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  • Georg H. B. Luck
  • Matthew Roller

Georg Luck, Professor Emeritus of Classics at Johns Hopkins University, died in Baltimore on February 17, 2013, his eighty-seventh birthday. An internationally itinerant scholar in the 1950s and 1960s, long before this career pattern became common, he settled down to spend his last forty-two years in Baltimore. He was born in Bern, Switzerland, in 1926, finished Gymnasium in 1944, and served in the Swiss Army; he then continued his studies at the Sorbonne and Harvard before returning to the University of Bern for his doctorate, which he received in 1953. He launched his professional career in the United States, teaching at Yale (1952–53), Brown (1953–55), and Harvard (1955–58), before moving to Germany in 1958 to take up a permanent position in Mainz. In 1962 he moved to Bonn as Professor Ordinarius, and in 1971 made his last move, once more across the Atlantic, to Johns Hopkins, where he succeeded Henry Rowell as professor of Latin. He became emeritus in 1990 (at a youthful sixty-three), but his scholarly output and intellectual and social engagement never flagged in retirement; he remained a regular and genial presence around the department and library until late last year.

Professor Luck’s dissertation, on Antiochos of Ascalon, may not lead one to suspect that Latin poetry and related textual and cultural matters would occupy much of his life’s work. But so it was. The Latin Love Elegy (1959, 2nd ed. 1969; German edition 1961) was a pathbreaking study in its day, and continues to appear in the bibliographies of contemporary work on elegy. His Studien zur Textgeschichte Ovids (1969) underpinned his magisterial edition, translation, and commentary on the Tristia (1967–77). He also produced the Teubner edition of Tibullus and the corpus Tibullianum (1988; 2nd ed. 1998). A German edition and translation of Lucan (Der Bürgerkrieg) appeared in 1985. An edition and commentary on Ovid Metamorphoses 15 was near completion at his death; also in the planning stages was a revised English edition of a delightful early work on interjections in colloquial Latin (Über einige Interjektionen in der lateinischen Umgangssprache: kritische Beiträge zu Plautus und Terenz, 1964). His scholarly interest in ancient magic, which received attention far beyond the confines of classics, may itself have grown from his engagement with elegy, as a pamphlet [End Page 692] published in 1962 (Hexen und Zauberei in der römischen Dichtung) suggests. His annotated sourcebook of ancient texts on magic (Arcana Mundi, 1985; much enlarged 2nd ed. 2006) made this material readily available to teachers and students for the first time—and not only in the Anglosphere: editions were also published in Spanish, German, and Italian. It remains one of the best-selling scholarly titles of the Johns Hopkins University Press.

Apart from his scholarly output and teaching, he had an important, if quiet, impact on the field of classics by serving for a decade (1972–81) as editor-in-chief of AJP. He resumed that position for a two-year interim in 1987, though this time his impact was less quiet. An editorial he printed upon resuming the editorship defined the kinds of work the journal would and would not accept for publication. It was taken as a sally in the “culture wars” of that decade, stirring a lively and sometimes acrimonious debate in the field and garnering press attention nationally—marking, perhaps, the one and only time that a scholarly classics journal made front-page news in The New York Times.

Professor Luck’s interests extended widely and were by no means limited to antiquity. He lectured and left manuscripts in progress on topics as diverse as Rilke, psychotropic substances, and streets bearing the name “Römerstrasse,” among others. An accomplished classical guitarist, he played with and for any students and colleagues who had a musical bent. He graciously hosted departmental parties each May in his enormous and beautiful North Baltimore garden. As an oenophile, he did not permit you to escape from lunch without sharing a bottle, which was very pleasant but eliminated the possibility of doing real work in the afternoon.

He is survived by three children and his wife...

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