d.m. Geza Vermes
From the Telegraph:
Professor Geza Vermes, who has died aged 88, was from 1965 to 1991 first Reader, then Professor, of Jewish Studies at Oxford and the foremost world authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls — early manuscripts of some Old Testament scriptures, the first of which were discovered accidentally in 1947 by a young Arab shepherd in a cave near the Dead Sea.
Vermes led a long and sometimes bitter battle with the Israeli archaeological authorities to secure publication of all the manuscripts and fragments, copies of which were eventually lodged in the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in 1992. His own The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, first published in 1962, had four editions, the latest in 1997, and sold 300,000 copies. He was the first to identify the Scrolls as belonging to the middle of the 2nd century BC.
That Vermes was able to achieve anything in this area and in other important fields of Jewish history and religion owed everything to the fact that during the darkest days of the Second World War he was, in his native Hungary, a Roman Catholic priest and, although of Jewish family background, just managed to escape deportation to a German death camp. Both his parents, who had converted to Catholicism in the 1930s, were less fortunate: he never saw them again after their arrest in 1944.
Vermes remained a priest until 1957, when marriage required his resignation and, having also renounced Catholicism, he returned to his roots and became a non-practising Jew. Eventually, however, he became a member of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in London and a member of the academic committee of Leo Baeck College, though he declared himself to be uninterested in “organised religion of any description”.
Geza Vermes was born at Mako, southern Hungary, on June 22 1924. When he was four the family moved to Gyula, where his father was the owner and editor of the town’s weekly newspaper until it was closed down by anti-Jewish laws in 1938. Geza was sent to a Roman Catholic school where in 1942 he obtained top marks in every subject and qualified easily for university entry. He decided, however, that because of his Jewish origins he would never secure a university place, so he opted instead for the Catholic priesthood.
He was in the second year of a theological seminary when the Germans invaded Hungary and rounded up all Jews and those of Jewish origin.
Although not yet ordained, he was carrying out the functions of a deacon under the certification of the local bishop, enabling him to escape arrest. The remainder of the war was spent in hiding, protected by the Salesian and Dominican Orders in Budapest.
Although refused admission to the Dominican Order because of his Jewish background, Vermes was accepted by the Fathers of Sion — a community dedicated to prayer for the Jews. By this time he had recognised his calling to be a scholar and was at the community’s house in Louvain, Belgium, from 1946 to 1952 before moving to its central house in Paris, where he remained until 1957.
Having decided to specialise in Old Testament studies, he became particularly interested in the discovery of what became known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, and from 1950 he began translating and interpreting the new texts. He took a doctorate, with the highest honours, in their historic framework at the Institut Orientaliste in Louvain. The doctorate was published as Manuscripts from the Judaean Desert (1953).
Following his move to Paris, Vermes became assistant editor of Cahiers — a journal devoted to the furthering of Catholic-Jewish relations — and began campaigning for an end to anti-Semitism in the Church. This was influential in the reconciling statements of Vatican II. Although still a young priest, he was becoming widely recognised as a scholar of distinction, and it was after attending an international conference in Oxford in 1954 that he went to stay with a friend at Ottery St Mary in Devon.
There he made the acquaintance of an Exeter University professor and his wife Pam . Vermes and Pam fell in love, and her marriage broke down soon afterwards. After much soul-searching, she and Vermes married in 1958 — a union that brought great happiness and fulfilment to both until Pam’s death in 1993.
On leaving the priesthood, Vermes secured an appointment as a lecturer in Divinity at King’s College, Newcastle upon Tyne — then part of Durham University . The teaching duties were light, and over the next eight years he devoted a good deal of time to research and writing. Besides work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, he became interested in the ways in which the Old Testament was interpreted at different points in Jewish history and how this affected the New Testament — discussed in his Scripture and Tradition (1961).
In 1961 he responded to an advertisement for a Reader in Jewish Studies at Oxford, and such was his reputation that he was appointed without interview. He also became a Fellow of the newly-founded Wolfson College .
A major undertaking was the co-editing of a revised edition of The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ — a classic three-volume 19th-century work by a German scholar. This occupied him, on and off, for several years and encouraged him to embark on a trilogy devoted to the Jewish background of the life and work of Jesus — Jesus the Jew (1973), Jesus and the World of Judaism (1983) and The Religion of Jesus the Jew (1996).
These portrayed Jesus as a typical 1st-century Jewish holy man — a preacher, healer and exorcist — who was executed because it was feared that his words and deeds might lead to insurrection: “He died on the cross for having done the wrong thing (causing a commotion) in the wrong place (the Temple) at the wrong time (just before the Passover). Here lies the real tragedy of Jesus the Jew.”
The trilogy was followed in 2000 by The Changing Faces of Jesus, a survey of the various representations of Jesus in the New Testament; and, in 2003, a companion volume, The Authentic Gospel of Jesus .
Although Vermes did not share the Christian belief in the divinity of Jesus, he acknowledged him to be “second to none” among the Jewish teachers and prophets, and the trilogy was found illuminating by many Christian scholars.
Notwithstanding his high reputation worldwide and his popularity in Oxford, Vermes — a distinguished-looking, bearded figure — always craved further recognition, and this came almost at the end of his academic career when he was elected to the British Academy in 1985 and awarded an Oxford DLitt in 1989 — in the same year he was appointed to the chair of Jewish Studies.
In 1998 he published an autobiography, Providential Accidents, and he continued to write and lecture until he was well into his eighties. In 2012 he published Christian Beginnings from Nazareth to Nicaea AD30–325.
He married secondly, in 1996, Margaret Unarska, a Polish scientist, who survives him with a stepson and two stepdaughters.
Professor Geza Vermes, born June 22 1924, died May 8 2013
- via: Professor Geza Vermes (Telegraph)
d.m. Peter Walsh
From the Telegraph:
Peter Walsh, who has died aged 89, was a classicist and helped to change the way scholars look at some of the great Latin texts.
He made his name in 1961 with Livy: His historical aims and methods, a book which rescued the reputation of the great Roman historian from the academic doldrums. In 1970 The Roman Novel showed the connection between the Satyricon of Petronius and the Metamorphoses (or Golden Ass) of Apuleius and other forms of fiction being written in the Roman world before 200AD, and explored how they had influenced the mainstream of European picaresque literature over the centuries.
Later on in his career Walsh turned his attention to medieval Latin, ranging from the sacred to the profane. He published editions of The Art of Courtly Love and the earthy lyrics of Carmina Burana, while his work on the early Church fathers (including Saints Paulinus and Thomas Aquinas) led to his appointment as a papal Knight Commander of the Order of Saint Gregory.
One of nine children, Patrick Gerard Walsh was born on August 16 1923 at Accrington, Lancashire, where he and his siblings were brought up in poverty in a two-bedroom terraced house with an outside privy. His decision, in childhood, to adopt the name Peter was not entirely popular with other members of the family since his brother and father both had the same name.
Peter’s father, a factory labourer, was a first generation Irish immigrant who had experienced a profound conversion to Catholicism as a result of traumatic wounds sustained at the Battle of the Somme, and he subjected his young family to a rigorous programme of religious training and ritual, both in the home and at the local Jesuit church. Of Peter’s eight brothers and sisters, three became nuns and two priests.
Walsh won scholarships to Preston Catholic College and then to Liverpool University, where he took a first in Classics. During the war, having failed to make the grade in the RAF due to poor practical skills, he served in Italy and Palestine with the Intelligence Corps, although the only training he could recall involved solving crossword puzzles.
After the war he began his academic career at University College, Dublin, moving in 1960 to Edinburgh University, where he was awarded a personal chair in 1971. The following year he succeeded CJ Fordyce as Professor of Humanity at Glasgow University, where he turned his attention largely to medieval Latin and also sought to address the decline of Classics in Scottish schools by organising residential courses for schoolchildren.
