By Daniel J. Taylor, '63
Hiram A. Jones Professor of Classics
Lawrence Today magazine, Summer 2003
Main Halls all across America have their myths and legends, and our revered aedifice is certainly no exception. I'm particularly sensitive to the past of our own Main Hall for two reasons: I've spent almost exactly half my life in old Main as student and professor, and my office/classroom is arguably the most storied room in that glorious structure.
Classics has been at Lawrence since the college's founding in 1847, for the study of Latin and/or Greek was the core of every collegiate curriculum in those days. In fact, it wasn't until 1904 that a Lawrentian could graduate without studying a classical language. Lawrence's first Latinist was named Romulus, and his successor's middle initial stood for Augustus. How fitting! Romulus Kellogg didn't stay long (five years), but Hiram A. Jones presided over "famous Room C in the southwest corner" of Main Hall for 44 years, despite chasing down runaway horses on College Avenue. Hiram never did retire, however. One morning he greeted his students in the room now numbered 106, opened his text of Cicero, put his head on his arm, and died. What a way to go!
Jones' legacy is more than just a portrait gracing the wall above the fireplace or a plaque on the door designating the room as the Hiram A. Jones Latin Library or an endowed professorship. His courses featured an unremitting emphasis upon grammar and the analysis of Greek and Latin sentences, and he insisted upon literal translations as the best guide to appreciating the idiom, style, and beauty of expression in the classical languages. No matter what the course, he introduced his students to the principles of comparative philology, to etymology, and to an enhanced understanding of language with a capital L. Well, guess what? Some things don't change. That's why I don't worry about Hiram's kindly ghost hovering around in mid-air, as it occasionally does, for it knows I'm still doing what Hiram did.
The next half-century or so featured more legendary characters pacing the halls of old Main and teaching the Classics. Thanks to the Rev. Henry Lummis, a picturesque but impoverished professor, President Plantz instituted a pension plan for faculty. Thank you, Henry, and thank you, Doc Sammy.
E. D. Wright was Jones' successor, the first member of the department with a Ph.D., and the first Hiram A. Jones Professor of Latin.
Albert Augustus Trever graduated from Lawrence, earned a Ph.D., and returned to his alma mater as professor of Greek and later of history. Trever Hall is named after one fine scholar. He understood the importance of numismatics, and it will come as no surprise that Ottilia Buerger ['38] was his student. Ottilia, as we all know, bequeathed to Lawrence her collection of ancient coins, one of the world's finest. My Latin students read Eutropius' summary of Roman history and put a face on history by studying the portraits on the Buerger coins.
Edna Wiegand ['11] was the first Lawrence alum to head the department (1923-1953). Edna was still alive when I followed in her footsteps, but much to my regret I never managed to meet her. She and President Nathan Pusey, also a classicist, chose her successor, Maurice P. Cunningham, my teacher and mentor and colleague and friend. This is where it all gets up close and personal.
My first impression of Lawrence, Main Hall, and MPC was intense and vivid: I felt that the Lawrence campus was one of the most beautiful places I had ever seen; that Main Hall and, especially, the Classics room, were an inspiration to learning and scholarship; and that Professor Cunningham was a unique and charismatic scholar/teacher. I still feel the same way. I've now taken or taught courses in every room in Main Hall, but my first academic experience was a humbling one; I bailed out of Philosophical Classics after the first class meeting (I couldn't even understand the syllabus!) and headed for safety — i.e., a Latin course.
I took the first Russian courses ever offered here and discovered that grammar really was my forte. Two years later in the same room I had the privilege of studying French with Anne Jones; whenever my Greek or Latin students misread a word or sentence, I recall the patience with which she listened to my wretched French pronunciation. Courses with Mojmir Povolny taught me not only history and political science but also what constitutes a good lecture and that gentleman and scholar can designate the same person. I personally never observed Bruce Cronmiller climbing the outside fire escape from his office on the first floor to a classroom on the second, but I did catch John Alfieri's many witty asides in Freshman Studies. Linguistics with Herb Tjossem in a dreary basement classroom was a dynamic, life-changing intellectual experience. When I returned as an assistant professor, these wonderful teachers became my friends and trusted colleagues.
