From the Inquirer:

Helen F. North, 90, professor emerita of classics at Swarthmore College, died Saturday, Jan. 21, at Crozer-Chester Medical Center.

In a tribute to Dr. North, Swarthmore College president Rebecca Chopp said: “The college has lost not just a brilliant scholar who was instrumental in building one of the most influential classics departments at a liberal-arts college, but also, as one who taught and cultivated relationships among generations of Swarthmore students for more than 60 years, a complete embodiment of the teacher-scholar.”

A native of Utica, N.Y., Dr. North earned a bachelor’s degree in 1942, a master’s in 1943, and a doctorate in the classics in 1945 from Cornell University.

She taught at Rosary College in Illinois before joining the Swarthmore faculty in 1948.

An avid equestrienne, she told an interviewer for Swarthmore’s alumni magazine that then-president John Nason informed her she was the only job candidate who ever insisted on seeing the school’s stables.

As a young faculty member, Dr. North, a devout Catholic, helped establish – over Nason’s objections – a Newman Club for Catholic students at Swarthmore.

Dr. North held several visiting-teaching appointments, including at Columbia University, Vassar College, and Cornell. She was a classicist in residence at the American Academy in Rome and held teaching and research posts at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.

She was the recipient of National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, and Ford Foundation fellowships and two fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation.

Dr. North wrote numerous articles for academic publications, published two books on Greek literature, and was editor and translator of several classical volumes and college texts.

She was a member of the American Philosophical Society; past president of the American Philological Association; and chairwoman, for eight years, of the search committee for the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Program. From 1973 to 2003, she served on the board of La Salle University.

Her many honors include a Harbison Prize, for outstanding accomplishments in college teaching. In 1989, she was named a Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania.

Chopp said in her tribute, “Although she retired from teaching at Swarthmore in 1991, Helen remained thoroughly engaged with the college community. Until recently, she continued to meet weekly with her colleagues in classics to read, translate, and discuss Greek poetry. She also regularly attended Alumni Weekend and the annual lectureship in classics established in her name in 1996.”

For years, Dr. North led Alumni College Abroad trips. Travelers would marvel, Chopp said, at her “near-encyclopedic knowledge of even the tiniest details of Christian as well as classical symbolism.”

In the alumni magazine interview, Dr. North said her idea of earthly happiness was the life she had. “When I walk across campus and stop in the rose garden or at the weeping cherry trees, I have a feeling it’s all kept up just for me.”

Dr. North and her sister, Mary, lived in a house Mary North designed in Swarthmore. They traveled annually in Ireland, the home of their ancestors, and wrote two guidebooks on Ireland’s earliest art and archaeology.

Mary North died in 2001. Dr. North has no survivors.

A Funeral Mass will be said at 10 a.m. Saturday, Jan. 28, at Notre Dame de Lourdes Roman Catholic Church, 950 Michigan Ave., Swarthmore. A reception will be in the church school. Burial will be in SS. Peter and Paul Cemetery, Marple Township.

A memorial gathering will be at 2 p.m. Saturday, April 21, at the Friends Meeting House on the Swarthmore College campus, 12 Whittier Place, Swarthmore.

Donations may be made to Notre Dame de Lourdes School, 1000 Fairview Rd., Swarthmore, Pa. 19081.

• via: Helen F. North, 90, Swarthmore classics professor (Inquirer)

• 2012.01.44:  Laurianne Martinez-Sève, Atlas du monde hellénistique (336-31 av. J.-C.): pouvoirs et territoires après Alexandre le Grand. Atlas. Mémoires.
• 2012.01.43:  Marie-Joséphine Werlings, Le dèmos avant la démocratie: mots, concepts, réalités historiques.
• 2012.01.42:  S. L. McGowen, Sacred and Civic Stone Monuments of the Northwest Roman Provinces. BAR international series 2109.
• 2012.01.41:  Louise H. Pratt, Eros at the Banquet: Reviewing Greek with Plato’s Symposium. Oklahoma Series in Classical Culture, 40.
• 2012.01.40:  Eugenio Amato, Xenophontis imitator fidelissimus: studi su tradizione e fortuna erudite di Dione Crisostomo tra XVI e XIX secolo. Hellenica, 40.
• 2012.01.39:  Roy K. Gibson, Ruth Morello, Pliny the Elder: Themes and Contexts. Mnemosyne supplements. Monographs on Greek and Roman Language and Literature, 329.

ante diem vi kalendas februarias

• 6 A.D. — dedication of the Temple of Castor and Pollux by the future emperor Tiberius
• 98 A.D. — death of Nerva (?)
• ca. 303 A.D. — martyrdom of Devota
• 1887 — birth of Carl Blegen, future excavator of Pylos (etc.)

Seen on various lists:

Bologna University Greek and Latin Summer School (25th June – 13th July
2012)

The Department of Classics and Italian studies (http://www.ficlit.unibo.it)
of Bologna University offers, for the fifth running year, an intensive three
week Greek and Latin Summer School.

The school offers courses in Greek and Latin language (at different levels:
beginners and intermediate) and the possibility of combining two courses
(Latin & Greek) at a special rate.
The courses will be held in Bologna from 25th June to 13th July 2012 and are
open to students (undergraduate and post graduate) and non-students alike.
Participants must be aged 18 or over.

