Professor David John Furley, 87, of Charlbury, United Kingdom, formerly of Princeton, died January 26 after a long illness in Banbury Hospital, Banbury, United Kingdom. A former chairman of Princeton University’s Department of Classics, he was the first classicist to receive the University’s Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities, winning the award in 1984.
Born in Nottingham, England, he was educated at Nottingham High School and Cambridge University (Jesus College), where he graduated with first class honors in 1947. His studies were interrupted by active service in the Second World War, mainly in Burma, where he rose to the rank of Captain in the Artillery. After teaching in the Department of Greek and Latin of University College London from 1947 to 1966, he joined the Princeton faculty in 1966 as a professor of classics. From 1974 to his retirement in 1992 he was the Ewing Professor of Greek Language and Literature. He also directed the Program in Classical Philosophy from 1969 to 1982 and chaired the Department of Classics from 1982 to 1985. During his career he served as president of the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy and chairman of the International Committee of the Symposium Aristotelicum.
Together with his wife Phyllis, who died in 2009, he enjoyed the company of many friends in the Princeton community.
He is survived by two sons, John and William from his first marriage to Diana (née Armstrong); four grandchildren; four step-children from his second marriage, Alison, Neil, Kate, and Fiona; four step-grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
The funeral will be this Friday, February 12 in Charlbury near Oxford. The address of the Furleys in Charlbury is 14 The Playing Close, Charlbury, Oxfordshire OX7 3RZ, England.
In lieu of flowers, memorial gifts may be made to http://www.alzheimers-research.org.uk.
Month: February 2010
d.m. George Paul
My Ph.D. supervisor … a very patient man with a legendary book collection. This is Dr Michele George’s obituary from the Canadian Classical Bulletin:
George McKay Paul (1927-2010)
Professor Emeritus of Classics, George Paul, died at home on Monday, February 15, 2010. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, he graduated from Oxford (BA, MA), where he studied with George Cawkwell, and London (PhD), where his thesis was supervised by H.H. Scullard. After teaching at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica from 1955 to 1964, George joined the Department of Classics at McMaster, where he taught until his retirement in 1993. A historian with a particular interest in historiography and rhetoric, he published articles on Thucydides, Plutarch, and Josephus, and was widely recognized as a leading authority on the Roman historian, Sallust, the article on whom he wrote for the Encyclopedia Britannica. His Historical Commentary on Sallust’s Bellum Jugurthinum remains a standard.
Known for his meticulous attention to detail and insistence on clarity of expression, George’s high standards in the classroom were always tempered by a keen, dry wit and a perpetual twinkle in the eye. As a long-time bibliophile and keeper of a legendary Classics library in his Westdale home, George devoted great effort toward building the Classics collection in Mills library. His commitment leaves a permanent legacy for future generations of scholars.
Funeral services will be held at Knox Church, 23 Melville Street in Dundas, Ontario on Thursday, February 18 at 1:30. Donations can be made to a graduate scholarship set up by George’s family on the occasion of his 80th birthday (The George McKay Paul Scholarship).
… he will be missed.
This Day in Ancient History: ante diem xiv kalendas martias
ante diem xiv kalendas martias
- Parentalia (Day 4) — the period for appeasing the dead continued
- 309 A.D. — martyrdom of Pamphilius
A Scholarly Slap on the Wrist?
Excerpts from an interesting piece at the New York Times’ Paper Cuts Blog:
There’s a scene in David Malouf’s “Ransom” — a novel based mainly on Homer’s “Iliad” — in which King Priam of Troy is slaughtered by Neoptolemus, the son of the Greek hero Achilles. That episode, which is not described in the “Iliad,” ultimately derives from a lost archaic Greek epic, the “Iliou Persis,” or “Sack of Troy.” But the best-known surviving version of the death of Priam appears in the second book of Virgil’s “Aeneid,” and Latinists took me to task for not mentioning it in my review of “Ransom” published in the Book Review last month.
In recompense, here are two translations of the passage in Virgil to compare, the first by Sarah Ruden. In The New York Review of Books, Garry Wills said her 2008 “Aeneid” “has soared over the bar” set high by Robert Fagles in 2006. His translation follows hers. (Neoptolemus is here called Pyrrhus; the narrator is Aeneas, at the court of Queen Dido of Carthage.)
[…]
Some other notes:
— The fantastic vase painting of the killing of Priam is from an Attic black-figure amphora of the late sixth century B.C., now in the Louvre. Like many ancient illustrations of the Trojan War, it depicts the conquest of Troy as a savage and merciless slaughter of innocents; here Neoptolemus bludgeons Priam with the body of a Trojan child.
— Virgil’s references to the rule of Asia and a headless trunk on the shore would have been immediately understood by Romans of the early Augustan age as a reference to Pompey the Great, the Roman conqueror of the East treacherously assassinated and beheaded on the shores of Egypt.
— The title of Malouf’s novel, “Ransom,” is a translation of the Greek term for the Iliadic episode in which Priam ransoms the body of his son Hector from Achilles. It’s just one of the many ways in which Malouf shows his thorough engagement with the “Iliad.”
— No matter how skillful these translations, Virgil’s Latin suffers far more in translation than does Homeric Greek. It’s worth learning Latin just to read the “Aeneid.”
rogueclassicism 