Martin Ostwald (1922–2010)

The death of Martin Ostwald, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Classics Emeritus at Swarthmore College, on April 10, 2010 deprived the entire classical world of a leader endowed with multiple gifts: a brilliant intellect devoted to the lifelong study of classical literature and Greek history, keen powers of judgment that made him the wisest of advisors, and a personality of charm and integrity that endeared him to colleagues, students, and friends throughout the world. The crowd of mourners who jammed the Friends Meeting House on the Swarthmore campus to honor him at his funeral gave silent witness to the love he inspired among all who were privileged to know him.

Martin was born in Dortmund, Germany on January 15, 1922, and was well launched on the study of the classics at the local gymnasium when his life suffered a tragic upheaval with the rise of the Nazis. After Kristallnacht, November 10, 1938, he, his father, and his younger brother were arrested and sent to a concentration camp near Berlin. Both of his parents were put to death by the Nazis, but both boys were able to escape in one of the Kindertransports, first to the Netherlands, then to England, where Martin sought in vain to join the British army. After Dunkirk he, as well as many other Jewish refugees, was sent as an enemy alien to a concentration camp in Canada, where he spent two and a half years and valiantly began a new life.

Completing his high school education in a school which he himself helped to found, and in which he taught Latin and English literature, Martin was able with the help of a Jewish fraternity to enroll in the University of Toronto, from which he received a B.A. in honors classics in 1946. He then enrolled in the University of Chicago, where he was attracted by the newly established committee on social thought. After receiving an M.A. there in 1948, with a thesis on the treatment of the Orestes myth in Greek tragedy, he chose to finish his doctoral studies at Columbia University, where he worked with two distinguished German classicists, Kurt von Fritz and Ernst Kapp. He received his Ph.D. in 1952, with a dissertation on the unwritten laws and the ancestral constitution of ancient Athens—an indication of his increasing interest in Athenian history. Even before he received the doctorate, he was teaching at Columbia (and for one year at Wesleyan). After seven years at Columbia, which established his reputation as a brilliant teacher and scholar, he was persuaded to join the classics faculty at Swarthmore upon the retirement of Lucius R. Shero in 1958.

Professor Shero was one of the Rhodes scholars appointed by President Frank Aydelotte in 1922 to initiate the honors program, and he was also one of that courageous and overworked group of classicists—insufficiently appreciated today—who enabled their departments to survive through depression and war. He left the department in excellent shape. The other members were Dean of Women Susan P. Cobbs, a Ph.D. from Chicago who taught one course each semester, and Helen F. North, who had met Martin as a visiting professor at Barnard and Columbia in 1954–55 and was determined to recruit him.

The move to Swarthmore, although it temporarily deprived Martin of one of his chief joys, teaching graduate students, offered notable compensations. The most attractive was the prospect of bringing up the two Ostwald boys, David and Mark, in the Swarthmore environment. Another was the location of the college in a suburb of Philadelphia with easy access to the libraries of New York and Washington. A major attraction was the famous honors program, for which Martin was perfectly suited. He was also attracted by the prospect of teaching women as well as men, a rare occurrence at Columbia. As he later said, "I found that very inspiring because there was a different style that male and female students have that complements each other beautifully." Finally there was the unique leave program, which compensated for a heavy teaching load by providing leave every fourth year. Martin flourished amid all...