) reference the ancient game of , played by flicking the dregs of a wine-cup at other participants.
Early career Tyrrell twice won prizes in the examinations to become a fellow of Trinity College, but did not secure the position until his third attempt in 1868. Classical studies had held relatively little prominence at Trinity until the 1860s; few classics graduates had applied for fellowships at the college, preferring instead to seek careers in law or public service. Tyrrell's appointment, along with those of
John Pentland Mahaffy in 1864 and
Arthur Palmer in 1867, marked the beginning of a period in which the subject expanded greatly in numbers, publications and prestige. These academics became known as the "Dublin School" of classics. Tyrrell was elected Professor of Latin in 1871, succeeding
William Hugh Ferrar, who had died in office. Tyrrell's lecture style was spontaneous, relying on question-and-answer with his audience: his student
Louis Claude Purser later wrote that the lectures were highly effective, but not "by any means highly systematic", and that they might have been condemned as mere "desultory conversations" by an educational inspector. In 1869, Tyrrell co-founded (with
Edward Sullivan) and became the first editor of the Trinity literary magazine , which
William Stanford, Tyrrell's biographer, describes as "a polyglot miscellany of ". He remained its editor-in-chief for all the editions of its first run, which ended in 1881. His contributions to included reports on college cricket matches written in the style of the ancient Greek historian
Thucydides. He was also a founding member of the editorial board of
Hermathena, a more serious academic journal, established in 1873. He contributed to the first issue a review of John H. Hogan's edition of
Euripides's
Medea: the review was, in Stanford's words, "a savagely sarcastic scarification of Hogan's grammatical and metrical lapses". Tyrrell wrote that his intention was to discourage Hogan from editing any further works of the playwright "until he has made himself acquainted with the rudiments of Greek
accidence and the structure of an
iambic trimeter". In 1879, Tyrrell published the first volume of an edition of the letters of the Roman statesman and philosopher
Cicero. This was the first attempt in an English-language work to establish the date of each of Cicero's letters and to arrange them in chronological order, though German scholars had attempted the same project and previous studies had attempted to date individual letters within the corpus. Unusually for the time, Tyrrell's edition rejected the traditional practice of grouping letters by their addressee, referring to each of the 931 letters by a number.
Regius Professor of Greek From 1880 to 1898, Tyrrell was
Regius Professor of Greek, succeeding
John Kells Ingram, who became the college librarian. From 1885, Purser began to work with him on his editions of Cicero's letters, though only Tyrrell was credited on the 1886 publication of the second volume, and he remained the "senior partner", listed before Purser, for all succeeding volumes. In 1887, he used his own name to have a textual note on the
Frogs of
Aristophanes, written by
A. E. Housmanwho had failed his degree at Oxford and was working at the
Patent Officepublished in
The Classical Review; in 1892, he sponsored Housman's successful application to be
Professor of Latin at
University College London. In 1893, Tyrrell delivered the Percy Turnbull Lectures at
Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore, which he published as
Latin Poetry. Tyrrell was a lifelong friend and supporter of
Richard Claverhouse Jebb, professor of Greek initially at the
University of Glasgow and, from 1889, at
Cambridge, and often sided with him in academic debates, particularly against Mahaffy. In a letter to Jebb of February 1883, Tyrrell congratulated him for "show[ing] Mahaffy in his true light, with slovenly Greek and disingenuous arguments"; from 1884, Tyrrell and Mahaffy quarrelled over the edition of the Greek historian
Herodotus made by the historian
Archibald Sayce, leading to what Stanford calls a "minor civil war" between their respective acolytes at Trinity.
Later career Tyrrell left the Regius Professorship in 1898; he was succeeded by his former student
J. B. Bury, then appointed in 1899 as the university's
Public Orator and, in 1900, as Professor of Ancient History. The move was not regarded as a good fit with Tyrrell's academic interests – he was a literary scholar rather than a historian – but may have been intended to prevent Bury from leaving Trinity to seek a professorship elsewhere. Stanford further explains it through the belief that "in those days, Fellows of Trinity were deemed to be omniscient". Tyrrell suffered from
thrombosis of the legs from 1899, which forced him to give up his previous participation in sport (particularly
rackets and
tennis), affected his physical and mental energy and, in Stanford's words, "ravaged his fine features". In 1904, he was considered for the position of college
provost, though ultimately passed over in favour of
Anthony Traill, who was appointed by the Prime Minister,
Arthur Balfour, in March. In the aftermath of Traill's appointment, Tyrrell was co-opted as a Senior Fellow, which required him to resign both his professorship and his office as Public Orator. Tyrrell was also elected as the college
registrar in the same year, with a total salary (in 1906) of £1,386 14s (). In 1913, by which point his health was in decline, he was not re-elected as registrar, and was instead appointed
senior dean and catechist, responsible for the religious education of the student body. Tyrrell was a Commissioner of Education for Ireland; he was called to testify in 1899 before a
royal commission on the state of education on the island and the possibility of reforming it. He was also chosen, in 1901, as one of the founding fellows of the
British Academy. He died on 19 September 1914, at his home in
Greystones, in
County Wicklow near Dublin, after what Purser describes as a "tedious illness". ==Personal life==