chair. Trinity College, Cambridge duly admitted him to its fellowship. Having published the content of his Sather Lectures in 1970, his work on Greek literature continued with a translation of the Bacchae (1970) by the tragedian Euripides and a second monograph on Homer (Homer and the Oral Tradition, 1977). In 1979, he briefly returned to the United States to take up a distinguished visiting professorship at Tulane University. In 1975, while serving as the Regius Professor, Kirk's marriage to his wife was dissolved. He then married Kirsten Ricks, the former wife of the literary critic Christopher Ricks, in September of the same year. Although the pair did not have any children, he acquired four stepchildren from Kirsten's first marriage. Retirement and death Kirk retired from his teaching duties in 1982. Continuing for some time to live at their house in Woodbridge, Suffolk, he and his wife later moved to Bath and finally settled in Fittleworth, West Sussex. Much of his retirement was taken up by work on a large-scale commentary on Homer's Iliad. Intended to be the crowning achievement of his academic career, the book was published in six volumes between 1985 and 1993. While he was the sole author of the first two volumes, the remaining ones were published in co-operation with fellow classicists Mark W. Edwards, Richard Janko, Nicholas Richardson, and John B. Hainsworth. In his retirement, Kirk increasingly suffered from depressive illness, leading to a "stressful and unsettled" life. He died from heart failure in March 2003 in a nursing home at Rake, West Sussex. He was survived by his second wife Kirsten, his daughter and four stepchildren. Legacy Kirks's reputation as a classical scholar was based initially on his work on pre-Socratic philosophy. His first book (Heraclitus: the Cosmic Fragments, 1954) was well received among the scholars community. Gregory Vlastos, a leading interpreter of Plato, remarked that it "compell[ed] one to reconsider many things one has previously taken for granted". Co-authored with John Raven, his 1959 book The Presocratic Philosophers became, in the words of Hellenist Hugh Lloyd-Jones, "an invaluable substitute" for previous treatments of the topic. From about 1960, his research focus lay with the Homeric epics. In this area, he was under the influence of his Cambridge predecessor Denys Page who had held that the poems were products of an oral tradition of poetry. Kirk's Songs of Homer (1962) presented a more nuanced expression