Mata Kimasitayo
2006-01-04 14:10:55 UTC
http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/article336348.ece
Professor D. R. Shackleton Bailey
Latin scholar whose edition of Cicero's letters is a monument of
20th-century classical scholarship
04 January 2006
David Roy Shackleton Bailey, Classics scholar: born Lancaster 10 December
1917; Fellow, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge 1944-55, 1964-68,
Praelector 1954-55, Bursar 1964, Senior Bursar 1965-68; University Lecturer
in Tibetan, Cambridge University 1948-68; Fellow and Director of Studies in
Classics, Jesus College, Cambridge 1955-64; FBA 1958; Professor of Latin,
University of Michigan 1968-74, Adjunct Professor 1989-2005; Professor of
Greek and Latin, Harvard University 1975-82, Pope Professor of the Latin
Language and Literature 1982-88 (Emeritus); Editor, Harvard Studies in
Classical Philology 1978-84; married 1967 Hilary Bardwell (marriage
dissolved 1975), 1994 Kristine Zvirbulis; died Ann Arbor, Michigan 28
November 2005.
D. R. Shackleton Bailey was a classical scholar of the "severe and thorough"
sort approved by A. E. Housman, those, to quote his own words, "who like
hard facts and the logic of facts and prefer results that last". That, for
him as well as for Housman, defined his life's work, the establishment and
explication of Latin texts.
David Roy Shackleton Bailey - "Shack" to friends - was educated at Newcastle
Royal Grammar School, where his father was headmaster and where (as I
learned many years later from a schoolmate) he was known as "Boffles", and
at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. After a predictable first class,
with distinctions in Greek and Latin Verse Composition, he changed to
Oriental Languages, offering Sanskrit and Pali, and was again placed in the
first class.
One suspects that the change of subject reflected a wish to avoid the
history and philosophy required in Part II Classics and concentrate on
language. He may however already have been aware that Housman's university
career had been shipwrecked by his neglect of those parts of the Greats, for
the story had been told in A.S.F. Gow's memoir (A.E. Housman: a sketch,
1936) published during Bailey's first year at Cambridge. Of that débâcle he
was later to remark that "had he [Housman] gone to Cambridge, things might
have turned out differently". He perhaps preferred to run no such risk.
After wartime service at Bletchley Park, Bailey returned to Cambridge and to
a Fellowship at Caius. In 1948 he was appointed University Lecturer in
Tibetan, a post which he held until 1968. It was generally believed that he
discouraged intending students by telling them to go away and come back when
they had learned Sanskrit. Certainly a trawl through the class-lists of
those years yields the names of only three candidates offering Tibetan in
the Tripos.
In 1951 he published a critical edition of two first- or second-century AD
Buddhist hymns, The Satapancasatka of Matrceta. The complex editorial
techniques involved are described in an article of 1975, "Editing Ancient
Texts". This deserves to be better known than it probably is, for taken with
the articles on Housman of 1984 quoted above, it can be read as Shackleton
Bailey's critical credo.
Meanwhile he was being drawn back to Classics, and specifically to Latin.
The return to allegiance was signalled by translation in 1955 to Jesus
College as Director of Studies in Classics, and by the publication in the
following year of Propertiana. The book was offered, in Propertius' words,
uilia tura damus, in humble tribute to the shade of Housman "as a
contribution to the improvement of Propertius' text".
The dedication and the choice of poet are pointed, for by this time he
certainly would have known from Gow's account that Housman had designed to
edit Propertius and that a transcript of a text and apparatus criticus was
found among his papers at his death and was destroyed in accordance with his
instructions. Bailey's words foreshadow the monumental achievements of the
next 50 years, which were to be devoted to the editing, translation and
interpretation of an astonishingly wide range of Latin authors.
Propertiana is an unpretending book, a collection of notes on selected
passages of critical interest, with an appendix of parallel and illustrative
passages unnoticed by recent commentators. It is important as implicitly
refuting a commonly held notion that textual criticism is synonymous with
emendation, the correction of texts. Textual criticism begins with accurate
interpretation. As Bailey points out in "Editing Ancient Texts", "A great
many supposedly corrupt passages have finally been vindicated by intelligent
and informed interpretation." Repeatedly in Propertiana it is shown that the
most satisfactory solution to a textual problem is not a new conjecture, but
a defence of one already proposed or of the transmitted text. These verdicts
are supported by notes which are a rich source of information on Latin
poetic usage.
