Byline: KENNETH DOVER

ANTONY Andrewes, the Greek historian who has died the day after his 80th birth day, succeeded HT Wade-Gery as Wykeham Professor of Ancient History at Oxford in 1953, and retired in 1977. Educated at Winchester and New College, he was a Fellow of Pembroke from 1933 to 1946 and of New College from 1946 onwards.

The strongest influence on his earlier career was that of Alan Blakeway (whose widow, Alison, he married in 1938), and he became a notable member of a new generation of historians which achieved an integration of archaeology and historiography.

Although his first love in history was the Archaic period, by the time he published his first book, The Greek Tyrants (1956) he had disentangled some problems in late 5th-century history and joined with Russell Meiggs to produce what was called (too modestly) a 'New Edition' of Hill's Sources. As a collaborator and colleague, he fell short of perfection only in that his comments and suggestions were sometimes quirkily allusive.

He was flexible, sympathetic and patient, but never weak and never willing to save time by leaving a question unsettled. In private conversation he was prompt to dismiss as 'garbage' pretentious and verbose books and articles which did nothing to advance our understanding of what happened in the Ancient Greek world, and his judgments on anyone he regarded as self-seeking and unscrupulous could be very severe. But in controversy he always treated disagreement with his own conclusions as the honest attempt of a fellow worker to get at the truth.

He brought the same detached, wry humour, the same generosity of spirit, to bear on academic questions, college business and private misfortunes.

He was able to remain a friend of people who were enemies of one another; some manage that by duplicity, but he did it by the respect which his goodwill and integrity inspired.

His most enduring contribution to Greek history is undoubtedly the commentaries on books V and VIII of Thucydides which form a major part of the Gomme-Andrewes-Dover Historical Commentary on Thucydides (1970, 1981).

Those books had never before been given the comprehensive and penetrating treatment which he was able to give them. He knew Greek extremely well, and he also knew Greece.

Parachuted during the war into the northern Peloponnese to work with the forces of Greek Resistance to German occupation, he learned from experience what it is like to travel and fight in such country and profited, as a historian would, from observation of the faction, treachery and rhetoric which bedevilled the Resistance. After Thucydides he came back to Archaic Greece, and his chapters in volume III of the new Cambridge Ancient History, on Athens down to the late sixth century BC, display at its best his combination of learning, clarity of exposition, level-headed judgment and readiness to admit doubt.

Antony Andrewes born June 12, 1910; died June 13, 1990.