Apprendo ora della morte di Colin Austin: l’editore, assieme a Kassel, di una magistrale e monumentale edizione critica (con ricchissimi subsidia interpretationis in latino) di testimonia e frammenti relativi ai poeti comici greci (il “Kassel-Austin”, K-A), iniziata nel 1983 e tuttora in progress (manca il vol. IX - gli Indici -, e i due tomi relativi alle 11 commedie tràdite di Aristofane - vol. III.1 - e alle commedie maggiormente preservate di Menandro - vol. VI.1 -, oltre, ovviamente gli Addenda&Corrigenda), il cui avanzamento ha accompagnato i miei anni di studio universitario e dottorale.
Mi piace ricordare, inoltre, la sua edizione critica e commento delle Tesmoforiazuse di Aristofane, in collaborazione con Douglas Olson: attesissima, all’epoca (anche in Italia, nonostante l’ediz. Valla curata da Prato nel 2001), perché per qualche decennio sempre in procinto di essere completata (la tesi dottorale oxoniense -del 1965 - dello stesso Austin, che si arrestava ai primi 550 versi, trovò compimento quasi quarant’anni dopo, nel 2004, grazie alla collaborazione del calcenterico Olson)…
——-
Colin Austin obituary - One of the world’s leading scholars of ancient Greek texts
The Guardian, 6 settembre 2010
Richard Hunter
Colin Austin, who has died of cancer aged 69, was one of the world’s leading specialists on ancient Greek texts. Thanks to his technical expertise and power of conjectural divination, Colin had a remarkable gift for the reconstruction and interpretation of fragmentary poetic texts preserved on Egyptian papyri. The monumental edition of the fragments of Greek comedy which he completed with Rudolf Kassel set new standards of scholarly accuracy. The first volume of Poetae Comici Graeci, or “Kassel-Austin” as it is usually known, was published by De Gruyter in 1983; seven further large-scale volumes followed.
At the time, the remains of Greek comedy, other than the extant plays of Aristophanes and some Menander, were only available in editions which were either completely out of date or marred by fantastic and improbable reconstructions. Poetae Comici Graeci put hundreds of verses of Greek poetry into the mainstream, so other scholars could no longer think of them as inaccessible or unimportant. The fragments are accompanied by a full textual history and a commentary which always goes straight to the point and the problems.
Poetae Comici Graeci has already transformed the way in which the fragments of comedy can be used to shed light on Greek cultural and literary history. From the biting satire and high farce of the Old Comedy of classical Athens to the social comedy of Menander, the ancestor of the western tradition of the comedy of manners, Greek comedy reflects the evolution of both political structures and moral attitudes. Poetae Comici Graeci offers scholars in those fields a fresh start with some crucial evidence. It is unlikely to be superseded for many decades.
Colin was born in Australia to Lloyd Austin, an Australian professor of French, and his French wife, Jeanne-Françoise Guèrin. The family moved to Britain when Colin was five and then to France. He was educated first in Paris, at the Lycée Lakanal, and then at Manchester grammar school and Jesus College, Cambridge, before moving to Christ Church, Oxford, where Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones supervised his DPhil on Aristophanes, for which Colin edited Thesmophoriazusae, Aristophanes’s play about the women of Athens’ plans to take revenge on the playwright Euripides for the ways he has depicted them in his plays. Colin’s commentary on Thesmophoriazusae was published by the Oxford University Press in a 2004 edition co-edited by S Douglas Olson.
While in Oxford his aptitude for papyrology was nurtured by Peter Parsons. When he returned to Cambridge in 1965, as a research fellow and director of studies in classics at Trinity Hall, his future academic path was set. His growing reputation led to invitations to transcribe and edit several important papyri, including Martin Bodmer’s Menander codex, one of the main sources for the plays of a major poet who had otherwise been lost to the world. The fruits of these labours appeared in vastly improved texts of the Aspis and the Samia in 1969-70. Colin kept up his love for, and services to, Menander throughout his life. At the time of his death, he had been working frantically to complete a new edition of Menander’s plays for the Oxford Classical Texts series.
