Frederick M. Ahl, professor of classics emeritus in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), died on Jan. 27 in Rochester, New York. He was 83.
A scholar of Greek and Roman epic and drama and the intellectual history of Greece and Rome, Ahl was considered among the greats in Latin literature, known for his scholarship, translations, and connections with theater – both ancient and contemporary. He was a member of the Cornell faculty for more than 52 years.
“Fred Ahl was a superb classical philologist, trained in the best tradition and a leader in his multiple fields of scholarship. He also had a passion for the theater and passed it on to his students, who valued his learning and his wit alike,” said President Emeritus Hunter R. Rawlings III, professor emeritus of classics (A&S). “He devoted many decades to teaching at Cornell and will be remembered with great fondness and affection by his colleagues and his numerous students.”
Ahl’s innovative writings on Latin poetry, once controversial, are now mainstream, said Jeffrey Rusten, professor of classics, emeritus (A&S).
The author of eight books, Ahl published translations and commentary on the work of Lucan, Seneca, Ovid, Homer and other classical poetry and epics. He also published many articles on a wide range of topics.
“He solved the riddle of the Sphinx with his two brilliant books on Sophocles’ 'Oedipus,' where he demonstrated that the play is about the value of eyewitness testimony in capital cases, rather than the inevitability of fate,” said Michael Fontaine, professor of classics (A&S), referring to Ahl’s “Sophocles’ Oedipus: Evidence and Self Conviction” (1991) and “Two Faces of Oedipus,” his 2008 translation of the Oedipus of Sophocles and of Seneca, two plays written hundreds of years apart.
“Fred Ahl was not only a path-breaking scholar and beloved teacher of Greek and Latin literature but a true Renaissance man,” said Jonathan Culler, the Class of 1916 Professor Emeritus (A&S) of literatures in English and comparative literature. “He was a great comic actor in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas staged by the Cornell Savoyards, an irreverent critic displaying the punning and word play endemic in Latin writing that today we tend to read as very serious, and a virtuoso translator.”
Ahl challenged himself, Culler said, to translate Vergil’s Aeneid into hexameter verse – the standard meter for Greek and Latin epics – a feat difficult to bring off in English. Ahl’s 2007 translation and commentary is used as the standard text in many classrooms.
Ahl was fluent in several contemporary languages, including modern Greek and Portuguese, and he spoke and read many more. He taught Greek and Latin as active, spoken languages.
An innovative, versatile, and demanding teacher, Ahl was “unmatched” as a lecturer, Rusten said.
John Sander ’76, J.D. ’80, said Ahl was accessible to everyone, including undergraduates.
“There always seemed to be more than 24 hours in Fred’s day,” Sander said. “He taught everything from beginning Greek to the most advanced graduate seminars, he was a celebrated academic who wrote prodigiously, he chaired the department, he knew several languages, he organized play readings in the Temple of Zeus, he set up softball games, he sang Gilbert and Sullivan, and he had students over his house constantly, where he often cooked the meal.”
In the past decade, Ahl built strong connections to classics scholars in Brazil.
Frederick M. Ahl was born Sept. 5, 1941 in Cumbria, U.K. Educated in schools in England and Wales, he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in classics at the University of Cambridge in 1962 and 1966, respectively, and his Ph.D. in classics at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966.
Ahl taught at the Texas Military Institute in San Antonio, at Trinity University and at the University of Texas at Austin before arriving at Cornell in 1971 as an assistant professor of classics.
Ahl’s awards and fellowships include the Clark Award for Distinguished Teaching at Cornell and a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship. He was named a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell, 1996-2001, and was twice a Society for the Humanities Fellow at Cornell.
He served two terms as classics department chair, among other department posts, and directed Cornell Abroad program in Greece. With support from the NEH, Ahl led summer seminars in Greece. A conference at Cornell, “Speaking to Power in Latin and Greek Literature,” honored Ahl in September 2013. In the classics department, the annual Fred Ahl Prize honors undergraduate achievement.
The golden record aboard the Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977, includes messages recorded by Ahl in ancient Greek, Latin and Welsh.
Ahl is survived by his wife, Nicola Minott-Ahl; by his four children, Katherine Ahl, Eamonn Ahl, John Ahl and Martin Ahl; by three grandchildren; and by his sister, Marie Corbin.