Like earlier miscellanies such as J.N. Madvig's 1871 Adversaria, the book
immediately became, apart from its value for future editors of Propertius
(whom Bailey himself never edited), a standard work of reference. It was
also an earnest of what was to come. As F.R.D. Goodyear, himself a severe
critic of other editors, was to write, in one of a series of magisterial
reviews of Bailey's magnum opus, his edition of Cicero's Letters to Atticus
(1965-70), "The author . . . was already an outstanding critic, who showed
exceptional insight, lucidity of judgement and versatility."
In the decades following Propertiana there appeared an imposing series of
critical editions of Latin prose and verse texts, including Horace, Lucan,
Martial, part of the so-called Anthologia Latina, Valerius Maximus, and the
declamations falsely ascribed to Quintilian, supported by a copious flow of
relevant notes and articles.
It was, however, Cicero who principally came to engross Bailey's interest,
and his edition of the letters in 10 volumes - which brought him, among
numerous other distinctions, the Kenyon Medal of the British Academy, to
which he had been elected in 1958 - immediately took rank as one of the
great monuments of 20th-century classical scholarship. It displayed all the
qualities to be expected of an editor who believed that scholars who
"omitted to steep themselves in Housman's works" had not equipped themselves
to do their job. (Words which a reviewer of Latin texts of 50 years'
experience can only echo.)
However, in one important respect Bailey's approach differed from his
mentor's. Housman was concerned almost exclusively with determining what his
author had written. His chef-d'oeuvre, the great edition of Manilius' poem
on astrology, includes a commentary, written in tersely elegant Latin, which
is a fundamental source of enlightenment (something not as widely known as
it should be to editors of Latin texts) on Latin poetic usage. Manilius
himself, whose principal talent he described as an aptitude for doing sums
in verse, what he had to say and why it may have mattered, did not interest
him.
Bailey chose an author in whose character and in the part that he played in
the history of his times, like him or loathe him, it is impossible not to be
interested, and Cicero the man and statesman is the central focus of the
commentaries. The enormously improved text of the letters was accompanied by
translations, a valuable aid to interpretation and a medium in which
Shackleton Bailey excelled. The translations are not the least useful and
attractive feature of his Loeb editions, and those published in the Penguin
series offer Cicero to the wider reading public in a pleasing and accessible
literary guide.
In 1964 Bailey left Jesus to return to Caius as Deputy, subsequently Senior,
Bursar. He was indeed known to be extremely careful with money. His learned
works were usually written on the backs of proof sheets or old examination
scripts, which in those days, after retention of four months in case of
enquiries, became the property of the examiner. Written as they then were on
one side of paper only, they formed a useful perquisite for the frugally
inclined, and Bailey always took care to get his fair share.
However, only four years later he moved again to the University of Michigan
at Ann Arbor, and thence in 1975 to Harvard, where he eventually attained
the position by which he was known to set great store, of Pope Professor of
the Latin Language and Literature. On retirement from Harvard in 1988 he
returned to Ann Arbor as adjunct professor. The series of Loeb editions
which he pronounced there ended with the declamations of pseudo-Quintilian,
completed in last year of his life and bringing the number of volumes edited
by him in that series to a total unmatched by any other contributor in its
almost century-long history.
Shackleton Bailey was not always easy to get on with, but shyness and a
sometimes unwelcoming manner masked an emotional and aesthetic sensibility
most evident in his response to romantic classical music: "The next one" - a
Brahms song being put on the turntable - "is particularly jammy."
He became a cat lover on acquiring Donum, so called because he was the gift
of Frances Lloyd-Jones, and displayed his affection to the classical world
in the dedication of his magnum opus to DONO DONORVM AELVRO CANDIDISSIMO,
"The gift of gifts, whitest of cats". It was indeed generally and credibly
believed in Cambridge that his departure from Jesus and return to Caius was
occasioned by the refusal of the Master of Jesus, Sir Denys Page, a dog man,
to sanction the cutting of an entrance for Donum in the ancient oak (outer
door) of his rooms. At Ann Arbor there were to be other cats, but Donum was
special: there comes to mind an evening in those rooms in Jesus when the
company suddenly became aware their host had disappeared, and discovered him
and Donum in silent communion beneath the floor-length tablecloth.
The choice of Cicero as the principal focus of his scholarly life was not
solely due to the fact that his writings offered a rich source of historical
and philological problems which he was extraordinarily well qualified to
solve. It was Cicero as a human being, whose life and character are better
and more intimately documented than any other figure from the ancient world,
Socrates not excepted, that attracted him and that displays Shackleton
Bailey himself to best advantage. It is this for which he chiefly deserves
to be remembered.
