JANUARY 2022
New article
“Pandemics, Plagues, and Philosophy: Moral Lessons from Antiquity for the Modern
World”, Antigone [online classical journal], January 2022. Illustrated.
Epicurean and Stoic philosophers could not offer vaccines or effective medicines to
combat plagues and pestilences, but they did offer moral advice to those caught up in
such events, and they were concerned to combat the plagues of false opinions that
blight the lives and happiness of so many. Their advice is as relevant today as it was
in antiquity.
NEW! READ HERE: https://antigonejournal.com/2022/01/pandemic-philosophy/
Reception of new book, In and out of Bloomsbury: Biographical Essays on Twentieth-Century Writers and Artists, Manchester University Press, 2021.
(1) Selected by Manchester University Press as its “Book of the Month” for September 2021.
READ HERE: https://www.staffnet.manchester.ac.uk/news/display/?id=26901
(2) Reviewed by Vanessa Curtis, author of two fine books about Virginia Woolf, in The Times Literary Supplement, 19 November 2021, p. 21.
Under the title “Bloomsbury blooms”, the reviewer writes of Martin: “In this
masterful collection of essays, he shines a welcome new light on the oft-told stories of the Bloomsbury Group and their acquaintances, correcting errors, filling in gaps and
revealing much ‘new’ information”. Calling him “something of a literary bloodhound”, she signals the “sort of dogged, forensic attention to detail that sets [his] Ferguson Smith’s book apart from the rest”.
(3) Reviewed by Seona Ford, in the Dorothy L Sayers Society Bulletin 278, November 2021, pp. 13-14.
Her judgment: “Carefully researched and scholarly. … The essays are fascinating.”
(4) Reviewed by Janet Brennan Croft, in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature 40, no. 1 (18 October 2021), Article 26.
The reviewer focuses, approvingly, on Essays 8-10, about Dorothy L. Sayers and Tolkien’s teacher Richard Williams Reynolds.
READ HERE: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol40/iss1/26
(5) Reviewed by Wendy Jones Nakanishi, in Virginia Woolf Bulletin 69 (January 2022), pp. 57-63.
She comments: “Smith brings a depth of knowledge and a level of meticulous
scholarship to these biographical essays about important literary, artistic and
historical figures of the early twentieth century that would be difficult to equal
let alone surpass.”
READ HERE: www.martinfergusonsmith.com/pdf/69BulletinJonesReview.pdf
Forthcoming article and book-section
“Diogenes of Oinoanda: News and Notes XIV (2019-2021)”, Cronache Ercolanesi 52 (2022). One illustration.
A survey of recent work, including details of activities and a critical review of relevant publications.
“Die epikureische Inschrift des Diogenes von Oinoanda”, in M. Bachmann (†), J. Hammerstaedt, E Laufer (eds), Oinoanda: Ergebnisse der Surveys 2007-2015:
Bauforschung, Archäologie, Epigraphik. Expected in 2022 in the “Istanbuler Forschungen” series, published by Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Istanbul. Illustrated. Co-author with Jürgen Hammerstaedt.
A presentation and discussion of Diogenes of Oinoanda, with particular reference to new discoveries made during the German-led survey of Oinoanda in 2007-2015.
Next book
Martin is well advanced with the writing of a book about the artist Helen Coombe (1864-1937). The movingly tragic story, never fully told before, is of a woman admired for her artistic genius, personality, and good looks, who married the artist and art critic Roger Fry in 1896, and whose career, marriage, and whole life came to be wrecked by paranoid schizophrenia, which led to her incarceration in a psychiatric hospital for the last 27 years of her life.
November 2021
Lucretius
An attractive item, and an unusual one, by “Young Epicurean”, aka Alan Noel Reyes, and posted here with his kind permission, is what he describes as “an Epicurean devotional chant”. The words are the first five and a half lines of Lucretius’ third book, in which the poet hails Epicurus as the one who brought moral and spiritual salvation to humanity, raising a bright torch of truth out of the darkness of ignorance. The music is Reyes’s contrafact of Hildegard von Bingen’s O Virtus Sapientiae, and he is the performer. The Latin text is retained, with Martin’s translation given in the accompanying notes.
VIEW AND LISTEN HERE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uW0PaQqglg
August 2021
“The Royal Academy of Arts Students’ Clubs, 1883-1902,” The British Art Journal 22, No. 1 (Spring 2021) 78-88. 14 illustrations.
READ HERE: www.martinfergusonsmith.com/pdf/RA 20Clubs 20BAJ 20XXII.pdf
This link is provided by kind permission of the editor of The British Art Journal
This tale of two clubs is one that has never been told before. Each club had premises close to Piccadilly Circus. The earlier one, established in 1883,
was very short lived, but hosted important and influential lectures on art by Oscar Wilde and James McNeill Whistler. The later one, opened in 1889,
held regular meetings, especially smoking concerts – a sure sign that only men were eligible for membership! The exclusion of women is considered alongside
discussion of their status and discriminatory treatment in the Royal Academy Schools in the nineteenth century. Most of the illustrations are of the posters
and invitations designed by the students.
July 2021
In and Out of Bloomsbury: Biographical Essays on Twentieth-Century Writers and Artists (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021). 46 colour and black and white illustrations. Publication: 20 July 2021.