After his retirement in 1993 he continued to work, making new translations of Petronius, Apuleius, Boethius and Cicero for Oxford World’s Classics.
At the time of his death, despite suffering from Parkinson’s disease, he was attempting to complete a translation of St Augustine’s The City of God, and had reached the 16th of its 22 books.
A few weeks before he died he was delighted when Harvard University Press published a handsome anthology of his translations of Latin hymns.
He married, in 1953, Eileen Quin, who survives him with their daughter and four sons.
via: Peter Walsh (Telegraph)
d.m. Kathryn Bosher
From the Globe and Mail:
Kathryn Bosher studied very old things and died at a very young age.
An accomplished, respected scholar of ancient Greek theatre, especially as it was performed outside ancient Greece, Prof. Bosher had also been a world-class rower for Canada. She packed much into a life that metastatic lung cancer cut short at the age of 38 on March 23, just five months after the disease was diagnosed.
Very unlike the popular image of the tweeded geezer who pores over dusty, half-forgotten tomes, Prof. Bosher was a vibrant, energetic young woman who could make the Greek classics crackle. Among a handful of scholars to research the ancient origins of comedy in Sicily and southern Italy, then western outposts of the Greek empire, she was equally at home with the raunchy, sexually charged humour of Aristophanes as with the crystalline melodies of Sappho’s poems.
“She combined a good critical sense of her field with a tremendously positive disposition,” Robert Wallace, who worked with her in the department of classics and theatre at Northwestern University in the Chicago area, where Prof. Bosher began teaching Greek and Latin in 2006, told the campus newspaper.
“Students were just blown away by her knowledge and passion,” noted another colleague.
“Tragedy grew up in Athens but comedy grew up in Sicily,” explained her husband, LaDale Winling, an American history professor at Virginia Tech. “She documented this process by looking at theatres that have been excavated, and clay fragments, to illustrate that as great as Athens was, it wasn’t the birthplace of everything. There were cultural products coming from Sicily.”
Prof. Bosher preferred the drama and tragedy of the ancients to their comedy, which, by today’s measure, tended to be laced with crude bathroom humour. “She was faced with these jokes about bodily fluids and excreta, but she was much more highbrow and enjoyed a lofty plotline,” her husband said. “Some of the jokes we just don’t get anymore; they speak to a time and place and set of issues that no longer resonate or apply. She thought comedy could offer compelling and unique insights into a society.”
But a social and political history of theatre in Sicily from around 500 to 200 BC had not been examined in great detail because the evidence seemed too sparse and fragmentary, Prof. Bosher wrote in her doctoral thesis, Theater on the Periphery.
“In recent years, however,” she wrote, “significant discoveries have been made by archaeologists, papyrologists and philologists, and, by drawing on all these kinds of evidence, it is possible to piece together the outlines of the development of western theatre [in early Sicily].”
Whereas, for example, the playwright Epicharmus was the first to make the cultural and political elite of the Greek Heroic Age the butts of ridicule, Sicily was ruled by local tyrants, who would stage bawdy comedies to poke fun at themselves as a way of cooling civil unrest, Prof. Winling explained. “It was a very flexible genre.”
Born in Toronto on Sept. 14, 1974, Kathryn Grace Bosher wrote and performed plays from the age of five or six, her mother, Cecil Bosher, recounted. Inspired by a Latin teacher at Toronto’s Branksome Hall school, young Kate travelled through Greece and studied Classics at the University of Toronto, earning bachelor and master’s degrees there, and a doctorate from the University of Michigan.
A lithe frame of just under six feet made her a natural rower. As a teen, she rowed with Canada’s junior national team, participating in the 1991 World Junior Championships in Spain in the women’s eight (they finished seventh).
A competitive sculler in graduate school, she won both the senior women’s single and the championship women’s single for the Ann Arbor Rowing Club at the 2004 Royal Canadian Henley Regatta. The same year, she won three gold medals at the U.S. Rowing National Championship. “She was the story of that regatta, for sure,” said Brett Johnson of USRowing.
Even in graduate school in Michigan, she was driven in her sport. She would get up at about 5:45 a.m. and row for 90 minutes. That was followed by a breakfast of raw oats, yogurt, bananas and raisins, then time spent on the Web reading message boards on rowing, sandwiched around a few hours of research and scholarly reading. Then came a healthy lunch, more research and another hour-and-a-half of rowing. During winters, the same regimen was completed on indoor rowing machines.
“Research and graduate school were a way of recovering between workouts,” her husband said. “True, Classics was why she was in [school], but rowing was what sustained her.”
Prof. Bosher loved to direct plays. As a grad student, she helmed Euripides’s Orestes, while “nobody who saw the production of Aristophanes’s Assemblywomen that she directed for the 2008 Feminism and Classics conference will forget it,” the American Philological Association noted in its tribute to her.
Her mother recalls “a romantic, sensitive, poetic person, filling her bedroom with dead roses. She said her best ideas came while staring out of a library window. As a child surrounded with 136 dolls, she grew into the fantasy world of play performance.”
Conscious of her peers’ criticism, she moved from such sensitive themes as love, death and the unconscious in classical Greek literature, to the more ribald works.
“She believed in being tough,” Cecil Bosher added. “Although she never was, and thought doing things which were unfamiliar or unpleasant purely for the experience of them was valuable.”
In 2009, Prof. Bosher helped win a Mellon Foundation grant for a two-year series of conferences called Theater Outside Athens, focusing on new research and bringing together scholars of theatre and antiquity. A resulting book of the same title she edited sought to produce a wide-ranging study of “this hitherto neglected history,” she wrote in the introduction.
She was sometimes called on to comment on what seemed a greater trend toward ancient Greek culture, as seen in the movies 300, Troy and the Clash of the Titans remake. “It seems people are using Greek myth to think about the modern world, as people have always done,” she told the Orlando Sentinel in 2010, “but there seems to be an extra swing toward Greekness.”
Most recently, she directed a project called Classicizing Chicago, a website and archive that intends to investigate and document a wide range of aspects of Chicago’s engagement with Greco-Roman antiquity from 1830 until the present day.
Unfinished business included editing, with three colleagues, the Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama. “Kate was very much the driving force behind this volume and we will complete it very much in her honour,” relayed Prof. Justine McConnell of Oxford University.
Prof. Bosher started getting headaches and feeling neck pain last summer. The pain worsened. In October, it was diagnosed as lung cancer that had metastasized to several bone sites, including her cervical spine. The elite athlete had never smoked. She fought to the very end, a stoic like so many of her study subjects.
“When doctors at Ohio State University indicated there was nothing more they could do, she said to me, ‘Screw them. I don’t plan on dying in the next few weeks,’” Prof. Winling recalled. “I still cannot believe that Kate could not beat cancer, because she was the toughest person I have ever met.”
She leaves her husband, Prof. LaDale Winling; an infant son, Ernest; parents John and Cecil Bosher; a brother, Hal; and half-sisters Sylvie and Lise Bosher.
A memorial service will take place May 4, 11 a.m. at Ennismore Cemetery in Ennismore, Ont.
via: Greek theatre drew scholar Kathryn Bosher, rowing moved her (Globe and Mail)
d.m. Adrian Hollis
From the Independent:
Once famously described in the press as one of this country’s hidden chess assets, Adrian Hollis spent a long and distinguished academic career as a Classics Tutor and Fellow of Keble College, Oxford. There, amid research focussed largely on Hellenistic and Roman poetry, he bestrode the often narrow confines of his art with consummate ease.
Though originally hailing from the West Country, Adrian Hollis spent almost all his working life in Oxford. The only son of the former Director-General of MI5, Sir Roger Hollis, and his first wife, Evelyn Swayne, he initially moved to the city during the Second World War when his father was based at Blenheim Palace. Winning a Classics Scholarship to Eton College, he then took a first in mods and greats at Christ Church.
