John Pentland Mahaffy was described as a contradictory and often extravagant legend by William Stanford and Robert McDowell in their 1971 biography. Mahaffy’s remarkable life certainly was contradictory, at times extravagant and often controversial and we cannot hope to do him justice in a mere 20 minutes. He was a polymath, a professor of ancient … More John Pentland Mahaffy: ‘The extravagant and contradictory legend’