Obituaries

300 GUSTAV HERMANSEN Gus Hermansen, who died on 13 February 1984, was a remarkable personality and an extraordinary classicist. He was born in Copenhagen on 27 April 1909, and educated in classics at the Metropolitan School and at the University of Copenhaqen where he obtained his M.A. in 1933. After this he began working in the field of early Roman religion in which he published his major work, Studien uber den italischen und den r6mischen Mars, in 1939. In it he traced the various manifestations of the cult of Mars and attempted to relate them to the ethnic history of the Ital ic tribes. This is still a fundamental work on the cult of Mars in Italy. But Gus's interests extended far beyond the immediate topic of his dissertation. In 1933 he joined the team of Danish scholars working on the Diplomatarium Danicum, a corpus of documents relevant to Danish history of the 13th and 14th centu ries. An expert palaeographer, he played an important role in their transcription and translation. He was also involved in the founding of Classica et Mediaevalia, first published in 1938. From 1942 to 1947 he was Iibrarian at the State Library of Aarhus, combining this with lecturing in Classics at the University and with covert activities in the Danish Resistance, about which he had some lively tales. After the war conditions in Denmark were not conducive to classical scholarship, and Gus turned to journalism. From 1947 to 1952 he worked as a columnist and editorial writer for the "Jyllandsposten" and in 1950 he visited Canada as a reporter for that paper. Canada attracted him so he stayed on. becoming a Canadian citizen and combining journalism and broadcastinq with farming and other activities. He moved gradually westwards with his family and in 1957 bought a quarter section at Westerose in Alberta, where he raised piqs, winning a prize in 1960 for the heaviest litter in western Canada. Gus maintained his keen interest in classical and mediaeval studies; he contributed various items to encyclopaedias and to the Novum Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis. In 1965 he accepted OBITUARIES 301 an appointment in the University of Alberta as Collections Librarian, with a part time sessional lectureship in the Department of Classics, and in 1967 was appointed full time to the Department of Classic~. Gus soon proved himself a stimulus to his colleagues and a fertile source of ideas. He was promoted rapidly to a full professorship in 1971, when he published his joint edition with F. D. Blackley of Queen Isabella's Household Book. This, the first publication of a royal household book, documents the economic organization of the royal household in England in the early 14th century and demonstrates the usefulness of this kind of source material for social as well as economic historians. Gus's interest in Roman urban studies had first been awakened by Boethius in 1932, and in 1967 he organized the first of the University of Alberta's summer courses in Italy in Roman Archaeology and Civilization. He taught the course annually, drawing enthusiastic students from across Canada, and senior colleagues too would follow him through Rome and Ostia to learn from his observations. By renting the British School at Rome for accommodation during the summer, working in close association with other universities (including McMaster University) and offering hospitality to visiting Canadian academics in various disciplines, he demonstrated the need for a permanent Canadian academy in Rome. He was thus an original promoter of the Canadian Academic Centre in Italy and took a keen interest in its initial stages, although he disapproved of some of the ways in which it subsequently developed. In recent years the most important of Gus's various academic interests was a series of articles on the building of Ostia. These studies culminated his book, Ostia, Aspects of Roman City Life, published in 1981, which was well received by leading scholars in the field (Meiggs, TLS 19 Nov. 1982). Gus retired from the University of Alberta in 1974 to his farm at Westerose, where he would offer hospitality to a wide range of academic and other friends. His retirement allowed him to teach elsewhere, notably at...