[4]: 195 In 1912, Dodds won a scholarship to University College, Oxford to read classics, or Literae Humaniores, a two-part four-year degree program consisting of five terms' study of Latin and Greek texts followed by seven terms' study of ancient history and ancient philosophy.

[5] After graduation, Dodds returned to Dublin and met the poets W. B. Yeats and George William Russell, who published under the pseudonym "A. E.".

His lack of service in the First World War (he had worked briefly in an army hospital in Serbia but later invoked the exemption from military service granted Irish residents) and his support for Irish republicanism and socialism in addition to his scholarship on the non-standard field of Neoplatonism, also did not make him initially popular with colleagues.

[6] He was treated particularly harshly by Denys Page at whose college (Christ Church) the Regius Chair of Greek was based.

Dodds's scholarship on what he called the "irrational" elements of Greek mental life was significantly influenced by anthropology of J. G. Frazer (especially Psyche's Task) and Ruth Benedict's culture-pattern theories, the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (esp.

[8]It was this synthesis of anthropological, psychoanalytic and philosophic lenses which re-invigorated interdisciplinary conversations in Classics that had faltered ever since the controversies of the Myth-ritualists.

He was also editor of three major classical texts for the Clarendon Press, Proclus: Elements of Theology, Euripides' Bacchae and Plato's Gorgias, all published with extensive commentaries, and a translation in the case of the first.

The Berkeley, California punk band The Mr. T Experience recorded a song for their 1988 album, Night Shift at the Thrill Factory, entitled "The History of the Concept of the Soul", which is a two-minute, musical version of lead singer Frank Portman's (also known as Dr. Frank) master's thesis.

Dodds' The Greeks and the Irrational is specifically referenced at the end of the song as "footnotes"[9] (including an Ibid) sung by Portman.