Colin’s particular gift lay not merely in the fine detail of fibres and ink smudges with which papyrologists must be concerned, but with filling in the gaps of broken lines with supplements. He revelled in what he saw as the supernatural nature of the gift he had been given, and he likened such conjecture to a mystery or a dream. A childlike wonder at what the sands of Egypt had preserved for us and the puzzles they set us shone through his public lectures in which he delighted to read aloud the newest piece of Menander-Austin.
One of his notable projects was a remarkable papyrus containing more than 100 new epigrams by Posidippus, a poet of the third century BC, which was acquired by a Milan bank and of which the world only learned in 1993. Colin was asked by the Italian papyrologist Guido Bastianini to help with the editing and writing the commentary, and a lavish edition appeared in 2001, followed shortly afterwards by an editio minor of Posidippus by Austin and Bastianini. Much of this work was done while Colin was suffering from the effects of unstable angina; the major surgery it necessitated, and his excited devotion to the project, was to foreshadow the resolution with which he worked through great suffering at the end of his life.
Colin was appointed a lecturer in the faculty of classics at Cambridge in 1969; a readership followed in 1988 and a personal chair 10 years later. In 1983 he joined his father as a fellow of the British Academy. He served as treasurer of the Cambridge Philological Society for 40 years, and at Trinity Hall was a much- loved wine steward and praelector. If Colin felt a lack of sympathy with some aspects of academic life – computers and modern literary criticism were never to his taste – he was very generous with his time and his learning to those who shared his enthusiasms.
His greatest pride was his family and he took delight in writing Greek or Latin verse to accompany the marvellous batiks made by Mishtu, his wife of 43 years. She survives him, along with their son, Topun, and daughter, Teesta.
- Colin François Lloyd Austin, scholar of ancient Greek, born 26 July 1941; died 13 August 2010
- This article was amended on 11 September 2010. The original referred to a translation of Thesmophoriazusae. This has been corrected.
***********************************+
Independent 13 settembre 2010
Eric Handley
Time both gives and takes. Beginning in the mid-19th century, and continuing at intervals through to the 20th and the present, the stock of surviving Ancient Greek texts that has nourished our civilisation has been augmented by discoveries of works long lost. Mostly, though not exclusively, they come from papyri excavated in Egypt, where the climate has favoured their survival.
Unlike the morning paper, they do not land on the mat crisp and ready to read. Whole books, or substantially whole books, very rarely survive. Alongside tens of thousands of documents, such as contracts, wills and inventories, we have leaves, columns and scraps from discarded or recycled copies of once valued works of literature. They are often tattered, distorted and discoloured. It is in the art and science of recovering poetry and drama from such discouraging remains that the scholarship of Professor Austin has excelled.
Euripides and Menander are two authors who have conspicuously benefited from the discoveries. A collection of new fragments of Euripides from papyri, published in Berlin in 1968, gave a foretaste of much of Austin’s work to come. It is in a series of compact format and meticulous presentation; it included a substantial new portion of Euripides’ once well-known tragedy Erectheus, extracted from a mummy casing in Paris, of which the first edition was Austin (1967).
Likewise, when it came to the publication in 1969 of the first and third plays from the Bodmer Codex of Menander (the second play, the Dyskolos or Misanthrope, has a first edition dated 1958), Austin collaborated with Rodolphe Kasser in Geneva to produce first editions of Samia, The Woman from Samos and Aspis, The Shield, while “Austin” (1969) is the academic shorthand for his own edition of the two comedies, including the remains previously known: it was published in the same series as the Euripides volume, with innovative restorations and helpful brief notes. These and other rediscoveries have transformed modern knowledge of one of the founders of a style of light drama now universally familiar, with its portrayal of people like ourselves and those we recognise in our own very different daily lives.
