Lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford (1931–1939) In 1931, Page was appointed a lecturer at Christ Church and became a Student (a full member of the college's governing body) the following year. It was during this period that he began working on the plays of the Greek poet
Euripides, which culminated in the publication of a critical edition and commentary of Euripides'
Medea (1938). Following in the footsteps of fellow Oxford classicist
Edgar Lobel, he also worked on the poems of the
archaic Greek lyric poets. Page assumed an active role in college affairs. In 1936, he strongly opposed the candidacy of the Irish scholar
E. R. Dodds for the
Regius Chair of Greek which was hosted at Christ Church. Dodds was elected to the position in spite of Page's reservations. In 1937 he was appointed to the office of junior censor at the college – the
Censor Naturalis Philosophiae, responsible for undergraduate discipline. However, he resigned the position a year later to marry Katharine Elizabeth Dohan, daughter of the American archaeologist
Edith Hall Dohan. They had four daughters, one of whom is the
Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley. In 1939, he briefly served as the inaugural
Andrew Fleming West Professor in Classics at
Princeton University.
Wartime service at Bletchley Park (1939–1945) In 1939, Page was recruited to the
Government Code and Cypher School and posted to
Bletchley Park. Page's command of German, acquired during his time at Vienna, was put to use in the interpretation activities of Hut 9A. In 1942 he joined the ISOS "illicit signals" section run by Oliver Strachey and later headed that unit. In this role, he joined the inter-services
XX Committee, and became a Deputy Director of GC&CS. After the
end of World War II in Europe, he was part of a mission to the British headquarters in Colombo, then Singapore and finally Sri Lanka near the end of the war.
Cambridge (1950–1973) After
the end of the war, Page returned to Oxford from 1946 and was elected to the office of
Senior Proctor (1948). Page's tenure at Oxford came to an abrupt end in 1950: the
Regius Chair of Greek at
Cambridge University had become vacant after the retirement of
Donald Struan Robertson. Though he did not submit an application, Page was offered the post by the electors and accepted. He was duly elected a fellow of
Trinity College. At this time, Cambridge provided a less stimulating environment for scholars of the classics than Oxford. Page's arrival, together with that of the German Latinist
Charles Brink, marked a reinvigoration of classical teaching at the university. Similarly to his time at Oxford, Page actively participated in the running of the university. Having been elected to the council of Trinity College soon after his arrival, he was chosen to replace classicist
E. M. W. Tillyard as the Master of
Jesus College in 1959. He held this position until his retirement in 1973. Many contemporaries considered Page suitable for the position of
vice-chancellor, but he was never elected. According to classicist
Hugh Lloyd-Jones, his failure to obtain the office was a consequence of his staunch opposition to the students involved in the
Garden House riot, a violent protest against the
Greek military junta. Having played as a
bowler while at Christ Church, Page also served as the president of
Cambridge University Cricket Club from 1971 to 1973. His tenure at Cambridge saw the publication of a number of books on Greek poetry. In 1955, Lobel and Page published a
critical edition of the poems of the
Lesbian poets
Alcaeus and
Sappho, followed by a book on the same authors (
Sappho and Alcaeus). He was also the sole author of studies on
Homer's Odyssey (
The Homeric Odyssey, 1955) and the
Iliad (
History and the Homeric Iliad, 1959). His most comprehensive work, an edition of all lyric poets apart from the Lesbians, appeared in 1962 under the title of
Poetae Melici Graeci. Resuming his earlier work on the tragedian
Euripides, he took over from the recently deceased Denniston an edition of
Aeschylus' Agamemnon, which was published in 1957 as a rival to
Eduard Fraenkel's edition of the play. ==Retirement and death==