It was while at university that he first made his mark in the world of competitive chess. Having won the West of England Chess Congress on his debut in 1961, he represented Oxford University Chess Club in four varsity matches, twice taking the top board. Becoming British Correspondence Chess Champion three times, in 1976 he became an English Correspondence Chess Grandmaster.
For five years (1982-87) he represented Britain in the Ninth Correspondence Olympiad, winning the world championship ahead of many distinguished competitors from Germany, Hungary, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. In 1998 he was a member of the British team that won the World Postal Chess Championship. Typically, during his years at Keble, Hollis did much to nurture a remarkable array of emerging chess talent that included David Goodman, David Norwood Dharshan Kumaran and Jonathan Rowson.
Having been an Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Humanity at St Andrews University for three years between 1964 and 1967, that year he became yet another in a long line of Christ Church men who migrated to north Oxford to serve Keble College. It was there over the course of the next 40 years, that he not only created a noted centre of academic excellence but also exercised a most benign influence over generations of aspiring classicists. A quiet and courteous presence, his manner was invariably encouraging. But his disapproval could be bleak and his criticism devastatingly accurate.
Always precise, literate and stylish, Hollis proved to be an equally fine writer and editor. Alongside many significant contributions to specialist periodicals and journals, his early reputation was forged with two volumes of Ovid, Ars Amatoria 1 and Book VIII of his Metamorphoses. This was followed by an equally authoritative edition of the Greek poet Callimachus’ poem, “Hecale”.
Later scholarly editions, Hellenistic Colouring in Virgil’s Aeneid, Attica in Hellenistic Poetry and The Nuptial Rite in Catullus 66 and Callimachus’ Poetry for Berenice, were interspersed with definitive papers on Horace, Virgil, Propertius, Lycophron, Euphorion and Choerilus. No less impressive was his painstaking reconstruction of the many tiny slivers of verse that formed the basis of his final volume, Fragments of Roman Poetry c 60 BC-AD 20. Here again, his expertise and insights remain unsurpassed.
Throughout his time at Keble, Hollis threw himself wholeheartedly into the affairs of the college. He served as Tutor for Admissions, took on the role of Fellow Librarian, was Senior Tutor and, in later years, became Sub-Warden. As Editor of the College Record, amid a scrupulous attention to detail, he emerged as a man of wry but gentle observation to whom one warmed irresistibly. Following his retirement at the end of 2007, he was elected to an Emeritus Fellowship.
Within the wider academic world, he was valued not just for the depth of his knowledge but for the soundness of his judgement. While his scholastic credentials found a ready outlet as a keynote speaker at conferences and seminars worldwide, he also acted as a Research Consultant to the School of Classics at the University of Leeds. Hounded by the press for many years, Hollis always steadfastly rebutted any suggestion that his father had ever been an agent of the KGB.
Moving back to Somerset, while relishing both the cricket and the culture, he enjoyed a quiet but not entirely inactive retirement. Like Ovid before him he continued his academic studies, but now at a much gentler pace.
- via: Adrian Hollis: Classics don and chess grandmaster (Independent)
d.m. Charles Babcock
From the Columbus Dispatch:
BABCOCK Charles Luther Babcock, age 88, died Friday, December 7, 2012 at the Wesley Glen Health Center. Son of Estelle Randolph and Robert L. Babcock he was born in Whittier, California May 26, 1924. He was a World War II veteran, having served in Europe where he was awarded the Bronze Star with V(alor) device. Upon return to the US he became an aide to General Jon B. Coulter. Returning to University of California, Berkeley after the war he received his BA (Phi Beta Kappa), MA, and PhD (1953). He was a member of Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity. He was a Fulbright Scholar and Fellow at the American Academy in Rome (1953-1955). Early academic positions were at Cornell University (1955-1957) and the University of Pennsylvania (1962-1966). In 1966 he came to The Ohio State University to be chair of the Department of Classics (1966-8 and 1980-1988). He was the first Dean of the newly created College of Humanities (1968-1970). Awards at OSU included the Alfred Wright Award (1968), Distinguished Teaching Award (1982), College of Humanities Exemplary Faculty Award (1989), and the Distinguished Service Award (1996). From the Classical Society of the Midwest and South, which he served as President in 1977-1978, he received the OVATIO Award of Merit (1982). Charles shared his great love of ancient Rome and the Latin language with many, not only through his teaching, but also through programs he directed in Rome: The Summer School at the American Academy (1966); Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies (1974-1975); Mellon Professor in Charge, School of Classical Studies at the American Academy in Rome (1988-1989). Survivors include Mary, his wife of 57 years; his children, Robert Sherburne Babcock of Hastings, Nebraska; Jennie Rownd Babcock of Columbus, OH; and Jonathan Taylor Babcock (Jennifer) of Salt Lake City, Utah; his grandchildren, Sara and Carl Babcock of Hastings and Eiseley Babcock of Salt Lake City. A date for a memorial service in the spring will be announced later. The family would appreciate contributions to the Charles L. Babcock Rome Scholarship (600239), which enables students to study in Italy. Contact the OSU Foundation on Lane Avenue, Columbus, OH. Online guestbook at http://www.cookandsonpallay.com
Alia:
- Charles L. Babcock (CAMWS)
- In memoriam: Charles L. Babcock (1924-2012) (APA blog)
d.m. Hector Catling
From the Telegraph:
Hector Catling, who has died aged 88, became director of the British School at Athens after playing a leading role in establishing a comprehensive archaeological field survey of the island of Cyprus.
In 1951 Catling, then a young Oxford student struggling to develop his career as an archaeologist, went out to Cyprus, as part of a two-year Goldsmith’s travelling scholarship, to assist Joan du Plat Taylor in her excavations of a Bronze Age shrine at Myrton-Pigadhes.
Over the next two years, with his wife and small daughter in tow, he criss-crossed the island to gather material for what would eventually be his magisterial Cypriot Bronzework in the Mycenaean World (1964), filing reports to AHS “Peter” Megaw, the first director of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus, which was then under British administration. “I began to develop an eye,” Catling recalled, “and found a lot of new sites here and there.”
Cyprus is fascinating to archaeologists because, owing to its location at the economic, political and cultural crossroads of the eastern Mediterranean, it is a repository for a rich variety of objects. Returning to Oxford, Catling had the idea of carrying out a comprehensive field survey of the island.
Peter Megaw supported the project, found a source of funding, and the Catlings moved from Oxford to Nicosia, with a stop in Athens to learn about Roman pottery from the finds at the Athenian Agora. Under Catling’s leadership, the newly-created Archaeological Survey of Cyprus began its first season in June 1955. A second team was put into the field in 1957.
The Survey, and Catling’s other work on the island, which included the publication of an Early Byzantine pottery factory at Dhiorios, revealed a rich medieval landscape almost unparalleled in the eastern Mediterranean, helping to place Cyprus at the centre of debates about the mechanisms of cultural exchange and island archaeology.
Catling’s four-year contract with the colonial government of Cyprus came to an end in 1959, and the island’s move to independence and the later Turkish invasion led to something of a hiatus. None the less, the Cyprus survey provided a model for similar projects elsewhere.
Hector William Catling was born on June 26 1924 and educated at Bristol Grammar School and St John’s College, Oxford, where he remained to take a doctorate on the Cypriot Bronze Age.
After his time in Cyprus, he returned to Oxford, becoming an assistant keeper and later senior assistant keeper in the Department of Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum. He remained there until his appointment in 1971 as Director of the British School at Athens.
During his time in Athens, Catling undertook a major dig at Knossos, leading a massive excavation of its main Early Iron Age cemetery which led to the publication of a lucid joint study with Nicolas Coldstream, Knossos North Cemetery, in 1996. He also led digs at the Menelaion, an important Mycenaean site in Sparta, where he discovered inscriptions proving that Helen of Troy was worshipped there alongside her husband Menelaus, and at the sanctuary of Zeus Messapeus at Tsakona.
