Category: Obituaries

d.m. Honor Frost

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

From the Telegraph:

During a career that began in the 1950s, she led many excavations in the Mediterranean and was noted for her skills as an illustrator and her work on the technicalities of ancient boat-building and nautical equipment, particularly the use of stone anchors and their typology.

Among her most important projects was an expedition, sponsored by Unesco, which she led to survey the Pharos (lighthouse) site in the Port of Alexandria in 1968. She dived the site and confirmed the existence of ruins representing part of the Pharos as well as the remains of submerged buildings representing the lost palace of Alexander and the Ptolemies, and published a preliminary report with drawings which revealed the site’s importance.

For the next two decades, however, the site remained more or less forgotten, because of a lack of specialised archaeologists and the fact that the area was in a military zone. It was only in the 1990s that work there resumed.

In 1971 the Sicilian authorities and the British School at Rome appointed Honor Frost to direct the excavation of a Punic warship in Marsala harbour off the coast of Sicily. It is believed to have been one of the Liburnian “longships”, an oared vessel with 17 sweeps per side, used by ancient Carthage in the Battle of the Aegates Islands (241BC), the last battle of the First Punic War between Carthage and the Roman Republic.

The ship had been uncovered by a dredger in 1969, and for several years Honor Frost and an international team of marine archaeologists worked on the site, publishing regular reports, before eventually restoring the wreck for display at the local museum.

She concluded that the warship had sunk stern-first after being rammed by the Romans. The crew had apparently abandoned ship, taking their weapons with them, but left evidence of their diet, including deer, goat, horse, ox, pig and sheep as well as olives, nuts and fruit. There were also traces of cannabis, which the crew may have chewed as a stimulant before going into battle. The team also found a human skeleton, possibly of a Carthaginian sailor trapped by ballast. The ship’s “nationality” was painted on the sides with letters by its Punic builders.

An only child, Honor Frost was born on October 28 1917 in Nicosia, Cyprus. After the death of both her parents she became the ward of a London solicitor, Wilfred Evill.

She studied at the Central School of Art, London, and the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford, then worked as a designer for the Ballet Rambert, and later as director of publications at the Tate Gallery.

Honor Frost was, as she put it, “baptised” into the delights of underwater exploration in a garden well in Wimbledon. She had been invited to try a diving suit attached to a hand pump which had been used in the Second World War for shallow water work and, as she descended, found herself entranced by the beauty of her surroundings: “air bubbles, like quicksilver, adhered to undercut surfaces. The floor was a cushion of dead leaves in every stage of decomposition.” Underwater, she found, “the mind loses its habits of anxiety, while powers of contemplation increase”.

She soon became convinced that “time spent on the surface was time wasted”, and, in the late 1940s, began training at Cannes with the Club Alpin Sous-Marin.

It was with the club, under the guidance of the archaeologist Frederic Dumas, that she dived her first wreck, a large Roman ship lying at the foot of a rock called the Balise de la Chretienne off the south coast of France at Antheor. “Around 15 metres I could just make out the wreck, or rather a tumble of amphorae extending as far as the eye could see,” she recalled. The wreck was inhabited by a colony of octopuses, “graceful, playful and as sensuous as cats when tickled”.

In 1957 she reported for work for the last of six seasons of an excavation, led by the British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon, of tombs near Jericho. Though she did not enjoy working on dry land, Honor Frost was struck by the contrast between the gung-ho excavation of the Roman ship and the discipline and careful record-keeping of land-based archaeology, particularly the way in which the “context” of the tombs was studied in as much detail as their contents.

The experience convinced her of the importance not only of recording shipwrecks of particular historical interest photographically, but also of representing them in meticulously detailed plans and finding out as much as possible about the surrounding sediments.

After the Jericho dig was over, Honor Frost moved to Lebanon, where she explored the ancient harbours at Tyre and Sidon and along the Syrian coast. She developed an interest in stone anchors after spotting several built into the walls of the bronze age temple at Byblos, and then discovering similar anchors off the nearby coast.

