Sir Kenneth Dover was one of the finest and most widely respected Greek scholars of the 20th century, and held many high positions in the academic world. He became better known to a wider public in 1994 through his remarkable autobiography Marginal Comment and the reactions that it aroused. And to generations of students, especially at St Andrews, he was always a hero.

Kenneth James Dover was born in 1920, the only child of Percy Dover and Dorothy Healey. His father was a civil servant, and they lived in London. In 1932 he went to St Paul’s School, the nursery of so many classical scholars, and later acknowledged his debt to two outstanding teachers there, Philip Whitting and George Bean. He went up to Balliol as a scholar in 1938, and took his first in classical moderations in 1940. His army career was as an artillery officer in the Western Desert and in the Italian campaign, in the course of which he was mentioned in dispatches.

Returning to Balliol in 1945, he soon made his mark as one of the ablest young scholars of the time. After his first in Greats, and having collected the Ireland and various other scholarships and prizes, he migrated to Merton as a Harmsworth scholar and began to work for a doctorate under the supervision of Arnaldo Momigliano; but when Balliol decided to make an appointment in Greek and Greek history in 1948 he was obviously the man for the job. For a few years he combined his Fellowship with a share in the teaching for Wadham. He was something of an innovator in tutorial practice, and, young as he was, served as senior tutor at Balliol for a while. He was already publishing notable work: articles on Thucydides and on Antiphon’s speeches, and a still valuable essay in Greek comedy. He also edited a revision of J. D. Denniston’s The Greek Particles. All this foreshadowed the most important areas of his work.

In 1955 the electors to the chair of Greek at the University of St Andrews were looking for a successor to W. L. Lorimer. They made their inquiries and, as a St Andrews colleague later wrote, “netted the complete Grecian”. In Scotland there were both problems and opportunities not to be found in Oxford. One problem was the teaching of Greek to beginners. Dover solved this by writing his own textbook. It is a work of real linguistic scholarship, but extremely austere and demanding: it needs a teacher with Dover’s skill and enthusiasm, and pupils of unusual ability and commitment. The great opportunity was the chance to expand an already distinguished department along lines of his own choosing. It had concentrated hitherto very much on linguistic skills: Dover developed the study of all things Greek. By the time he left, 21 years later, St Andrews had a very special reputation in classical studies.

For this, he and his Latin colleague Gordon Williams, who had followed him from Balliol, were largely responsible. Their legacy happily endures. In Dover’s time, a steady stream of enthusiastic and well-trained graduates flowed from St Andrews to Oxford and elsewhere, his pupils and devotees. He was not only a natural and indefatigable teacher; he was active in university and local affairs, and served twice as a diplomatic and persuasive Dean of the Faculty of Arts.

It was during his tenure of the St Andrews chair that his first major works appeared. It is a rich crop: the original and subtle Greek Word Order (1960), no easy read; the careful and disconcertingly destructive research on the speeches attributed to Lysias, which was the subject of his Sather Lectures at Berkeley in 1967; his commentary on Aristophanes’ Clouds (1968), and the general book on Aristophanic Comedy (1972); and his share in the great Historical Commentary on Thucydides, which he and Tony Andrews had taken over from A. W. Gomme. Honours came too: he became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1966, and was President of the Hellenic Society in 1971-74 and of the Classical Association in 1975, the same year in which he was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

At this time, commentary was Dover’s genre, at least as far as major publications were concerned. In continuous exposition, he was better as a lecturer than as a writer, for, though he expected a lot from his audiences, he expected even more from his readers. At his best, he was a spellbinding lecturer; he came to scorn using notes, and his apparently extempore talks could often be taken down in a form that many would have thought fit for publication. He was gestating two large and original books. One was Greek Popular Morality (1974), in which he used his minute knowledge of comedy and oratory to illustrate the ordinary, unphilosophical Athenian’s attitudes in the age of Plato and Aristotle. His choice of evidence was unexpectedly limited: neither Aristotle’s The Art of Rhetoric nor Xenophon, both surely good sources for the ordinary man’s ideas, was put to use. The book was in part a response to A. W. H. Adkins’s Merit and Responsibility, which Dover thought gave a selective and misleading account of how moral ideas developed. The controversy with Adkins went on for some time. The second book was Greek Homosexuality (1978), the first really scholarly study of the subject. It is outspoken and shirks no detail; indeed, Dover always took pains in his writing to be explicit about sexual matters, in a way that is more usual today than when he started doing it.