In the 1960s, with Anne Millet, Catling had carried out pioneering optical emission spectography analysis of stirrup jars excavated at Thebes in 1921, which showed them to be Cretan in origin. His research into the provenance of ceramics led to the foundation, in 1973, of the Athens School’s Fitch Laboratory for Science-based Archaeology, equipped with an atomic absorption spectrometer and a multitude of other hi-tech gadgets.
After his retirement in 1989 Catling founded the Friends of the British School at Athens, serving as its honorary secretary until 2011.
He was appointed OBE in 1980 and CBE in 1989.
Hector Catling married, in 1948, Elizabeth Salter, who predeceased him in 2000. Their daughter and two sons survive him.
Hector Catling, born June 26 1924, died February 15 2013
d.m. Georg H.B. Luck
From the Baltimore Sun:
Georg H.B. Luck, whose career teaching the classics at the Johns Hopkins University spanned two decades and included studying the role magic and witchcraft played in the theology and world of the ancient Greeks and Romans, died Sunday from complications of cancer at Gilchrist Hospice Care in Towson.
He was 87 and a longtime resident of the city’s Poplar Hill neighborhood.
“Georg was a modest man who had great gusto for the things that interested him,” said Richard A. Macksey, a noted Baltimore bibliophile and professor of humanities at Hopkins. “He was the kind of person who could interest the general public in what might appear to many to be very dry work. He saw the relationship between theology, witchcraft and magic.”
“He was a pioneer in the study of magic and witchcraft in the theology of the ancient Greeks and Romans,” said Matthew B. Roller, a professor and former chairman of the classics department at Hopkins. “It was the first serious study and he collected all of the material.”
The son of a government worker and a homemaker, Georg Hans Bhawani Luck — pronounced “Luke” — was born and raised in Bern, Switzerland, where he graduated in 1944 from the Kirchenfeld Gymnasium.
Dr. Luck served in the Swiss army, first as a volunteer during World War II and later in the regular armed forces, where he attained the rank of lieutenant in the infantry.
Dr. Luck graduated from the University of Bern and also studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. He earned a master’s degree in classics in 1951 from Harvard University, and his doctorate in classics in 1953 from the University of Bern.
He began his academic career in 1952 as a classics instructor at Yale University and joined the faculty of Brown University in 1953; he taught there for two years.
He taught at Harvard from 1955 to 1958, when he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was a lecturer in Greek and Latin from 1958 to 1962 at the University of Mainz.
Dr. Luck taught at the University of Bonn, where he attained a full professorship, for eight years, until he came to Baltimore in 1970 and joined the Hopkins faculty.
In addition to his regular classwork, Dr. Luck taught various courses in the Johns Hopkins School for Continuing Education.
For 12 years, he served as editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Philology.
His book “Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds” was published in 1986; he added a second volume in 2006.
“I think ‘Arcana’ is his most famous work,” said Dr. Roller. “He was in his 80s when he issued the second volume and it showed that he was still thinking about the subject.”
“No one currently at work in ancient magic or related fields can remotely compare with Luck for the breadth and profundity of his knowledge of the literary texts, for the humanity and sympathy of his exegeses of them, or for the humanity and lightness of touch with which he conveys his scholarship,” wrote Daniel Ogden in a 2007 review for the Literature Resource Center.
He had contributed a chapter to the “Athlone History of Witchcraft,” and a collection of his articles dealing with ancient morals, religion and magic — “Ancient Pathways, Hidden Pursuits” — was published by the University of Michigan.
“I am still interested in the history of magic and the occult sciences in Antiquity,” Dr. Luck wrote in an online Hopkins departmental profile.
Dr. Luck felt that certain plants, herbs and mushrooms played an important role in the practice of religion by the ancient Greeks.
“The analogies with the medieval witch-cults in Europe and with the practices of South American shamans are very instructive,” he wrote. “The Greek experience was, perhaps, on a higher level, but they worked within a very old, very ‘primitive’ tradition.”
A 1983 Baltimore Sun profile said that during the day Dr. Luck taught tenses and declensions to undergraduates studying Latin and Greek and “by night, however, the amiably rumpled, mild-mannered Johns Hopkins University professor turns his attention from Caesar and Cicero to witches and warlocks.”
The article also observed that through years of research and translation, Dr. Luck had “compiled a veritable cookbook of spells and incantations for almost every conceivable occasion.”
“His scholarship was theologically grounded,” said Dr. Macksey.
Dr. Luck also maintained a serious academic interest in Roman poetry and poets such as Ovid, Tibullus, Lucan and Propertius, who are considered love elegy poets.
Dr, Luck wrote widely in the field of classics in both English and German and was author of “The Latin Love Elegy,” published in London in 1959.
Even though Dr. Luck had retired, he maintained an office at Homewood.
“He was a genial presence and was always in good spirits. He also was willing to step in and teach a course if need be,” said Dr. Roller.
“Work and writing were his big interests along with playing classical guitar,” said his wife of 56 years, the former Harriet Richards Greenough.
A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. Saturday at Emmanuel Episcopal Church, 811 Cathedral St.
In addition to his wife, Dr. Luck is survived by a son, Hans Andreas Luck of Bern; two daughters, Annina Luck Wildermuth of Huntington, N.Y., and Stephanie Luck Coic of Paris; and two grandchildren.
via: Georg H.B. Luck, Hopkins professor (Baltimore Sun)
d.m. Zvi Yavetz
from Ynet:
Distinguished historian Professor Zvi Yavetz, who was the 1990 Israel Prize for Humanities laureate, died Tuesday. He was 88-years-old.
Yavetz, who co-founded the Tel Aviv University, was a world renowned historian, and received honorary doctorates from various universities worldwide.
Born in 1925 in Chernovitz, now in southwestern Ukraine, he lost most of his family in the Holocaust. He managed to escape Romania in 1944, with 20 other Jewish refugees. He was able to arrive in then-British ruled Palestine later that year.
At the age of 29, just after finishing his doctorate, he was asked to help form Tel Aviv University. In 1956 he was named head of the general history department and dean of the Humanities Faculty in TAU.
He would later become instrumental in the founding of the colleges at Beit Berl and in Tel Chai. In 1960, at the government’s request, he traveled to Ethiopia, where he helped found the Faculty of Humanities at the Addis Ababa University.
Specializing in the history of ancient Rome, Yavetz penned dozens of books and articles including a series focusing on the Roman emperors: Augustus, Julius Caesar, Caligula and Tiberius, Cicero, Claudius and Nero.
“He’ll be remembered as an extremely charismatic man, sharp and funny. He had a phenomenal memory and he was a compelling public speaker,” one of his colleagues said Tuesday.
Prof. Zvi Yavetz will be laid to rest on Thursday at Kibbutz Tel Yitzhak.
- via: Israel Prize laureate Prof. Zvi Yavetz dies (Ynet)
d.m. Evelyn Byrd Harrison
From the ASCSA:
Renowned art historian Evelyn Byrd (Eve) Harrison died peacefully in her New York City apartment on November 3.
Born in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1920, Eve Harrison received her A.B. from Barnard College in 1941 and her M.A. from Columbia University in 1943, but her graduate studies were interrupted by the Second World War. Until the end of 1945, she served as a Research Analytic Specialist, translating intercepted Japanese messages for the War Department.
In 1949, she joined the staff of the ASCSA’s Athenian Agora Excavations. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1952, and a revised version of her dissertation on the portrait sculpture found in the Agora inaugurated the series The Athenian Agora: Results of Excavations Conducted by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Her Portrait Sculpture was followed in 1965 by Archaic and Archaistic Sculpture, volume XI of The Athenian Agora.
Professor Harrison began her teaching career in 1951 at the University of Cincinnati, where she taught not only art history but also first-year Greek and Latin. After a second research position with the Agora Excavations between 1953 and 1955, she joined the faculty of the Department of Art History and Archaeology of Columbia University, where she was named full professor in 1967. Four years as Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University followed, and in 1974 she was named Edith Kitzmiller Professor of the History of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University.
