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.

• via: From Vergil to Winnie-the-Pooh, Ross Kilpatrick had wide-ranging interests

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.

• via: Eminent linguist fought for country

(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.

• William F. Wyatt Jr., Brown classics scholar, dies at 78