E. J. Kenney
© 2005 Independent News and Media Limited
- -
Mata Kimasitayo
Kimasita~aT~Bloomington.In.Us
______________________________
______________________________
Professor D. R. Shackleton Bailey
Latin scholar whose edition of Cicero's letters is a monument of
20th-century classical scholarship
04 January 2006
David Roy Shackleton Bailey, Classics scholar: born Lancaster 10 December
1917; Fellow, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge 1944-55, 1964-68,
Praelector 1954-55, Bursar 1964, Senior Bursar 1965-68; University Lecturer
in Tibetan, Cambridge University 1948-68; Fellow and Director of Studies in
Classics, Jesus College, Cambridge 1955-64; FBA 1958; Professor of Latin,
University of Michigan 1968-74, Adjunct Professor 1989-2005; Professor of
Greek and Latin, Harvard University 1975-82, Pope Professor of the Latin
Language and Literature 1982-88 (Emeritus); Editor, Harvard Studies in
Classical Philology 1978-84; married 1967 Hilary Bardwell (marriage
dissolved 1975), 1994 Kristine Zvirbulis; died Ann Arbor, Michigan 28
November 2005.
D. R. Shackleton Bailey was a classical scholar of the "severe and thorough"
sort approved by A. E. Housman, those, to quote his own words, "who like
hard facts and the logic of facts and prefer results that last". That, for
him as well as for Housman, defined his life's work, the establishment and
explication of Latin texts.
David Roy Shackleton Bailey - "Shack" to friends - was educated at Newcastle
Royal Grammar School, where his father was headmaster and where (as I
learned many years later from a schoolmate) he was known as "Boffles", and
at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. After a predictable first class,
with distinctions in Greek and Latin Verse Composition, he changed to
Oriental Languages, offering Sanskrit and Pali, and was again placed in the
first class.
One suspects that the change of subject reflected a wish to avoid the
history and philosophy required in Part II Classics and concentrate on
language. He may however already have been aware that Housman's university
career had been shipwrecked by his neglect of those parts of the Greats, for
the story had been told in A.S.F. Gow's memoir (A.E. Housman: a sketch,
1936) published during Bailey's first year at Cambridge. Of that débâcle he
was later to remark that "had he [Housman] gone to Cambridge, things might
have turned out differently". He perhaps preferred to run no such risk.
After wartime service at Bletchley Park, Bailey returned to Cambridge and to
a Fellowship at Caius. In 1948 he was appointed University Lecturer in
Tibetan, a post which he held until 1968. It was generally believed that he
discouraged intending students by telling them to go away and come back when
they had learned Sanskrit. Certainly a trawl through the class-lists of
those years yields the names of only three candidates offering Tibetan in
the Tripos.
In 1951 he published a critical edition of two first- or second-century AD
Buddhist hymns, The Satapancasatka of Matrceta. The complex editorial
techniques involved are described in an article of 1975, "Editing Ancient
Texts". This deserves to be better known than it probably is, for taken with
the articles on Housman of 1984 quoted above, it can be read as Shackleton
Bailey's critical credo.
Meanwhile he was being drawn back to Classics, and specifically to Latin.
The return to allegiance was signalled by translation in 1955 to Jesus
College as Director of Studies in Classics, and by the publication in the
following year of Propertiana. The book was offered, in Propertius' words,
uilia tura damus, in humble tribute to the shade of Housman "as a
contribution to the improvement of Propertius' text".
The dedication and the choice of poet are pointed, for by this time he
certainly would have known from Gow's account that Housman had designed to
edit Propertius and that a transcript of a text and apparatus criticus was
found among his papers at his death and was destroyed in accordance with his
instructions. Bailey's words foreshadow the monumental achievements of the
next 50 years, which were to be devoted to the editing, translation and
interpretation of an astonishingly wide range of Latin authors.
Propertiana is an unpretending book, a collection of notes on selected
passages of critical interest, with an appendix of parallel and illustrative
passages unnoticed by recent commentators. It is important as implicitly
refuting a commonly held notion that textual criticism is synonymous with
emendation, the correction of texts. Textual criticism begins with accurate
interpretation. As Bailey points out in "Editing Ancient Texts", "A great
many supposedly corrupt passages have finally been vindicated by intelligent
and informed interpretation." Repeatedly in Propertiana it is shown that the
most satisfactory solution to a textual problem is not a new conjecture, but
a defence of one already proposed or of the transmitted text. These verdicts
are supported by notes which are a rich source of information on Latin
poetic usage.
Like earlier miscellanies such as J.N. Madvig's 1871 Adversaria, the book
immediately became, apart from its value for future editors of Propertius
(whom Bailey himself never edited), a standard work of reference. It was
also an earnest of what was to come. As F.R.D. Goodyear, himself a severe
critic of other editors, was to write, in one of a series of magisterial
reviews of Bailey's magnum opus, his edition of Cicero's Letters to Atticus
(1965-70), "The author . . . was already an outstanding critic, who showed
exceptional insight, lucidity of judgement and versatility."