She was honored for her contributions to art history and archaeology by election as an Honorary Councilor of the Archaeological Society of Athens, a member of the German Archaeological Institute, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Archaeological Institute of America recognized her lifetime of accomplishment by awarding her its Gold Medal for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement in 1992.
- via: In Memoriam: Evelyn Byrd Harrison [1920 – 2012] (ASCSA)
d.m. Glenys Lloyd-Morgan
From the Guardian:
My friend Glenys Lloyd-Morgan, who has died aged 67 after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, devoted her career to the appreciation and understanding of Roman archaeology.
She was born in Halifax and brought up in Caernarfonshire; her father was a merchant sea captain and her mother was an entomologist and teacher. Glenys graduated from the archaeology department at Birmingham University in 1970 and acquired fine skills in excavation. Former contemporaries recall how she practised it at Droitwich, Worcestershire.
Under Richard Tomlinson’s supervision, she did a PhD at Birmingham on Roman mirrors, which she studied, along with any potential Celtic-related predecessor artefacts in museums throughout Britain and Ireland. Venturing into the world of Roman Europe, she spent a very happy period at the Museum Kam in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, in 1973-74. At the British School at Rome, she met Sir Anthony Blunt, who vividly recalled Glenys’s enthusiasms for Etruscan mirrors and how she had enlivened the school’s New Year’s Eve party by dancing on the table.
In March 1975, Glenys joined the Grosvenor Museum, Chester. There, she catalogued collections and did convincing re-enactments as a Roman lady. Though hoped-for promotion never materialised, she soldiered on until marrying and moving to Rochdale in 1989. She became a finds consultant specialising in Roman artefacts. In 1998, she returned home to north Wales, where it was recognised that she had developed Alzheimer’s. She was taken into a home soon afterwards and the rest of her life was spent in full-time care.
I first met Glenys at the Young Archaeologists’ Conference in Durham early in 1968, where she sang and danced, as was often her habit. Her dress could be unconventional and her eastern dances disarming to those more used to her authoritative archaeological presentations.
Made a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in March 1979, she published in mainland Europe, Britain and Ireland. Glenys was a warm-hearted and helpful collaborator who made lasting friendships, retained her youthful sense of fun, loved children and assumed the role of aunt without encouragement. Her scholarly works will endure.
She is survived by her sister, Ceridwen, her brother, Dewi, and three nephews.
- via: Glenys Lloyd-Morgan obituary (Guardian)
Triste: Robert J. Buck
The ‘regular’ obituary in anticipation of something more formal later:
d.m. Brian Dobson
From the Telegraph:
The Roman Emperor Hadrian ordered the building of the wall in AD 122, and until the 1960s it was generally assumed that it was a defensive structure from which legionaries would fight off invaders from the north. Hadrian’s biographer wrote that it was built to separate the barbarians from the Romans.
Dobson and Breeze argued that this was not the wall’s purpose. Conquered provinces were a source of taxation in cash and kind. The wall, they maintained, signified the concept of a frontier and served to control and tax the movement of people across the border. While it probably deterred raiders, it would not have been very effective against large-scale attack. The wall was designed to exert control not only over people to the north of the wall but also tribes to the south, as evidenced by the Vallum, a ditch-and-mound system built parallel to the wall on the south side.
Dobson regarded the wall as an indication of weakness rather than strength — a sign that an army designed for conquest was dissipating its energy in building and manning elaborate obstacles. Until AD122 the empire had been constantly expanding. The building of the wall (one of a series of barrier structures commissioned in various parts of the empire at around the same time) suggests that Rome was beginning to reach its limits.
Other historians have suggested that the end of Rome’s expansion led eventually to its decline as it meant that the supply of slaves, captured during the process of conquest, dried up. As a consequence Roman rulers began to squeeze conquered populations — to the point where many sided with the barbarians who challenged the empire from the 3rd century onwards and eventually brought it to its knees.
Brian Dobson was born at Hartlepool on September 13 1931 and educated at Stockton Grammar School and Durham University, where he read Modern History. After National Service he returned to Durham to take a PhD under Eric Birley on the primipilares — a cadre of former chief centurions who, in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, replaced the Roman hereditary aristocracy in the senior echelons of the Roman army. Among many publications that arose from this work, he produced a revision in 1967 of Die Rangordnung des römische Heeres, Alfred von Domaszewski’s classic work on the officer rank-structure of the Roman army, and Die Primipilares (1978), a book published in German and based on his PhD thesis.
After a period studying epigraphy in Freiburg, in 1957 Dobson was awarded a research fellowship at Birmingham. In 1960 he was appointed staff tutor at Durham University’s Department of Extra-Mural Studies. There, in 1968, he launched a study tour entitled “Hadrian’s Wall and Hadrian’s Army”, which was so popular that the two elements were split and turned into separate courses. In 1972 he founded the Hadrianic Society, to promote the study of Hadrian’s Wall and the Roman army. Several of his students went on to become notable Wall scholars in their own right.
A quietly devout man, who served as a lay reader at his local church, Dobson remained in Durham until his retirement in 1990.
At various times he served as president of the Archaeological and Architectural Society of Durham and Northumberland and of the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne (1993-95). He was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1972.
He married, in 1958, Anne Priestley, who survives him with their two sons and three daughters.
- via: Brian Dobson (Telegraph)
d.m. John L. Brinkley
From the Times-Dispatch:
John Luster Brinkley, retired classics professor and historian at Hampden-Sydney College, could recall interesting stories about the school partly because he witnessed so much of its modern history.
In 1959, before he graduated as valedictorian of his class, a fire erupted in a campus building that had been condemned. Rumor had it that students set it alight in the mistaken belief that the administration wanted the building destroyed.
He remembered in a 1987 Richmond News Leader interview the “carnival atmosphere” that reigned as students stood on hoses, turned on showers and flushed toilets to lower water pressure and thwart the Farmville Fire Department’s efforts to douse the conflagration.
One enterprising student sold refreshments. The students’ behavior “was not malicious,” he noted. The incident led to formation of a student fire department.
Mr. Brinkley, who wrote a definitive history of the school and taught Greek, Latin, classical mythology, Roman history and rhetoric from 1967 until he retired in 2007, died Friday at 75. He lived at Westminster Canterbury Richmond.
A celebration of the life of this H-SC icon, who for years routinely sat on the 15-yard line at every home football game and behind home plate at every home baseball game, will be held at 10 a.m. Nov. 10 on campus before the annual school game with archrival Randolph-Macon College.
During “Macon Week,” which precedes the game with Randolph-Macon, Mr. Brinkley served as the annual speaker at the “Beat Macon Bonfire.”
His unswerving support for H-SC teams earned him a special citation in the H-SC Sports Hall of Fame in 2007.
He was the first H-SC student to become a Rhodes scholar, studying at Trinity College at Oxford University from 1959 to 1962. He earned a master’s degree at Princeton University, where he taught in the classics department, and another master’s at Oxford before returning to Hampden-Sydney to teach.
“I can see him standing completely erect, cigar in hand, head held high, gently shifting his weight from foot to foot as he spoke with confidence,” recalled former student John Adams, an H-SC trustee and chairman of the Martin Agency.
In 1994, Mr. Brinkley rolled out a history of the school, originally written in longhand, called “On This Hill: A Narrative History of Hampden-Sydney College 1774-1994.”
There are no immediate survivors.
via: John L. Brinkley, retired classics professor and historian at Hampden-Sydney College, dies
d.m. Darryl Hine
The incipit of a lengthy biography at the Poetry Foundation:
Poet, editor, and translator Daryl Hine was born in 1936 in British Columbia. He studied Classics and philosophy at McGill University, and he earned his PhD in comparative literature from the University of Chicago. The editor of Poetry from 1968-78, Hine was also a highly regarded translator of Classical writers such as Homer, Hesiod, and Ovid, among others; Hine’s translation of Works of Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns (2005) won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. His numerous other honors and awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, as well as a medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also received three Canada Council Grants, and his &: A Serial Poem (2010) was short-listed for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. The award’s judges described the book as “a reflection on civilization as a whole,” declaring it “the summing up of a life in particular weighed against eternity.” [...]