Among other achievements, Honor Frost was the first to recognise, in 1959, that a wrecked ship off the coast of Turkey at Gelidonya, which contained a rich cargo of copper and tin ingots together with personal possessions of the crew, dated from the late Bronze Age and was early Phoenician. At the time of the discovery, scholars believed the Myceneans had dominated Mediterranean trade in the Bronze Age and that the Phoenicians were not present on the seas until the Iron Age.

From her guardian, Honor Frost inherited a valuable collection of art and antiques and a Georgian house in London, where she entertained an eclectic circle of friends, including Erica Brausen, director of the Hanover Gallery during its heyday, and the fashion designer Thea Porter. Her fascination with the Mediterranean eventually led her to acquire a house in Malta as a second home.

Among other works she wrote Under the Mediterranean (1963), about her early experiences as an archaeologist. She was also a frequent contributor to the Mariner’s Mirror, the journal of the Society for Nautical Research.

Honor Frost was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1969. In 1997 the French government awarded her a medal for pioneering submarine archaeology in Egypt, and in 2005 the British Sub-Aqua Club presented her with the Colin McLeod award for furthering international co-operation in diving.

Two hip replacements in later life did little to slow her down. Shortly before she died, on September 12, she was planning another season at Sidon and a trip to India to see what she believed to be the largest stone anchor in the world.

Honor Frost was married but separated.

via: Honor Frost | Telegraph

Elsewhere:

Honor Frost | Guardian

d.m. Colin Austin

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

From Cambridge City News:

Cambridge professor Colin Austin, one of the world’s leading specialists on ancient Greek texts, has died of cancer at the age of 69.

Australian-born Prof Austin was educated in England and France – his mother tongue was French.

He studied at Oxford and came to Trinity Hall as a research fellow in 1965.

He was made a director of studies there, and remained a fellow until he retired in 2008.

Prof Austin, a fellow of the British Academy, taught in the Faculty of Classics in Cambridge and was treasurer of the Cambridge Philological Society for 40 years.

Colleagues said he had “a remarkable gift” for reconstructing fragmentary poetic texts preserved on Egyptian papyri.

Prof Austin had been working on a new edition of Greek New Comedy poet Menander.

He is survived by his wife Mishtu, their two children and four grandchildren.

d.m. Bernard Knox

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

From the New York Times:

Bernard M. W. Knox, an authority on the works of Sophocles, a prolific scholar and the founding director of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies, died July 22 at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 95.

The cause was a heart attack, said his son, MacGregor.

An American born and raised in Britain, Bernard Knox led a life as richly textured as the classics he interpreted for modern readers. After studying classics at Cambridge, he fought with the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War. While serving in the United States Army during World War II, he parachuted into France to work with the resistance and went on to join the partisans in Italy.

Returning to the United States with a Bronze Star and the Croix de Guerre, he resumed his study of the classics at Yale, where he earned a doctorate in 1948 and taught, becoming a full professor in 1959. In 1961, he was asked to lead the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, a Harvard affiliate, whose directorship he held until 1985.

His first book, which established his reputation, was “Oedipus at Thebes: Sophocles’ Tragic Hero and His Time.” Originally published in 1957 by Yale University Press, it remains in print in a new 1998 edition, as do several of his other books.

Notable among those is a landmark anthology he edited with college students as well as general readers in mind, “The Norton Book of Classical Literature” (1993).

He also wrote introductions for Robert Fagles’s new translations of Homer’s “Iliad” (1991) and “Odyssey” (2002) and Virgil’s “Aeneid” (2006).

Professor Knox was admired for the clear and powerful prose he brought to his essays, many of them published in general-interest magazines like The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic and The New York Review of Books.

They remain required reading in college courses on Greek and Roman literature and were collected in “The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy” (1964), “Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater” (1980), “Essays Ancient and Modern” (1989), “The Oldest Dead White European Males and Other Reflections on the Classics” (1993) and “Backing Into the Future: The Classical Tradition and Its Renewal” (1994).

Bernard MacGregor Walker Knox was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, on Nov. 24, 1914. He studied classics at St. John’s College, Cambridge, from which he graduated in 1936. Spurred by the rise of Mussolini and Hitler, he had committed himself to the political left well before that.