In the decades following Propertiana there appeared an imposing series of
critical editions of Latin prose and verse texts, including Horace, Lucan,
Martial, part of the so-called Anthologia Latina, Valerius Maximus, and the
declamations falsely ascribed to Quintilian, supported by a copious flow of
relevant notes and articles.
It was, however, Cicero who principally came to engross Bailey's interest,
and his edition of the letters in 10 volumes - which brought him, among
numerous other distinctions, the Kenyon Medal of the British Academy, to
which he had been elected in 1958 - immediately took rank as one of the
great monuments of 20th-century classical scholarship. It displayed all the
qualities to be expected of an editor who believed that scholars who
"omitted to steep themselves in Housman's works" had not equipped themselves
to do their job. (Words which a reviewer of Latin texts of 50 years'
experience can only echo.)
However, in one important respect Bailey's approach differed from his
mentor's. Housman was concerned almost exclusively with determining what his
author had written. His chef-d'oeuvre, the great edition of Manilius' poem
on astrology, includes a commentary, written in tersely elegant Latin, which
is a fundamental source of enlightenment (something not as widely known as
it should be to editors of Latin texts) on Latin poetic usage. Manilius
himself, whose principal talent he described as an aptitude for doing sums
in verse, what he had to say and why it may have mattered, did not interest
him.
Bailey chose an author in whose character and in the part that he played in
the history of his times, like him or loathe him, it is impossible not to be
interested, and Cicero the man and statesman is the central focus of the
commentaries. The enormously improved text of the letters was accompanied by
translations, a valuable aid to interpretation and a medium in which
Shackleton Bailey excelled. The translations are not the least useful and
attractive feature of his Loeb editions, and those published in the Penguin
series offer Cicero to the wider reading public in a pleasing and accessible
literary guide.
In 1964 Bailey left Jesus to return to Caius as Deputy, subsequently Senior,
Bursar. He was indeed known to be extremely careful with money. His learned
works were usually written on the backs of proof sheets or old examination
scripts, which in those days, after retention of four months in case of
enquiries, became the property of the examiner. Written as they then were on
one side of paper only, they formed a useful perquisite for the frugally
inclined, and Bailey always took care to get his fair share.
However, only four years later he moved again to the University of Michigan
at Ann Arbor, and thence in 1975 to Harvard, where he eventually attained
the position by which he was known to set great store, of Pope Professor of
the Latin Language and Literature. On retirement from Harvard in 1988 he
returned to Ann Arbor as adjunct professor. The series of Loeb editions
which he pronounced there ended with the declamations of pseudo-Quintilian,
completed in last year of his life and bringing the number of volumes edited
by him in that series to a total unmatched by any other contributor in its
almost century-long history.
Shackleton Bailey was not always easy to get on with, but shyness and a
sometimes unwelcoming manner masked an emotional and aesthetic sensibility
most evident in his response to romantic classical music: "The next one" - a
Brahms song being put on the turntable - "is particularly jammy."
He became a cat lover on acquiring Donum, so called because he was the gift
of Frances Lloyd-Jones, and displayed his affection to the classical world
in the dedication of his magnum opus to DONO DONORVM AELVRO CANDIDISSIMO,
"The gift of gifts, whitest of cats". It was indeed generally and credibly
believed in Cambridge that his departure from Jesus and return to Caius was
occasioned by the refusal of the Master of Jesus, Sir Denys Page, a dog man,
to sanction the cutting of an entrance for Donum in the ancient oak (outer
door) of his rooms. At Ann Arbor there were to be other cats, but Donum was
special: there comes to mind an evening in those rooms in Jesus when the
company suddenly became aware their host had disappeared, and discovered him
and Donum in silent communion beneath the floor-length tablecloth.
The choice of Cicero as the principal focus of his scholarly life was not
solely due to the fact that his writings offered a rich source of historical
and philological problems which he was extraordinarily well qualified to
solve. It was Cicero as a human being, whose life and character are better
and more intimately documented than any other figure from the ancient world,
Socrates not excepted, that attracted him and that displays Shackleton
Bailey himself to best advantage. It is this for which he chiefly deserves
to be remembered.
E. J. Kenney
© 2005 Independent News and Media Limited
- -
Mata Kimasitayo
Kimasita~aT~Bloomington.In.Us
______________________________
Dicit ei Pilatus: Quid est veritas? <<
-- Secundum Ioannem XVIII. 38______________________________