In Memoriam

Walter Donlan, past president of CAAS and former editor of CW, died of cancer on June 7, 2006, at his home in Irvine, California, with his wife Gail Davis at his side. He was seventy-one years old. It was my privilege to enjoy a long talk with him on the phone a week before his death. Throughout this conversation he remained as witty as ever, as he complained about the logistical inconveniences attendant on preparing to die. (Dying, he said, was easy; it was the getting ready that was a monumental nuisance.) He spoke of gathering his family and friends around him for "a hell of a party" before he was taken from us, but it was not to be.

Walter graduated from Harvard College in 1956 and immediately began teaching Latin at The Berkshire School in Sheffield, Massachusetts, and subsequently at the Sterling School in Craftsbury Common, Vermont, of which he was one of the founders. He then commenced his graduate work. Though he earned both his M.A. and his Ph.D. from Northwestern University, his years in Illinois did nothing to mute his engaging Boston accent. After earning his doctorate he took up a position at Penn State, where he taught for twenty years. It was during Walter's time at Penn State that he became intimately involved with CAAS and CW, serving as Book Review Editor of the journal from 1970 to 1974, as Associate Editor from 1971 to 1974, and Editor from 1974 to 1978. In 1979–80 he served as President of CAAS.

Although Walter moved to the University of California at Irvine in 1986, he remained very attached to CAAS, where he was honored by a panel in 2001 on the occasion of his impending retirement from teaching. In California, Walter was the driving force behind the establishment of the Tri-campus Graduate Program in Classics, a cooperative venture which offered graduate degrees to students at San Diego and Riverside as well as Irvine. As a scholar, Walter achieved international renown for his work on early Greece. In addition to his book The Aristocratic Ideal in Ancient Greece: Attitudes of Superiority from Homer to the End of the Fifth Century B.C. (Coronado Press, 1980), Walter published countless articles and reviews and delivered dozens of talks on the ancient world. He was also co-author of Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History (Oxford University Press, 1998); he, Sarah Pomeroy, Stanley Burstein, and I were just putting the finishing touches on the second edition at the time of his death.

At Walter's funeral in Boston relatives spoke of his generosity and his honesty, an honesty with others that was fueled by a ruthless honesty with himself. Magnanimous in spirit, keen in intellect, and, of course, salty in diction, Walter was most of all a mensch, and we will not see his like again.¹