Martin Ferguson Smith

After education at Shrewsbury School (1953–1958) he proceeded to Trinity College, Dublin (1958–1963), where he was a Foundation Scholar in Classics and won several academic prizes, including the Tyrrell Memorial Gold Medal for Greek and Latin verse and prose composition (1960).

[1] After gaining First Class Honours and a Moderatorship Prize (1962),[2] he carried out postgraduate research under Donald Ernest Wilson Wormell for a thesis entitled "Lucretius: The Man and His Mission" (MLitt, Dublin, 1965).

The other author is Diogenes of Oinoanda, who, probably early in the second century AD, presented his exposition of Epicurean philosophy in a Greek inscription carved on the wall of a stoa (colonnade) in the centre of his home-city in northern Lycia, in the mountains of southwest Asia Minor (Turkey).

In 1968 Smith inaugurated a long series of new investigations at Oinoanda that have now continued for half a century and much more than tripled the number of known fragments of one of the most remarkable documents to have survived from the ancient world.

The latest book and the series of articles in the journal Epigraphica Anatolica (2007–2012, 2016, 2018), in which the numerous and important discoveries made since 2007 are presented, were co-authored with Jürgen Hammerstaedt.

These include the writers Rose Macaulay,[10] Virginia Woolf,[11] Dorothy L. Sayers,[12] and Katharine Tynan;[13] the artists Roger Fry,[14] Helen Coombe,[15] and Tristram Hillier;[16] the art critic Clive Bell;[17] Mary Louisa Gordon, first female Inspector of Prisons in England and Wales and ardent supporter of the suffragettes;[18] the trade unionist and judicial reformer Madeleine Symons,[19] and Richard Williams Reynolds, schoolteacher of J. R. R. Tolkien, revealing Reynolds to be the unacknowledged son of a Confederate commander from Arkansas in the American Civil War.