Daryl Hine 1936–2012 (Poetry Foundation)
d.m. Natalie Kampen
From the Providence Journal [thanks to Dr. Lisa Trentin]:
KAMPEN, DR. NATALIE (TALLY) BOYMEL a pioneering feminist scholar and teacher of Roman Art History and Gender Studies, died on August 12, 2012 at home in Wakefield, Rhode Island. She was 68. Kampen taught graduate courses on the ancient world at Columbia University and undergraduate courses in feminist the-ory and gender studies at Barnard College, where she was the first faculty member to hold the endowed Barbara Novak chair in Art History and Women’s Studies, and became professor emerita in 2010. She was most recently a visiting professor of Roman Art and Architecture at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University and co-administrator of a Getty Foundation Grant sponsoring international study of the art and architecture of the Roman provinces. She was one of the world’s most notable experts on the history of the Roman provinces. Dr. Kampen was an internationally known teacher and scholar. She was a research fellow at Oxford University in 2000, received the Felix Neubergh Medal at the University of Gothenburg in 2004, and was a visiting professor of Art History at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi in 2010. As a senior scholar she was interested not only in promoting the careers of her Columbia students but of graduate students in Eastern Europe, South Asia and the Middle East. She was the author of Image and Status: Roman Working Women in Ostia (1981) and Family Fictions in Roman Art (2009), editor of Sexuality in Ancient Art (1996), and author of numerous articles and chapters in scholarly journals, encyclopedias, and books, including Art Journal, American Journal of Archaeology, Art Bulletin, and The Art of Citizens, Soldiers and Freedmen in the Roman World (2006), edited by Metrau and D’Ambra. Dr. Kampen was born on February 1, 1944 in Philadelphia, the daughter of Jules and Pauline (Friedman) Boymel. She was an enthusiastic supporter of left causes from the 1950s to the present, was an effective force in the development of feminist philosophy, and played a key role in the struggle for women’s rights. She raised generations of women’s consciousness. She received her BA and MA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1965 and 1967 and her Ph.D. from Brown University in 1976. She taught Art History at the University of Rhode Island between 1969 and 1988, where she helped to found one of the first Women’s Studies programs in New England and became a life-long patron of the Hera Gallery, a feminist artists’ collective in Wakefield, Rhode Island. She was an avid horseback rider and a lifelong owner of Labrador dogs. She was married to Michael Kampen from 1965 to 1969 and to John Dunnigan from 1978 to 1989. In all her pursuits, scholarly and otherwise, Tally’s generosity was extraordinary. She was famous as a beloved friend and colleague who nurtured lifelong friendships, forged groups of strangers into friends, and could change a person’s perspective on life after only an hour’s acquaintance in an airport. Even after the onset of her final illness, she led a group of younger scholars to Greece, determined to work with them while she was still able. Dr. Kampen is survived by her sister, Susan Boymel Udin, her brother-in-law David, and her niece and nephew Rachel and Michael Udin. A memorial service will be held at a later date. Contributions can be made in Dr. Kampen’s name to Rhode Island Community Food Bank, 200 Niantic Avenue, Providence, RI 02907. The family will be observing a week of Shiva at 33 Shadow Farm Way, Wakefield, RI 02879. Visitors will be welcome from 2-8 PM beginning August 13, 2012.
d.m. Jacques Desautels
In the Canadian Classical Bulletin:
d.m. Lou Bolchazy
Obituary at the CAMWS Necrologies:
d.m. David Ridgway
From the Herald:
DAVID Ridgway, who has died aged 74, was the English-speaking world’s leading expert on how the ancient Greeks colonised the Mediterranean almost 3000 years ago.
He passed on that knowledge during a 35-year career as lecturer, then reader in archaeology and finally reader in classics, at Edinburgh University.
He and his Sardinian-born wife Francesca became popular figures at the university, where she was an honorary fellow, first in Archaeology, later in classics, until they moved south to Colchester, Essex, on his retirement in 2003.
From their Edinburgh base, the couple, who met in 1964 on an archaeological dig in Calabria, southern Italy, and married in 1970, became leading authors in their fields. She was recognised worldwide as an expert on the Etruscans.
Their joint work Italy Before the Romans, published in 1979 and covering Italy from the Bronze Age to Roman rule, became widely known to fellow academics and students simply as Ridgway and Ridgway. It included the first account in English of the Etruscan colonisation of Corsica.
During his many years in Edinburgh, Mr Ridgway’s work was perhaps better known in Greece and Italy, where he was considered the pre-eminent classical archaeologist of his time in the field of ancient Mediterranean history.
At the same time, he became something of a bridge between British and local Mediterranean scholars. His work helped reveal how the Greeks colonised the sea’s shores all the way to the Iberian peninsula (the name Iberia itself came from the Greek) long before the Roman Empire became the regional superpower.
He explained how the Greeks began colonisation partly to find more fertile land to help feed the motherland, partly to get away from over-populated cities riven by social unrest.
Among Walsall-born Mr Ridgway’s specialist areas was the colonisation of the lands bordering the central Tyrrhenian Sea, between western Italy and the islands of Sicily, Corsica and his wife’s native Sardinia.
He was also deeply involved in the excavations at ancient Pithekoussai, on the island of Ischia near Naples, one of the first areas colonised by the Greeks in the eighth Century BC.
Born in 1938, David Ridgway studied classics at University College London, graduating in 1960. He then spent five years on a post-graduate course at Oxford, during which he added a Diploma in Archaeology to his CV in 1962, guided by the renowned Iron Age archaeologist Professor Christopher Hawkes. From 1965-67, he was a Research Fellow at the Department of Classics at the University of Newcastle before moving to Edinburgh in 1968.
Thirty-five years later, after moving back south to retire, Ridgway and his wife were made Research Fellows of the Institute of Classical Studies, one of 10 Institutes making up the School of Advanced Study of the University of London. They commuted regularly from their home in Colchester to use the fine library of the Institute’s headquarters, Senate House, in London’s Bloomsbury district.
In 2006, 50 of Mr Ridgway’s fellow scholars from around the world published a Festschrift – a volume of relevant archaeological essays – in joint tribute to the Ridgways. It was entitled Across Frontiers: Etruscans, Greeks, Phoenicians and Cypriots.
Mr Ridgway’s colleagues said they found it fitting that he had died, in Athens, after a long hot day doing what he loved best – visiting excavations in the village of Lefkandi on the Greek island of Euboea, whence the earliest Greek colonists had gone west almost three millennia ago. His wife Francesca died in 2008. They had no children.
