Thomas Felix Rudolf Gerhard Braun

The following obituary was first published in The Times on 27 October 2008

Thomas Braun: Oxford classicist with a special interest in the ancient Greeks abroad (born 30 August 1935; died 24 September 2008, aged 73)

Thomas Braun was one of the last representatives of an all but vanished breed of Oxford don. In the first place, he possessed a staggeringly retentive and varied memory that was crammed with recondite but somehow always apposite material. He had almost total recall of the text of Herodotus and of many of the fragmentary Greek historians whose works are collected in Jacoby’s Fragmente der griechischen Historiker. From an early stage in his career, he interested himself in the Greeks overseas, contributing sections on The Greeks in the Near East and The Greeks in Egypt to the second edition of The Cambridge Ancient History.

But his scholarly interests were not confined to the Greeks. He was profoundly knowledgeable across an extraordinary range of subjects including the history of the Jews (in almost all periods), the migrations of the Slav peoples, physical geography, and German literature, to name but a few.

The second thing that marked him out was a remarkable facility for languages. Although his first language was German, he spoke English perfectly and knew Latin and Greek to a degree that few living people now do. His knowledge of other European languages included French, Italian and Modern Greek. He always taught himself the rudiments of the languages of the countries he visited and he enriched his scholarship with a knowledge of Hebrew, Persian and, to a lesser extent, even Chinese.

He had a flair for verse and he took pleasure in the extempore compositions that he would occasionally publish or just circulate for the enjoyment of friends, family and colleagues. He delighted countless readers with his light verses that appeared in the Oxford Magazine; in his later years, he produced some fine translations of more serious poetry.
   
Apart from his learning, what really made him stand out among his Oxford colleagues was his extraordinary wit and charm, his personal modesty and his desire to share the byways of his extensive knowledge with all and sundry. His conversation sparkled and nobody who met him forgot his extraordinary talk. His parties were legendary, not least when he served his home-made fresh nettle soup.

Thomas Felix Rudolf Gerhard Braun (Tom to his friends) was born in 1935 in Berlin, the elder son of Konrad and Hildburg Braun. Konrad was an appeal court judge and stemmed from Berlin’s cultured Christian middle class. But his ancestry was Jewish and so the Brauns became victims of the Nazi regime. Konrad happened to be away on a visit to England in November 1938 when the Gestapo came to arrest him. Hildburg and Tom managed to get out with the aid of English Quakers, but many others of his closest family perished.

In England the family eventually built a new life at Woodbrooke, the Quaker college in Birmingham. But in the early months of the war Braun, still aged only 5, was evacuated and spent a miserable period separated from his family. It is possible that in these early experiences are to be found the roots of the bipolar illness from which he suffered later in life.

No sensitive German child can have found British schools easy during and after the war, but Braun’s academic ability eventually won the respect of his contemporaries. At Bootham, the Quaker school in York, he won a Noble scholarship to Balliol. A Bootham scholarship of £100 enabled him to travel round Greece, and in 1952 he set off. The drachma had been devalued just before he arrived so that, with his ability to live simply and make friends, he spent four months in pre-tourist Greece getting to know the country, the ancient sites and the modern language.

Before going up to Oxford, Braun did his National Service. As a conscientious objector, he spent two years with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit. For six months, he worked for the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief (later Oxfam), whose offices were tantalisingly just across the road from his future college. He went to Cephalonia to help with the building of a school after the devastating 1953 earthquake and spent a year as a hospital orderly in Woolwich.

He found his spiritual home at Oxford. After taking a double first in classics at Balliol, he moved to Merton for three years of postgraduate study. After a year at Leicester University, he was appointed Fellow and tutor in ancient history at Merton in 1963. He was appointed to a senior research fellowship in 1999 and retired in 2002, and was elected an emeritus fellow. He also served as dean from 1974 to 2002.

Braun’s wit, brilliance and learning did not endear him to all of his colleagues, especially those who felt threatened by it. He, for his part, was easily cast down when he felt misunderstood or treated unfairly by others.

He was not a man to hitch his wagon to passing trends in scholarship. He detested careerist dons who, lacking his scholarly acumen, needed to clothe their utterances with obfuscatory theorising in order to make them appear presentable.

When it became fashionable to write books on subjects such as the political and sexual connotations of food and eating in antiquity, it was Braun who quietly reminded people that it might be more fitting to leave that sort of thing until rather more was known about what Greeks and Romans actually ate. He published in this field and had particular expertise in ancient technology related to milling and making bread.

Braun had a wide interest in the preservation of valuable cultural heritage. Best known perhaps was his role in the successful campaign to prevent a road being built across Christ Church Meadow in the 1960s. Other concerns included the threatened ancient Christian communities in the Near East, the encouragement of learning in Eastern Europe before and after the collapse of communism, and the preservation of his own family’s fascinating history. He was unstinting in his help to scholars all over the world and children loved his word-games and sense of fun.

Braun never learnt to drive. It was quite common for friends and former pupils to drive him and they did so gladly. On an excursion with friends, he was involved in a major road accident on August 22 and died from his injuries in hospital a month later.

Much to his regret, he never married.