He spent vacations in Paris, staying in cheap hotels, becoming fluent in French and befriending fellow students marching against fascism for the Popular Front. When civil war broke out in Spain, he joined a machine-gun unit of the French Battalion of the 11th International Brigade, fighting on the northwest sector of the Madrid front. He described his experiences in “Premature Anti-Fascist,” a lecture delivered in 1998 at New York University.

In 1939, he married Betty Baur, an American he had met in Cambridge, and began teaching Latin at a private school in Greenwich, Conn. His wife died in 2006. In addition to his son, MacGregor, of London, he is survived by a sister, Elizabeth L. Campbell of Chapel Hill, N.C., and two grandchildren.

Soon after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Army, where he trained as an aircraft armorer and, after attending officer training school, returned to Britain in 1943 as an air defense officer at a B-17 bomber base.

He found the duty boring and approached the Office of Strategic Services, which took note of his fluent French and assigned him to an operations unit, despite his history with the international brigades in Spain.

After training as a parachutist, he fought with a special force organized by the O.S.S., the British and the Free French to coordinate elements of the French Resistance with advancing Allied troops after the Normandy invasion. He also instructed members of the French Maquis in the use of explosives.

The O.S.S. later sent him into northern Italy for an equally dangerous mission with the Italian underground, and it was there that he rekindled his passion for the classics. Holed up in an abandoned villa, he discovered a bound copy of Virgil and opened it to a section of the first Georgic that begins, “Here right and wrong are reversed; so many wars in the world, so many faces of evil.”

Professor Knox recalled, in “Essays Ancient and Modern,” “These lines, written some 30 years before the birth of Christ, expressed, more directly and passionately than any modern statement I knew of, the reality of the world I was living in: the shell-pocked, mine-infested fields, the shattered cities and the starving population of that Italy Virgil so loved, the misery of the whole world at war.”

He continued, “As we ran and crawled through the rubble I thought to myself: ‘If I ever get out of this, I’m going back to the classics and study them seriously.’ ”

Professor Knox’s many honorary degrees and distinctions included the George Jean Nathan Award for dramatic criticism in 1977, given for a review-essay in The New York Review of Books on Andrei Serban’s production of “Agamemnon” at Lincoln Center; the Charles Frankel Prize of the National Endowment of the Humanities, in 1990; and the Jefferson Medal of the Philosophical Society of America in 2004.

The Frankel Prize, awarded for contributing to the public’s understanding of the humanities, cited his books on Greek culture written for a general audience. In 1992, the National Council on the Humanities chose Professor Knox to deliver its yearly Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.

In his later years, he found himself defending classical learning against the champions of multiculturalism.

“There is a sort of general feeling among radicals that the whole of the Western tradition — and the Greeks are the heart of that tradition — is something that has to be repudiated,” he told The Washington Post in 1992. “I feel appalled. God knows what the world would be like if we were all brought up on the stuff they’d like us to read.”

via: Bernard Knox, 95, Classics Scholar, Dies | New York Times

d.m. Mabel Lang

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment
Bryn Mawr College
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It is with great sadness that I share the news that Mabel Louise Lang, Katharine E. McBride Professor Emeritus and Paul Shorey Professor Emeritus of Greek, passed away at home on Wednesday, 21 July at the age of 92. Professor Lang’s chief academic interests were Greek history and epigraphy, and she left a legacy of exceptional scholarship and institutional support at both the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and at Bryn Mawr College.

She earned her AB from Cornell (1939) and her MA (1940) and PhD (1943) from Bryn Mawr College. She commenced teaching at Bryn Mawr in 1943 and served on the faculty of the Greek Department for 45 years, before retiring in 1988.

Miss Lang, as she was known to many, began her service to Bryn Mawr as Warden of Rockefeller Hall (1942-1945). She served the College in a number of administrative capacities: Acting Dean of the College, Dean of the Sophomore Class, and Secretary of the Faculty (1970-1975). In 1961, she became Chair of the Department of Greek and held the position, without sabbatical, until her retirement 27 years later.

A revered and formidable presence on campus, Professor Lang was an inspiring, caring and demanding teacher. Professor Lang taught her signature undergraduate course—”Baby” Greek—almost every year, introducing nearly a thousand students to the language. Her graduate seminars on Homer and Thucydides set a standard across her academic field.