Very many lost works have not had the good luck to be resuscitated from papyri. They survive, if at all, in quotations, echoes and reminiscences by other authors, including grammarians and lexicographers of later ages, not always available in fully documented modern editions. Involvement with the new will often involve close encounters with the old.
That is very much in evidence in the work that will probably last longest among Austin’s achievements, the comprehensive edition of the Greek Comic Dramatists, Poetae Comici Graeci, which he undertook in partnership with Rudolf Kassel, beginning publication in 1983. The volumes that have so far appeared, up to 2001, give the surviving text of over 250 authors. With their prefaces, critical notes and parallels for the interpretations offered, they are already on the way to 4,500 pages, not reckoning with the provision made for the main works of Aristophanes and Menander and for indexes. Of course, there will be addenda and corrigenda (there already are), but it is hard to see how this monumental publication will ever be adequately replaced.
Other original and fertile studies should here be mentioned, notably work in collaboration with Italian colleagues on the rediscovered epigrams of Posidippus, and the subsequent edition of the Hellenistic poet’s complete surviving works with critical notes and translations (Austin–Bastianini, 2002). Several imaginative reconstructions of passages of Menander of great verve and style appear in recently published conference papers.
The magic may not always work: in a stern mood, one can feel that the extraordinary fluency in verse composition that is in evidence is sometimes carried away by its own momentum. One can, however, take to heart the Latin tag that the composer affixed to one of his earlier publications, in which he invited the reader not to hesitate to point out errors and omissions, but otherwise to join him in exploiting the results. Relentless care over details and lively inspiration are hard to find in so close a partnership.
Colin François Lloyd Austin was born in 1941 in Melbourne, Australia. He grew up in France, the homeland of his mother’s family. and was a lycéen in Paris. Long after his migration to England and to Manchester Grammar School he retained the warmest affection for the country of his earlier years, for its scholarship and for Maman. Married, settled in Cambridge, and with young children, he regularly enjoyed vacations in France; and indeed turned them to benefit by buying wine as Steward for his College, Trinity Hall, with a flair at least half inborn.
Undergraduate years at Jesus College, Cambridge were followed by doctoral studies at Oxford. He learnt much from his supervisor, Hugh Lloyd-Jones (jointly with Rudolf Kassel in Berlin), from seminars in Palaeography with Peter Parsons, and from contact with Eduard Fraenkel. The DPhil thesis of 1965 was on Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae, “Ladies’ Day”: it presented a text and commentary on lines 1–550 of the play. This work was to be revised, and completed in partnership with Douglas Olson. It was published nearly 40 years later in 2004 – Menander and the comic fragments had intervened – in the Oxford series of Aristophanes commentaries, whose General Editor and distinguished contributor was Sir Kenneth Dover. In 1983 came election to the Fellowship of the British Academy.
The sharp, scholarly mind that sometimes produced pointed criticisms of others’ work had also a courteous and friendly side. There was a talent for administration that was willingly, though perhaps not passionately, deployed in the service of College and Faculty, and a great capacity for relationships with fellow scholars worldwide, with frequent invitations to visit and give lectures. These qualities persisted even in latter years, when severe health problems and serious surgery might have been expected to quell them.
He emerged from hospital more than once with a quiet display of exemplary courage and spirit. He was working until the very last in the hope of completing his Oxford Classical Text of Menander, with a companion volume of notes on the remains of the 21 plays that he proposed to include. He leaves behind his devoted wife Mishtu, artist, printmaker and pillar of the household; there are a son, a daughter, and grandchildren. They, together with a host of colleagues, pupils and friends, will miss him deeply and treasure their memories.
Colin François Lloyd Austin, classical scholar: born Melbourne 26 July 1941; Fellow, Trinity Hall, Cambridge 1965–2008, now Emeritus (Director of Studies in Classics 1965-2005); Professor of Greek, University of Cambridge 1998–2008; married 1967 Mishtu Mazumbar (one son, one daughter); died Cambridge 13 August 2010.