- via: David Ridgway (Herald)
Triste: Steven Jackson
Seen on various lists (by John Hilton) … we await a more formal obituary:
The Classics discipline at UKZN (Howard College) regrets to announce the death of an eminent colleague. Dr. Steven Jackson (8/12/1946-26/5/2012) was lecturer and later senior lecturer at the University of Natal from 1989 to 2000. He obtained his M.A. at Queen’s University, Belfast, and his PhD at Trinity College, Dublin. He was widely respected as a researcher in the field of Hellenistic Poetry and published prolifically. His publications include: Creative Selectivity in Apollonius’ Argonautica (1993); Myrsilus of Methymna: Hellenistic Paradoxographer (1995), which is quoted in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, third edition, as the definitive study of this author’s work; Istrus the Callimachean (2000), and Mainly Apollonius: Collected Studies (2004). Steven had a wide range of interests outside Classical Scholarship. He was also interested in Conan Doyle’s character Sherlock Holmes, the P&O liners, and sport in all its forms.
d.m. Dirk Held
From the New York Times:
HELD–Dirk tom Dieck, Of Westerly RI, was the Elizabeth S. Kruidenier ’48 Professor of Classics at Connecticut College in New London, CT. He took his A.B. and Ph.D in Classics at Brown University. In 1971, he joined the faculty of Connecticut College, where he served until his death from a cerebral hemorrhage on March 19, 2012. He held the Chair of the Classics Department for thirty-two years. Professor Held presented and/or published over one hundred learned papers on a wide variety of topics. He was widely known and respected for the quality of his scholarship and his dedication to the field. Colleague Robert Proctor, Professor of Italian, remarked, “Dirk Held lived the liberal arts ideal. His scholarship was both profound and wide-ranging, from Plato’s understanding of love to Nietzsche and the reception of classical antiquity in the modern world. He was a modern exemplar of ancient Roman humanitas: culture, kindness, generosity, and wit.” In 2007 he was awarded the Helen B. Regan Faculty Leadership Award. He was a superb teacher whose students often became his lifelong friends. Dirk was secretary and presiding officer of the Ariston Club, a society of prominent professionals founded in 1900 to foster literary culture in the New London area, where he was his black tie, witty, raconteur best. Born on March 24, 1939, he was the son of the late Oskar Edouard Held and Ethel Crofton Hunt. He grew up in Rumson, NJ. He is survived by his wife of 50 years, Elizabeth Candace Allen; daughters Elizabeth Jensen and Kristin Held; grandsons Nicholas Thomson and Martin Jensen; and his brother Robert Crofton Held. He was descended from Pierre S. DuPont and was buried in the family cemetery, DuPont de Nemours, in Wilmington, DE. A Memorial Service will be held in Harkness Chapel, Connecticut College, on Friday, April 27th at 4pm, followed by a reception.
via: Dirk Held (New York Times)
d.m. Ross Kilpatrick
From the Globe and Mail:
Slide a garland across his crown, fluff up his hair a bit and stare boldly into his bold blue eyes. You’d swear Ross Kilpatrick was a Roman lyric poet circa 30 BC, but then there was the 21st-century smile and maybe a coffee in his hand.
As a classics scholar at Queen’s University and former department head, Kilpatrick’s research stretched wide. It included investigating the Mona Lisa smile, solving the Dionysian riddle in Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss, and claiming that A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh originated in a story by New Brunswick nature writer Charles G.D. Roberts in 1912.
Although Kilpatrick’s greatest loves were poets Vergil, Ovid and Horace, Renaissance painters such as da Vinci, Botticelli and Titian caught his interest late in his career.
But his first research in the world of art was a study of 20th-century Japanese artist Yoshio Markino. Kilpatrick visited London to discover where the painter lodged for a time, and the cemetery where he had been employed, carving angels.
Kilpatrick’s Yoshio Markino in Italia: The Travels of a Samurai Artist was published in 1999.
He was a member of the Canadian Philhellenic Society, the Vergilian Society of America, the Societa Dante Alighieri and past president of the Humanities Association of Canada. He spoke French, German, Italian, Greek and Latin.
“Ross Kilpatrick was a kind of art historian manqué,” said colleague David McTavish. “He used his very detailed knowledge of the classical authors, especially the Latin authors, to enrich the interpretation of many Renaissance paintings.”
Dinner table chatter in the Kilpatrick home could mean discussing Greek mythology, the Latin roots of words, the meaning of Bible passages or reciting Horace.
“Ross was interested in politics, religion, sports, history, economics, art, the military and language in all its forms and derivations,” said his wife, Suzanne. “He was a great person to have on your Trivial Pursuit team.”
Kilpatrick nosed out this bit of Canadian cultural trivia on Winnie-the-Pooh while head of Queen’s Classics Department:
In Babes in the Woods, Sir Roberts describes a mischievous cub hankering after honey and being assaulted by angry bees. Roberts’ bee-whipped bear waddles over to a nook between the roots of the tree, curls up his nose between his sticky paws, and sleeps.
Kilpatrick died in Kingston from viral cardiomyopathy on Feb. 24 at the age of 77.
He was born in 1934 in Toronto, the youngest of three children, to John Stuart and Ellen May Kilpatrick. His father drove a streetcar and never owned a car. Ross’s intelligence showed itself early: He taught himself to play the piano by ear, following his mother’s example. He soon added the French horn, ukulele and recorder to his list of instruments.
After finishing his homework he’d wolf down a few of his mother’s butter tarts and slip out into the street with the other kids to play cops and robbers, war games or sports.
Edgar Murdock, one of his boyhood buddies, remembered him as an inspiring autodidact of the playground. Over the years they grew apart into their separate lives and careers, but Murdock never forgot him.
“I probably passed by Kingston many times in my semi as a long-haul trucker en route from California to Montreal,” he recently wrote to the family. “We might have spent a few minutes together, but the destination always called. I hugely regret that oversight now.”
After graduating from Toronto’s Malvern Collegiate in 1953, Kilpatrick completed his BA in Latin and English at the University of Toronto. While directing Finian’s Rainbow at the university, he met Suzanne Mitchell, who auditioned for a part.
He turned her down for the role but offered her the next 51 years of his life The couple married in the Trinity College chapel on campus in 1960.
Kilpatrick put himself through school working as a sub-lieutenant in the naval reserve. Shortly after graduation he accepted his first academic position, teaching classics and English at East York Collegiate in Toronto.
In 1964, with a masters of Latin under his belt, he and his wife moved to New Haven, Conn., where he studied classics at Yale. He finished the following year with a second masters, in classics. He graduated from Yale in 1967 with a PhD. Now the father of an infant daughter, and with another child on the way, he accepted a job offer from Yale to teach Latin.
In 1970, he returned to Canada to join the Classics Department at Queen’s. He remained there for 42 years, serving in a range of academic and administrative positions.
He wrote two books on the poetry of Horace and pursued his hunt for and the identification of hidden meaning and symbolism in art.
He retired in 2000 but taught pro bono up until reading week in February. “He loved to teach,” his wife said. “It was also one of his passions.”
Kilpatrick leaves his wife and daughters Katherine, Rosemary and Andrea.
d.m. Alan Treloar
From the Sydney Morning Herald (tip o’ the pileus to Tim Parkin):
Colonel Alan Treloar was one of Australia’s greatest linguists and classical scholars and also a distinguished soldier.
Few could rival his knowledge as a scholar of ancient Greek and Latin. He had a special interest in the Roman poet Horace but had read the entire classical literatures of both languages at least twice.
He had an astonishing gift for languages and would admit, when pressed, to direct knowledge of about 80. He had a formidable command of many, such as Sanskrit, Russian, Chinese, Arabic and Hittite. In his early 80s he was investigating Bunuba, a language of the Kimberley.
Alan Treloar was born in Ivanhoe, Victoria, on November 13, 1919, the eldest of four children of John Treloar, who became the first director of the Australian War Memorial, and his wife, Clarissa (nee Aldridge), a music teacher.
His first linguistic interests were in French at six and Latin at 10. He soon took up ancient Greek as well and was learning Japanese by correspondence while at school.
He went to Carey Baptist Grammar School and the University of Melbourne, where he took a bachelor of arts and was the Victorian Rhodes Scholar for 1940 but did not take up the scholarship then because of his service in the Second Australian Imperial Force.
He began his military career with the Melbourne University Regiment and went on to serve with the 2/14th Battalion from 1940 to 1944, first in the Syrian campaign, during which he was seriously wounded, and later on the Kokoda Track.
His wounding meant he was no longer able to march with the infantry and he was transferred to a staff appointment at Victoria Barracks in Melbourne. After hours, he worked for his master of arts degree from the University of Melbourne, which he took in 1943. He then transferred to the Australian Army Intelligence Corps from 1944 to 1945.
In 1945 he married Bronnie Taylor, a fellow linguist and diplomatic staff cadet.
