In 1881 A.E. Houseman failed disastrously in his classical honours exam at Oxford University. He did not even manage to answer many of the questions. The reason for his failure was his dislike of Oxford’s approach to the classics, with its emphasis on ancient philosophy. After leaving university he started intense research, according to his own taste and interest, into Latin and Greek—the very subjects in which he had failed at Oxford. He spent all his free time at the British Museum Library, researching manuscript minutiae and carefully correcting errors in the texts of classical authors Ovid and Propertius. He published about twenty-five articles in scholarly journals. Just eleven years after his dismal failure at Oxford, he applied for the professorship of Latin at University College, London. His application was accompanied by 17 testimonials—from classicists all over the world—confirming his brilliance as a Latin and Greek scholar. He was granted the post and went on—before his death in 1936—to assume the professorship of Latin at Cambridge and be recognized as one of the greatest critics of classical texts of all time.

Norman Page A.E. Houseman: A Critical Biography (Schocken, 1984).