READ HERE: Blog about In and out of Bloomsbury: https://bit.ly/3rkH2X4
JANUARY 2021
1 January 2021 was the centenary of the death of the outstandingly brilliant and successful women’s trade union leader Mary Reid Macarthur (born 1880). She was secretary of the Women’s Trade Union League from 1903 and then of the National Federation of Women Workers, which she established in 1906. She appears prominently in Martin’s biography of her close colleague and friend Madeleine Symons – Madeleine Symons: Social and Penal Reformer, published in 2017. See MODERN, Books.

NOVEMBER 2020
“Fifty Years of New Epicurean Discoveries at Oinoanda”, Cronache Ercolanesi 50 (2020) 241-258.
The article chronicles the remarkable story of the Greek inscription set up by the Epicurean philosopher Diogenes of Oinoanda (the longest inscription known from the ancient world) from antiquity to the present, with particular focus on the discoveries and rediscoveries made at Oinoanda in the fifty years 1968-2017. Since 1968, when Martin inaugurated new investigations, huge progress has been made. As he points out:
“The number of fragments [of the inscription] has much more than tripled, from 88 to 305, and the quantity of text has more than doubled, from about 3,550 words to about 8,000. The length of the known parts of Diogenes’ inscription is now only slightly less than the combined length of Epicurus’ Letter to Herodotus, Letter to Menoeceus, and Principal Doctrines (Kyriai Doxai).”
He concludes:“Diogenes’ inscription … deserves a special place in the history of classical studies as one of the most remarkable documents to have come down to us from antiquity.”
In a similar vein, Professor Alexander Verlinsky of Saint Petersburg wrote to Martin:“I firmly believe that your Diogenes is one of the most outstanding discoveries in classics of the last two centuries.” (E-mail, 12 November 2017, quoted here with the writer’s kind permission)
READ HERE: https://www.martinfergusonsmith.com/pdf/CRONACHEERCOLANES.pdf
AUGUST 2020
“Covid-19 and Greek Philosophy”, The Philosophers’ Magazine 90 (3rd Quarter 2020) 53-56. An invited contribution to a special issue of the journal (published online and on paper) entitled Thinking Through the Pandemic
READ HERE: http://www.martinfergusonsmith.com/COVID-19 and Greek Philosophy.pdf
Three earlier versions of this article were published in April and June 2020.

MICHIEL SWEERTS (1618-1674), “PLAGUE IN AN ANCIENT CITY”. LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART
JULY 2020
On 3 July Martin was elected a Corresponding Member of the German Archaeological Institute (Deutsches Archäologisches Institut) “to acknowledge and commend your contribution to the field of Ancient Studies, and to further strengthen our existing bond”. In the latest phase of the investigations at Oinoanda in Turkey (since 2007) Martin has collaborated with German-led teams.
MARCH 2020
“Tribute to Diskin Clay and His Work on Diogenes of Oinoanda”, in P. Burian, J. Strauss Clay, and G. Davis (eds), Euphrosyne: Studies in Ancient Philosophy, History, and Literature in Memory of Diskin Clay (Berlin, 2020), pp. 109-111.
JANUARY 2020
"A New Look at Diogenes of Oinoanda, Fr. 157 Smith", Hyperboreus 25, 2 (2019) 351-362. 2 figures.
Contribution to an issue of Hyperboreus dedicated to Alexander Verlinsky, Professor of Classics, State University of St Petersburg, to mark his 60th birthday. The article presents a revised text, translation, and interpretation of a fragment of Diogenes' treatise Old Age - a fragment discovered by Martin at Oinoanda 50 years ago, in 1969.

DIOGENES OF OINOANDA, FRAGMENT 157 (SMITH), DRAWING (12:100) © Martin Ferguson Smith
JUNE 2019
Jürgen Hammerstaedt’s and Martin’s article “Diogenes of Oinoanda: The New and Unexpected Discoveries of 2017 (NF 214-219), With a Re-edition of Fr. 70-72” published in Epigraphica Anatolica 51 (2018) 43-79. Illustrated. The first publication of six new pieces of Diogenes’ philosophical inscription recorded at Oinoanda in October 2017. Two of the pieces (NF 214 and 215) are of particularly great interest and importance. The article includes a revised text of three already-known passages.
