When I first became aware of Averil Cameron, in the early 1970s, she was half of an academic power couple who strode into conferences and dazzled, he the Latinist, she the Hellenist, he leading on verse, she on prose. She and Alan believed in early and thorough publication and her early works have stood the test of time. Agathias, Corippus, and Procopius were landmark studies which were accepted as well as well-received by classical scholars, and she continued to be considered as a classicist, editing the Journal of Roman Studies (1985–1991) and three volumes of the Cambridge Ancient History, and serving as president of FIEC (2009–2014). But as the Camerons’ careers diverged, she was revealed as a figure of great importance. She was a pioneer in the newly developing field of Late Antiquity, more literary in focus than Peter Brown, more pagan – as well as Christian – than Elizabeth Clark. In everything she touched she became the authority, and she changed perceptions radically: her ‘A city finds its symbol’ reframed Norman Baynes for second-wave feminism and preceded by decades the flurry of interest in the Mother of God. Her ‘The sceptic and the Shroud’ engaged with the rise of the cult of icons and disappointed many devotees of Turin. Her series on seventh-century transformations of the Middle East predated recent concerns for ‘big-tent Byzantium’ and the integration of Syriac and early Islamic studies into Late Antiquity; and for her, Iconoclasm demanded a theological dimension. She produced the translation of Eusebius with Stuart Hall, The Later Roman Empire, The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, and her hugely important Sather Lectures. So she is rightly also thought of as the queen of Late Antiquity.
But for us, she was a Byzantinist, one of the ‘great generation’ which included Meg Alexiou, Michael Angold, Sebastian Brock, Anthony Bryer, and Robin Cormack, and she published in the third issue of this journal in 1977 (also in the twentieth and fortieth issues in 1996 and 2016). Her second inaugural lecture, ‘The use and abuse of Byzantium’ (1992), began to raise issues that resonated until Byzantine Matters (2014) with its ‘Absence of Byzantium’, the essay that launched a hundred seminars. She had also begun at that stage the work on religious debate which enabled her to overturn any lingering idea of Byzantine writing as tradition-bound and idea-free; her own considerable curiosity recognized an enquiring spirit in the texts she was reading, and she continued to argue for a dynamic, sophisticated Byzantium completely unrecognizable to her Byzantinist predecessors. She was intellectually formidable, quick to ask a difficult question, trained to know that ‘what mattered was excellence’,Footnote 1 and prepared to launch into the most convoluted thought and make clear sense of it. She claimed not to have been a natural at philosophy (her tutor was the formidable Elizabeth Anscombe) but got her alphas through sheer hard work. And she never shirked the subject-building which was so much needed. Anthony Bryer may have created our national Byzantine institutions, but Averil was there at the birth of the SPBS in Edinburgh in 1982, when Bryer wisely made her first chair of the Society; she was a speaker at many spring symposia, the first chair of the publications committee with a budget that caused envy in other subcommittees, and she was a beloved President of the Society until 2025.
Born Averil Millicent Sutton in Leek, Staffordshire, she grew up in a two-up-two-down house without hot water or indoor lavatory, passed the 11-plus to a girls’ grammar school, where she learned Greek in the lunch hour and won an exhibition to Somerville. She read Mods and Greats, gaining a first in each, directed the Persai (Eduard Fraenkel sitting in the front row), and at his seminar met Alan Cameron. They married on graduation, and when he proceeded to a lectureship in Glasgow, she got a scholarship to begin her PhD; after two years she had a draft and Alan a lectureship in London; she transferred, gaining Arnaldo Momigliano as supervisor. In 1965 she was appointed to King’s College London as Assistant Lecturer in Classics, in 1967–8 with a month-old baby she joined Alan to teach at Columbia in a seismic year, and in 1970 she became Reader and then (1978) Professor of Ancient History. In 1981 she was elected FBA and in 1989 Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies, still at King’s, where she set up the Centre for Hellenic Studies. In 1993 she moved to Oxford to be the first woman Warden of Keble and became Pro-Vice-Chancellor in 2001. She was awarded the CBE in 1999 and the DBE in 2006. On retirement in 2010, she won a Leverhulme Emeritus award for her transformative dialoguing project and became the first Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. A more brilliant career is hardly conceivable.
Averil was fierce, awe-inspiring (Greek research students recall standing to attention when answering a phone call from her), very tough, but above all generous, and a wonderful role model and mentor. Once she took you on, you had to deliver, because she did; she always had time to write the reference, even if it arrived in the interview room by fax, and to advise on support for a project she had adopted; she fought valiantly for causes she approved of, and mostly won. She was physically striking: the photograph of the Dumbarton Oaks 1970 symposium speakers in which a mini-skirted dolly-bird has invaded decades of grey-suited grey males; the languid vision in beige in the Roscoe portrait; the silvery elegance of the Somerville photograph with roses. She loved learning new things (modern Greek, Zoom) and reviving others (swimming, piano-playing) and was surprisingly down to earth: she mastered Cooking in a Bedsitter (lugging a Le Creuset pot back from a continental holiday before she was married) and owned to retail therapy as a favourite pastime. She was very good with small boys. She knew everything there is to know about being a single mother and the first woman in many male roles. And all this she used to the benefit of her subject, her students, her colleagues, and her friends.
She leaves two children, Daniel and Sophie, and a grandson, Silas.