On release from the army, Treloar was a lecturer in classics at the University of Melbourne and tutor at Trinity College, Melbourne, before taking up his Rhodes Scholarship. At Oxford, he chose to read classical moderations and greats.
He also served with the British Army of the Rhine in 1946 and from 1949 to 1950 was assistant lecturer in ancient history at the University of Nottingham. He then went to the University of Glasgow from 1950 to 1959. During this period, he was attached from the Australian Army to the University of Nottingham Training Corps and then the Glasgow Highlanders, then was transferred to the Territorial Army.
In 1959 the Treloars moved back to Australia. He became first warden of Hytten Hall and reader in classics at the University of Tasmania in 1959 and, in 1960, moved to the University of New England, where he was master of Wright College (1960 to 1966) then reader in comparative philology (1966 to 1984).
He also continued his military involvement, transferring back to the Australian Army to serve with the Tasmania Command and then the Sydney University Regiment in command of New England Company until retiring in 1969.
Academic retirement came nominally in 1984 but in fact ended only with failing health in the past few years. He continued to be sought out for expert advice by scholars from around the world and to make his skills available as an inspirational teacher to a string of students.
His publications reflect the diversity of his interests and include The Importance of Music (1987) and Lyra (1994), as well as academic and military papers.
Treloar was a reserved and dignified man of honesty and integrity and a warm and generous friend. In 1992, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of New England.
Alan Treloar is survived by his children, Anna and Jeannie, son-in-law James and grandchildren Sarah, Katy and Alex. Bronnie died in 1991, as did daughter Meg, in 1995.
d.m. William F. Wyatt
Image via Wikipedia
(tip o’ the pileus to Barbara Saylor Rodgers):
William F. Wyatt Jr., 78, professor emeritus and former chairman of the department of classics at Brown University, and a prolific contributor to the op-ed page of The Providence Journal, died March 25 in The Miriam Hospital, Providence.
Wyatt’s op-ed pieces over the years ranged across an eclectic landscape in which he tilled such fields as the culture of Fall River, road rage, famous wartime phrases, Latin, and the importance of mothers talking to their youngsters.
Addressing the rites of Halloween in a 1997 article, Wyatt discussed “hysteron proteron,” the reversal of the logical order of ideas in a phrase, such as in “I die, I faint, I fail.” Wyatt said the familiar children’s plea, “Trick or treat,” provided another example: “The statement, were it to be well-formed logically, would be: ‘If you do not give me a treat, I shall perform a [possibly unpleasant] trick.’ ”
Also that year, he addressed road rage and advanced the proposition that the phrase’s popularity had to do with its “alliterative quality.” Had the phenomenon carried the moniker “road anger” or “street ire,” he wrote, perhaps, it would not have caught on so universally. He then went on to wonder “why we do not have freeway fury, highway hate, detour disgust [and] turnpike tedium.”
His final contribution came in 2008, several years after his retirement.
“His mind was hard to contain,” his son John Wyatt, of Dover, Mass., said by telephone. “He really took an interest and a curiosity in virtually everything.”
The classics ran in his family. Born in Medford, Mass., he was the son of William F. Wyatt and Natalie (Gifford) Wyatt, both professors of the genre.
Wyatt graduated magna cum laude from Bowdoin College in 1953 and obtained a master’s degree and a doctorate from Harvard University. He served as a teaching assistant at Harvard and Tufts University and became an assistant professor at the University of Washington before joining the Brown faculty in 1967.
Wyatt took over the chairmanship of the department of classics in 1972, a post he held several times. He also served as associate dean of faculty and faculty parliamentarian. He was a visiting professor at the University of Crete in the spring of 1985, and at Clare Hall, a member college of Cambridge University, Cambridge, England, in 1984-85.
He was the author or translator of seven books, including “Anthropology and the Classics,” 1977, and “Teaching the Classics,” 1992. In 1989, he received the Takis Antoniou Prize for best translation of a modern Greek literary work, one of many such honors. In 1997, he won Brown University’s Harriet W. Sheridan Award for distinguished contribution to teaching and learning.
Wyatt led a number of Brown expeditions to Greece and Turkey; could instruct professionals in various forms of Greek, Demotic and Latin; and could work with Sanskrit, Russian and Romance languages.
In addition to his academic duties, Wyatt was founder and president of the Blackstone Park Improvement Association, vice chairman of the Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities, and president of the Narragansett Boat Club. He was president of the Westport Historical Society and head of volunteers at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. John Wyatt said his father transcribed and annotated seamen’s journals from 19th-century whaling voyages that are on display in the museum.
Other survivors include his wife, Sally, and children Nathaniel, of San Francisco, and Lydia, of Minneapolis. A private family burial will be followed by an outdoor reception at 11 a.m., July 30, at 241 River Rd,, Westport.
d.m. Ernst Badian
From the Harvard Gazette:
Professor Ernst Badian, John Moors Cabot Professor of History Emeritus, died on Feb. 1.
After teaching in the universities of Sheffield, Durham, and Leeds in Britain, and at the State University of New York, Buffalo, he was appointed to Harvard’s Department of History in 1971, and was cross-appointed to the Department of the Classics in 1973. He became emeritus in 1998.
Badian was one of the great historians of Greece and Rome of the 20th century. He was born in Vienna in 1925. In 1938, in view of the growing persecution of Jews in Austria and Germany, he moved with his parents to New Zealand. There he attended Canterbury University College, Christchurch, and received a B.A. with first-class honors in 1945, and an M.A. in 1946. He then transferred to Oxford University, in England, where he received another B.A., again with first-class honors, and went on to write his doctoral dissertation under Sir Ronald Syme; he later edited two of the seven volumes of Syme’s “Roman Papers.” His dissertation formed the basis of his first book, which remains his magnum opus, his “Foreign Clientelae” of 1958. This fundamental study of Roman imperialism in a period of crucial growth and transformation is still an unreplaced classic. Roman imperialism continued to be one of Badian’s major interests, and “Foreign Clientelae” was followed by “Roman Imperialism in the Late Republic” and “Publicans and Sinners.”
Unusually for someone whose main field was Roman history, Badian was also a major force in Greek history. In particular, beginning with an article on the city of Alexandria published in 1960, he brought about a revolution in modern understanding of one of the main figures in the tapestry of ancient history: Alexander III of Macedon, often called “the Great.” Reacting against the hero worship that was still offered to Alexander in the mid-20th century, Badian forced historians to look again at the contradictory and confusing texts on which most knowledge rests, and to realize that Alexander was as ruthless as any of the Roman generals that march through the pages of “Foreign Clientelae.” Allied to Badian’s deep historical sense was an acute philological ear, especially in his mastery of Latin, and he was a superb stylist in his second language of English.
Badian’s large output comprises well over 200 items, including six books and many notices for a basic tool of classical scholarship, the Oxford Classical Dictionary. He was also a formidable and sometimes devastating reviewer. Active in the historical profession in both the United Kingdom and the United States, he helped found the Association of Ancient Historians (1974) and the American Journal of Ancient History (1978). In 1999 he received the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art.
Badian leaves behind a wife, Nathlie; two children, Hugh and Rosemary; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
A memorial service will be held on March 22, at 1 p.m., at Harvard Hillel, 52 Mt. Auburn St.
d.m. J.V. Luce
From the Irish Times:
Former Trinity vice-provost and emeritus professor John Victor Luce died yesterday following a short illness at the age of 90.
Better known as JV Luce, he was a senior fellow of Trinity and was the 62nd vice-provost of the university from 1987 to 1989, a position which his father, Arthur Aston Luce also held between 1946 and 1952. He also acted as the public orator at Trinity for a number of years.
Mr Luce was the author of numerous books, including those on Homer and the Trojan War, a subject which he specialised in. He also wrote a book entitled Trinity College Dublin, The First 400 Years , published in 1992.As a young man he was an avid sportsman and played hockey for Ireland in the 1940s and was captain of the Trinity squash and hockey teams, as well as playing cricket.
