Keith Robert DeVries (1937-2006)

Keith Robert DeVries died of cancer in Philadelphia, on July 16, 2006, at the age of sixty-nine.¹ At the time of his death, he was Associate Curator Emeritus of the Mediterranean Section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and Associate Professor Emeritus of Classical Studies at Penn. He spent almost his entire academic career at Penn, where he was a much loved colleague and teacher.

Keith DeVries was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and after graduating from the University of Michigan in 1958 with a degree in English, he worked in publishing in New York and Rome for several years. In 1965, he began graduate study in classical archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania where he received his Ph.D. in 1970. There he worked with Rodney Young, the discoverer of King Midas' Phrygian capital at Gordion in central Turkey. In 1967–1968, he was a regular member (John Williams White Fellow) at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and excavated at Corinth. The following year he held the Edward Capps fellowship as an associate member. Keith loved Greece, and even after much of his scholarly work was centered in Turkey, he went to Greece almost every summer—to Athens, to Corinth, and, in later years, Mount Athos. In 1969, he began teaching at Penn, and he offered courses in Anatolian archaeology and in Greek archaeology from the Bronze Age through the classical period. His teaching reflected his scholarly temperament, and his classes were erudite and meticulously prepared, but also marked by flashes of his distinctive humor. He was a devoted and generous teacher and mentor.

DeVries' dissertation was on Boeotian incised fibulae, and he published several articles on these decorated bronze pins. His careful study of Corinthian Geometric pottery led him ultimately to propose a chronological adjustment for the initial Greek colonization in the central Mediterranean; this important paper appeared in the Corinth Centennial volume.² He also published several articles on the assemblage of Greek pottery from Phrygian Gordion. Most recently, his "Greek Pottery and Gordion Chronology," appeared in The Archaeology of Midas and the Phrygians: Recent Work at Gordion.³ He was interested in the interactions between the Greeks and the peoples of Asia Minor, and this was reflected in his article, "The Nearly Other," which examined the depictions of Phrygians and Lydians in Attic vase-painting.⁴

Beginning in the 1980s, he worked for a number of years on a manuscript, "Homosexuality and the Athenian Democracy," which included a comprehensive catalogue of scenes of homosexual love in Greek vase-painting as well as a very complete list of kalos inscriptions. His close study of the images showed, for example, that the largest number of such scenes appears in the years immediately following the establishment of the Athenian democracy, and therefore contemporary vase-painting provided no evidence of the newly established democracy's hostility to pederasty. Although the book was never completed, Keith, with notable but typical generosity, shared his manuscript with other scholars, and it played an important role in framing the discussion about these issues. His catalogue, which serves as reminder of Keith's insistence that the full range of the visual evidence had to be considered, will appear, with additions, in Andrew Lear and Eva Cantarella's forthcoming Images of Pederasty. It will be indispensable to the study of Greek homosexuality and indeed archaic and classical Greek culture in general.

Several other publications reflect his research on homosexuality and its representation in Greek art. An important article considered anew the representations of the eromenoi in Greek vase-painting, while in another he identified six of the so-called eponymous heroes on the Parthenon frieze as male couples.⁵

It was Gordion that became his life's work. He first went to Gordion in 1971, and was thereafter a staff member of the excavation for more than thirty years. He served as director, following the untimely death of Rodney Young, in 1974–1975, and then between 1977 and 1987. He wrote a series of significant articles which clarified the historical sequence of the site, in addition...