2012, she published two more books. Her edited collection Xenophon (Oxford Readings in Classical Studies) (Oxford University Press, 2010) drew together a selection of significant articles by different scholars on Xenophon. The following year, Xenophon’s Mirror of Princes appeared (Oxford University Press, 2011), which she described as a book ‘about Xenophon’s literary presentation of the leadership of individuals in their communities, from those of private households up to those of great empires’ (p. 1). She was particularly concerned in this book to demonstrate Xenophon’s literary skill and to address ‘ironical’ readings, associated with Leo Strauss and others, that had found concealed criticism in Xenophon’s positive images of leadership.
 
This, her final book, was very well-received. One reviewer called it ‘the most important book on Xenophon in many years, the product of a sustained and deep engagement with his texts. Its many close readings deserve serious consideration and provide an indispensable basis for future conversations about the author in all of the many areas his encyclopedic output occupies.’ Another reviewer commented that ‘Gray has established Xenophon as a major thinker and a writer of genuine sophistication, a man who reflected deeply on what makes for a successful human organization and the qualities that suit a person to lead such an organization – be it household, polis, army, or empire. Gray’s Xenophon is a writer who says what he means, and means his message to be useful. Readers who have been exasperated by neo-Straussian readings of any text will be refreshed by the drubbing herein administered. Readers sympathetic to such readings will find Gray’s the arguments to answer, for many years to come.’
 
Outside her work Vivienne’s interests included gardening and DIY (she was a regular at Bunnings), cryptic crosswords, swimming (preferably in the Mediterranean), Bob Dylan, experimental cooking, Campari-grapefruit cocktails, stimulating conversation, and much fiction (some favourites were the nineteenth-century French novelists, Anthony Trollope, and John le Carré). She was also a keen reader of poetry. Alongside Homer, Lucretius, and writers of ancient Greek lyric, some modern poets I recall her discussing were Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ted Hughes, Clive James, and C.K. Stead. Her enjoyment of the poetry of Hopkins went all the way back to her English classes with ‘Mr Hammer’ at Onehunga High. Clive James’s career she had followed since they met in Cambridge—he occupied a flat below hers in the early 1970s, and at one point had floated the idea of learning some Greek from her, but in the end he never quite managed to find the time. They shared another biographical link in that Clive James also developed a form of leukaemia (CLL to her CML), and Vivienne read his poetry of illness. Towards the end of her life she transcribed by hand three lines from a late James poem and placed the passage on her writing desk.
 
Another of Vivienne’s loves was for travel, to France and Italy, but especially to Greece. On one trip with an old school friend, she visited Perachora to establish what Agesilaus and Xenophon saw when they looked from Peiraion towards Corinth. The friend remembers much climbing and scrambling, and Vivienne’s conclusion that ‘if those bushes were not there…’. During her last trip to Greece in September 2024, which included visits to Crete, Naxos, Paros (prompting her to reread Archilochus), and Syros, a ferry through the Cyclades started much thought, and much talk, about the force fields of religion and power around those islands. Over a lunch in January 2025, she told me a lively story about a small, personal offering she had made to the sea off Syros. She was in sparkling form and I had no inkling then that I would not see her again. But now, with hindsight, I wonder if perhaps she had known; and perhaps she had also known in 2024 that, with her health failing, she was making her final offering to the deathless gods of Greece.
 
 
In preparing this obituary I had considerable help. I would like to thank Bill Barnes, Janice Cheeseman, Abigail Dawson, Mary Farrell, Denis Feeney, Hyun Jin Kim, Simon Oswald, Anne Priestley, and Graham Zanker for their contributions.
 
The speakers and chairs at the day of papers on 2nd February 2026 in Vivienne Gray’s honour and memory were: Lisa Bailey, Emily Baragwanath, Bill Barnes, Abigail Dawson, Denis Feeney, Hyun Jin Kim, Paul McKechnie, Simon Oswald, Jessica Priestley, Anneka Rene, and Richard Thomas.