My junior year we read Vergil's Aeneid from start to finish, every word, and that's an achievement few undergraduates ever attain. But that was Maurice Cunningham. He had more confidence in us than we did in ourselves; he challenged us accordingly, and so we overachieved. He wasn't much for syllabi, bibliographies, or introductory materials of any sort. What we needed to know, he said, was in the text, and of course it was. His teaching method, if you can call it that, consisted of answering questions. Our job was to read the text, to understand as much of it as we could, and to ask questions about anything and everything we didn't understand. He scattered his wit and wisdom around the classroom like the Cumaean Sibyl scattering leaves around her cavern, and it was up to us to expend the intellectual energy to keep up with him.
"Read the text aloud!", he admonished, and read aloud we did. Even his worst students could read Greek and Latin well, often better than many professional classicists. His own facility in reading the classical languages aloud was eloquent and definitive testimony to the existence of the Muses.
The classical world knew Maurice P. Cunningham best as a scholar. At the time of his death in 1978, he was one of the two leading scholars in the world on the Christian Latin poet Prudentius and an internationally recognized authority on Horace, Ovid, and Latin grammar. If any theme may be said to have dominated in Cunningham's scholarship and teaching, it is that the classical languages must be appreciated first and foremost as languages and classical literary works as artistic expressions of what is uniquely human, namely, language. Language is precious and as such is to be treasured, enjoyed, and loved.
We students remember Cunningham's humor, his kindness, his paradoxes, his verbal dexterity, and his physical appearance, including massive coughing spells that were literally death-defying until the final one. He was tall and lean, usually bearded, stoop-shouldered, and he walked with his head down, thinking. He always looked old, even aged, but the beauty of this is that he never seemed to get any older. He was a master teacher who literally personified the Classics for us and in whose presence learning was pure, unadulterated pleasure, even if every Greek class I ever took from him met at 8:00 a.m. Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.
Cunningham didn't just use words; he wielded them. He once described a translation of Horace's Odes as "non-prose." Think about that for a moment, and savor it forever. He considered the "funereal, dark mahogany tables and bookcases" in the Latin Library "especially suitable for a room wherein dead languages are taught." One of his annual reports was short and to the point: "We minded the store."
Maurice and I were colleagues for far too short a time. I especially loved late Friday afternoons. I would wander down from my cubbyhole office on the fourth floor to his elegant digs on the first floor, and we would argue Latin grammar. The debates occasionally got a bit heated, because some things — like Latin grammar — are worth taking seriously. I miss him even today. I'll never forget the last time he came into the office. We got to talking, and tempus of course fugit. The phone rang; it was Regina, his wife and as fit a companion for him as Penelope was for Odysseus. He laughed uproariously, turned to me, and said, "She figured I had either croaked or run into you."
By now you know that Jones and Cunningham had pretty much the same ideas on the classical languages, and it follows that I do too. Hiram or Maurice could walk into one of my classes and join in immediately without having to figure out what was going on. President Wriston noted that, in the liberal arts, practices change, principles abide, but in the case of Classics even the practices, for the most part, abide.
Main Hall hasn't changed much either, in my opinion. Oh, it's definitely a lot nicer looking on the inside these days, even with all those computers staring you in the face, but it's still a beautiful, classic structure. I miss that stunning central staircase, but after carrying nearly a thousand books up three flights of stairs, I can appreciate the elevator that replaced it. Most important, however, is that bright, critical-thinking, intellectually curious students still enter the hallowed hall to learn.
Much to my delight, a number of those students have found their way into my courses during my 29-year tenure here (minus three and a half years of teaching and researching in Italy). We read the text aloud, translate literally, and always find something meaningful in what we're studying. We take our work and ourselves seriously, but something humorous invariably makes its way into every class. I love alumni reunions, partly because former students always recall something outrageous that I have said; I of course deny having said it. I admit to making outrageous analogies and comparisons, however. But so did Hiram Jones and Maurice Cunningham.
As for the room, the Hiram A. Jones Latin Library, well, it still looks pretty much the same, with its fireplace, long tables, bookshelves crammed with books and papers, busts of Apollo Belvedere, Laocoön, Cicero, Caesar, and Brutus, oriental rugs, easy chairs, and the archaeological cabinet displaying selected objects and Roman coins. The dramatic color scheme derived from the palace of Knossos, the Labyrinth of Greek mythology, is new, but the classical frieze is not.
In fine, the room on the southwest corner of Main Hall is still the visible heart and soul of Classics at Lawrence, a classroom for those hardy souls who essay the study of Greek and Latin, and the office for another unconventional Lawrence classicist who is proud to be heir to such an illustrious tradition in such a magnificent Main Hall.