He had thought about leaving St Andrews in 1960, when he was offered the Regius chair of Greek at Oxford, but he chose not to move, partly no doubt because he thought he could do more for Greek studies, and exercise more influence, where he was. In 1972 it was different. He applied for the Cambridge chair, where he believed with reason that he could have done an outstanding job, and was disappointed not to be elected. But in 1976 there came a call back to Oxford, to be President of Corpus Christi, a relatively small college with a strong classical tradition. After some hesitation, he accepted. His knighthood, awarded for services to Greek scholarship, came at about the same time. He and his wife, Audrey Latimer (whom he had married when he was an undergraduate), soon won the respect of the college. He was popular with undergraduates, and steered the college successfully through the changes consequent on its decision to admit women. The university, too, made use of his talents. The Dover committee on undergraduate admissions (1983) did much to simplify the complex procedures by which colleges chose their students.

But it was in this period of his life that Dover faced two difficult situations which would have been an anxiety to anyone in authority. He was President of the British Academy (1978-81) when the question arose of what should be done about Anthony Blunt’s Fellowship, now that he was known to have been a Soviet spy. Dover’s account of this tortuous affair is in Marginal Comment. He took enormous trouble, he tried to be reasonable, he agonised over it — and yet he found it fascinating. There was no painless solution; a few Fellows resigned, and the echoes of the affair rumbled on for a time. There was trouble too in Corpus, because of the illness and subsequent suicide of one of the senior Fellows. This caused Dover even more anguish, because it was closer to home and happened in the intimacy of college life. He involved himself very directly in the problem, and his very frank account of it is in the autobiography.

There had been another, much smaller, episode that had not turned out as he might have hoped. This was his television programme, The Greeks, broadcast in 1980, which was not a success. It was not his fault, except that he seems to have been too deferential to his BBC minders. The resulting book became quite popular as an introduction to the Greek world, and was even translated into Japanese.

The Dovers probably found it a relief to get back to St Andrews in 1986. He was now Chancellor of the University, having been elected in 1981, a striking testimony to the respect and affection with which he was regarded. He had kept his old house and the garden, which he greatly liked. He remained as industrious as ever. From 1986 to 1991 he spent one term a year at Stanford as visiting professor, to the great delight and profit of colleagues and students there. He collected two volumes of his own papers, which were published in 1987 and 1988 and give a wonderful view of the range of his interests and skills. In 1990, his 70th birthday was celebrated by a Festschrift, Owls to Athens, which gave him tremendous pleasure. Before finishing his autobiography he fulfilled a long-held ambition to “do a big Frogs”; his major edition of Aristophanes’ masterpiece came out in 1993. The autobiography itself, which appeared in 1994, has had its critics and did cause some offence. However, this obsessively honest and strangely confessional book has given many readers the impression of a very different Dover from the humane and generous person known to his friends.

Dover was above all a scholar. He always wanted to be one, and to excel at it. His St Andrews friends understood this when they gave him, as a leaving present, a rosebowl inscribed with the line of Homer which means “always to do best, and be above the others”. What captivated him in classical Greece was, first and foremost, the language. From childhood, all languages had fascinated him, and he liked to draw parallels even from remote Melanesian tongues. Second, he loved the complexities of the social and political history of the fifth and fourth centuries BC. For philosophy, he had little taste; Latin he put aside early, and he never wrote or talked much about the continuities of European civilisation. Of the importance of knowing about Ancient Greece, he had of course no doubt; but the historical links between the world in which we live and that of Thucydides and Aristophanes were not, to him, evidence of that importance. It rested rather on what he believed to be the social and moral perceptions of the classical age and the precise and subtle language in which they are expressed.

Dover’s achievement as a scholar was massive: but so too was his contribution, often as a leader, to the institutions which he served, in Britain and abroad. And both his scholarship and his leadership were shaped by a distinctive personality, one which won and kept many friends in all walks of life. You saw the tall, spare figure (he enjoyed quite severe physical exertion, humping stones on his rockery or walking in the hills for days on end) with some faint traces of a military look, perhaps only the moustache. “Shaggy” was a word sometimes used of him when he was young — his face was lined quite early in life, and deeply lined as he grew older, as the portrait in the Corpus common room reveals. But then you heard, not a grunt or a military bark, but rational argument phrased in perfect syntax, in a light, unhurried tone. His voice was clear rather than resonant, and seldom showed emotion or vehemence, or indeed any marked change of tempo.

Pupils, or members of committees which he chaired, felt reassured, but knew they would be expected to decide the issues themselves with the same scrupulous regard for evidence.

He therefore gave many people an extraordinary impression of serene strength, though those who knew him well understood that this triumphantly masked much inner disquiet. Religion did not come into it: he wanted it to be known that twice in his life he had consciously reviewed and rejected the Christian beliefs by which he had been surrounded as a schoolboy. He claimed to find strength in what he called “scientific materialism”; but he also looked for some kind of spirituality, and found it in high and lonely places, and in observing the habits of birds.

He married Audrey Latimer in 1947; she died in December 2009. He is survived by their son and daughter.

Sir Kenneth Dover, Greek scholar and Chancellor of the University of St Andrews, 1981-2005, was born on March 11, 1920. He died on March 7, 2010, aged 89