The teaching will be focused mainly on Greek and/or Latin language with
additional classes on Classical literature; further classes will touch on
moments of classical history and history of art, supplemented by visits to
museums and archaeological sites (in Bologna and Rome).

All teaching and activities will be in English.

For further information and application forms please visit:
http://www.ficlit.unibo.it/dipartimento/summer-school
E-mail: diri_school.latin AT unibo.it

posted with permission

Lauren J. Apfel, The Advent of Pluralism: Diversity and Conflict in the Age of Sophocles. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2011. Pp. xvi + 380. £70.00/$135.00. ISBN 978-0-19-960062-5.

Reviewed by P. J. Finglass, University of Nottingham

This solid and thought-provoking monograph investigates the extent to which the ancient Greeks possessed the concept of pluralism: that is, the idea that ethical questions can have more than one right answer. A clear introduction is followed by sections on Protagoras, Herodotus, and Sophocles (though no conclusion, alas). Apfel writes intelligently and is usually easy to read, although footnotes are sometimes a little long (188 n. 75 is an especially egregious example). Her discussion of Sophocles (to cite the section relevant to my own interests, and highlighted by the book’s title) is intelligent and worth reading. I did not always agree with her. Sometimes she seemed too keen to assert moral equivalence between conflicting characters and values when Sophocles appears to me to be directing his audience in the direction of support for a particular side. I also wonder how hard she has thought about the terms “heroism” and “Sophoclean heroism” (e.g., 244), which seem decidedly question-begging, especially when used in a work concerned with ethics. But unanimity on such matters is hardly to be expected. The key point is that Apfel’s close readings of the ethics of Ajax, Electra, Antigone, and Philoctetes will stimulate thought and deserve to be widely cited.

Some points of detail. (31 n. 129) Apfel cites lyric poetry via Campbell’s outdated 1967 edition (not 1997, as she cites it); this will confuse readers, especially as they are notified here and not in e.g. a section on abbreviations at the beginning. (109-11) Apfel has a heading “The Poem of Simonides,” referring to the poem cited by Socrates in Plato’s Protagoras, but nowhere refers her readers to a text of that work. (134) It is Orestes, not Electra, who in Sophocles’ play “grasp<s> the idea that people can benefit from having been thought dead.” (135 n. 71) Read “Sophocles’” for “Sophocle’s”. In the same note Apfel cites Sophocles O.R. 1528-30 without indicating that almost every scholar who has seriously investigated the question considers this final tailpiece spurious (cf. Philologus 153 (2009) 59 n. 50). (135 n. 74) Apfel concludes that there is a “strong probability” that Sophocles read Herodotus; does she thereby exclude the possibility that Sophocles listened to Herodotus reciting parts of his work? And might Herodotus not have attended performances of Sophocles’ plays? I rather think he might have enjoyed them. (210) Abraham’s aborted sacrifice of Isaac did not take place on Mount Sinai. Apfel’s discussion here is vitiated by a lack of historical awareness concerning ancient attitudes towards the autonomy of children vis-à-vis their parents; I also miss a reference to Noort and Tigchelaar (eds.), The Sacrifice of Isaac … (Leiden etc. 2002). (211 n. 4) “Homer <Il.> 23.22-3.” (213 n. 14) Apfel dismisses the Epic Cycle as “inferior poems”; Sophocles himself apparently took a different view (Athenaeus 277c-e). (224 n. 63) Rieu’s translation is not in the bibliography. (225 n. 70) According to Apfel, “we can grant the suitors the valid point that Penelope has been stalling rather duplicitously and that it is high time she gets on which her choice.” Personally, I find Penelope’s fidelity admirable and inspiring, but perhaps I am just a romantic at heart. (253 n. 66) Ajax is hardly characterized by “mental slowness and inarticulateness” throughout ancient literature: cf. Hom. Il. 7.288-9, Soph. Aj. 119-20, Philost. Her. 35.2. (291) Sophocles’ use of Chrsyothemis and Ismene as foils to Electra and Antigone was commented on by the ancient scholia (on El. 328, p. 162 Xenis), well before Kamerbeek. (301 n. 113) Van Erp Taalman Kip in AJP 1996 refutes Apfel’s claim concerning Electra’s language here (305). Apfel mistranslates Soph. El. 1415 (“twice as hard,” not “a second blow”). (346 n. 131) For “interesting possibility,” read “uninteresting impossibility.”

The book contains a few errors in the Greek: ἐλπὶδ’ (87), καῖ (103), ἡδ’ (223, for ἠδ’), σὐ (226), εὐγηνὴς (289-290), αισχύνειν (299), αἰσχἰων (300), και (300 n. 107), ἐγω (301 n. 113), Ἀπόλλοων (306). The Bibliography contains errors, too; for example, several works are given the wrong publication date (somebody should have noticed that Finley’s The World of Odysseus came out somewhat earlier than 1999). On the dust jacket, in the description of the jacket illustration, a comma after “Protagoras” might have cleared up a potential confusion. I would also query Apfel’s definition here of “pluralism” as “the idea … that values and moral codes can and will come into conflict with one another”; the key point is not the existence of conflict (since conflict can occur between right and wrong), but the validity of the competing values. These mistakes can be corrected in the paperback reprint that this useful book deserves.