On a less academic note, Professor Lang was the beloved stage manager of a number of Bryn Mawr College Faculty Shows including: Standing Room Only (1943), Top Secret (1947), Kind Hearts and Martinets (1951), and The Profs in the Pudding (1955).

Professor Lang was a prolific and celebrated scholar, who wrote twelve books and more than fifty articles, spanning the fields of history, epigraphy, and archaeology. As a Fellow of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, she excavated at the Acropolis and the Agora; this led to the publication of the first guide to the Agora, four Agora picture books, and three scholarly volumes in the esteemed Agora series. In the 1950s and 1960s, she participated in excavations at Gordion (Turkey) and the Palace of Nestor at Pylos (Greece) that led to numerous publications. Particularly seminal were her reconstruction of the frescoes at Pylos and her interpretation of tablet fragments in Linear B (the script of the Mycenaeans). Professor Lang’s later scholarship on Herodotus, Homer, and Thucydides was equally impressive and well-received.

Professor Lang’s academic contributions were widely recognized. She was awarded the Blegen Research lectureship at Vassar College (1976) and chosen to deliver the Martin Classical Lectures at Oberlin College (1982). Honors included a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship to Greece, three honorary degrees, and membership in the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the German Archeological Institute, Phi Beta Kappa, and Phi Kappa Phi.

Details about memorial services will be forthcoming.

Legendary Professor of Greek Mabel Lang Dies at 93 | Bryn Mawr Now

Douglas MacDowell’s Classical Legacy

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ 1 Comment
University of Glasgow's Crest
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Tip o’ the pileus to Tim Parkin for this one from the Glasgow Herald, but which appears to be only available from findarticles.com for some reason; I don’t think we had an obituary for Dr MacDowell:

AN esteemed professor has stunned the Scottish academic world by leaving a pound(s)2 million fortune to the institution where he worked for 30 years.

Professor Douglas MacDowell left the money in his will to Glasgow University on the basis that it is used to reintroduce his old position of Professorship of Greek

The job was mothballed when he stepped down nine years ago after serving the longest period in office of any Glasgow Professor of Greek since 1877.

Professor MacDowell died in hospital of renal failure aged 78 in January this year but the details of his will totalling pound(s)2,157,176.28 have just been revealed.

As well as expressing shock at the reportedly modest-living professor’s wealth, classics experts say the return of the post will be a welcome boost.

MacDowell is credited with establishing the Greek department’s reputation as one of the most revered seats of learning anywhere in the world.

Alan Milligan, 53, classics teacher at the High School of Glasgow, and his wife Dr Susan Milligan, 51, from the Classical Association of Scotland, both studied under the professor.

Mr Milligan said: “It’s one of the oldest chairs at Glasgow University. It will be great to have that tradition kept up.”

Dr Milligan said: “It will give the subject a great boost. It never stopped being taught but there wasn’t a specific chair of it.

“He was absolutely dedicated and was a superb teacher and a scholar who published prolifically. He was a quiet person, very thoughtful.

“He was very precise and had a terrific sense of humour. Nobody would have guessed he had a huge amount of wealth. It’s typical of him it has only come out after his death.”

An only child who never married, London-born MacDowell lived a modest lifestyle in a pound(s)100,000 flat in Glasgow’s Byres Road. He drove a pound(s)1228 Daihatsu hatchback car and his furniture and personal belongings were valued at pound(s)2767 after his death.

He also had a stamp collection worth pound(s)900 but the bulk of his riches were made up of stocks and shares including pound(s)115,000 of BP shares and pound(s)82,000 of shares in mining giants Rio Tinto.

However, in his obituary published in The Herald in February it was noted: “More than one impoverished postgraduate student benefited financially from his generosity.”

He left pound(s)90,000 to friends and pound(s)10,000 to the National Trust for Scotland.

Though the university refused to comment officially, one university source said: “This is a wonderful gesture from Professor MacDowell and has taken everyone by surprise.

“After he stood down as the Professor of Greek the position was frozen and not readvertised.

“I think he felt very passionately that it should be reinstated.

“Discussions are currently ongoing between solicitors handling his estate and the university to decide if and how the wishes in his will can be implemented.”