Frederick M. Ahl

Frederick M. Ahl, 83, passed away after a short illness at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, NY, on Monday, January 27th, 2025. He recently retired from Cornell University where he was a Professor of Classics since 1971.

Frederick M. Ahl came to the United States from his native Cumbria after obtaining bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Classics at the University of Cambridge (1962, 1966). He completed his doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966 with a dissertation on the Roman epic poet Statius. He taught at the Texas Military Institute, Trinity University, the University of Utah, and the University of Texas before joining the Classics faculty at Cornell University in 1971. Despite offers from other institutions he stayed there for the remainder of his career. For several years in the 1970s and 1980s he directed the Emphasis on Writing program, which drew students and faculty from outside Cornell and turned the latter into a kind of deipnosophist band of brothers and sisters, not least because of Fred’s boundless generosity and hospitality. (He was always an excellent cook.) Additionally, he was an accomplished stage director, actor, and singer, well known for his productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operas with the Cornell Savoyards and of classical tragedies that used his own translations as their basis.

“Prof Ahl,” as he was affectionally called by many students, became one of the most charismatic teachers at Cornell among both undergraduate and graduate students. Graduate students from American and foreign universities came to Cornell specifically to study with him. Several of them went on to academic careers in the U.S. and abroad. Many of them became life-long friends, a sign of Fred’s professional and personal interest in, and concern for, those around him. Fred received a Distinguished Teaching award in 1977 and an NEH fellowship for 1989-1990. At Cornell he was a Presidential Fellow in 1996. For several years he taught at College Year in Athens; he also directed the Cornell Abroad program in Greece.

A man of indefatigable energy, Fred produced a prodigious amount of scholarship on both Greek and Roman authors. His first book, Lucan: An Introduction (1976), was the first scholarly monograph in English on this Roman epic poet and became the basis for all later research on this author. Metaformations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other Classical Poets (1985) definitively demonstrated that puns and related linguistic and stylistic features were an integral component of ancient literature and ought not to be dismissed, as was then commonly the case, as forms of low humor. Controversial at first among traditional classicists, this book nevertheless opened the way for much related later scholarship in Classics and beyond, e.g. among scholars of Chaucer. Fred’s work on post-Virgilian epic continued with three monograph-length studies: “The Rider and the Horse: Poetry and Politics in Roman Poetry from Horace to Statius” (1972), “Statius’ Thebaid: A Reconsideration” (1986), and “Silius Italicus” (also 1986). These were published in the prestigious multi-volume series Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt. The third was co-authored with two of his graduate students. All this, along with the work on another epic poet, Valerius Flaccus, done under his supervision by one of his students, proved Fred a master both of the more familiar epic poets Virgil, Ovid, and Lucan and of their successors. His studies covered a large—and great—area of Roman literature: a body of work that resuscitated three authors from long academic neglect and inspired new appreciations by other scholars. Moreover, “The Rider and the Horse” exemplified Fred’s deep interest in the ways in which authors resort to various rhetorical strategies in dealing with the political system, often restrictive or oppressive, in which they write. Hence one of Fred’s most formidable and influential articles: “The Art of Safe Criticism in Greece and Rome.” The irony that it appeared in the Orwellian year 1984 was not lost on its author. Many more articles and contributions to books edited by others rounded off those mentioned; a number of them took classical perspectives into unforeseen new areas. A case in point, by no means the only one, was “Amber, Avallon, and Apollo’s Singing Swan” (1982).

Almost unavoidably, Fred turned his attention to one of the most famous and influential, if also enigmatic, works in all of literature: Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus the King. In his 1991 book Sophocles' Oedipus: Evidence and Self Conviction he examined the Oedipus case, as it might be called, and presented a close analysis of the play’s verbal and rhetorical ambiguities as they relate to Sophocles’ character portrayals. Predictably, traditionalists ignored it. A companion volume, Two Faces of Oedipus: Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus and Seneca's Oedipus (2008), juxtaposed translations and commentaries on the only surviving dramas about Oedipus. In between there came The Odyssey Re-Formed (1996), written with Hanna M. Roisman, a close reading of plot, character, and rhetoric of Homer’s Odyssey. As is the case with much pioneering work, what was once controversial becomes mainstream. So it was entirely appropriate that a Festschrift in Fred’s honor, with contributions by colleagues and former students, should turn to his favorite subject: Wordplay and Powerplay in Latin Poetry (2016).

Fred was an avid reader of literature and scholarship far beyond Classics and had taught himself several languages, including modern Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, and Danish (and some Turkish). It followed naturally that the art of translation should have occupied him since before his work on Oedipus. His Seneca: Three Tragedies (1986) collected Medea, Phaedra, and The Trojan Women and proved that the tragedies of Seneca, traditionally considered as written for recitation only (because supposed to have been impossible to be staged in antiquity), were nothing of the sort. The apex came with Virgil: Aeneid (2007), reissued the next year as a volume in the Oxford World’s Classics series. A labor of love occupying Fred for well over a decade, this is a unique version of ancient Rome’s most famous epic because it preserves Virgil’s hexameter poetry and its rhythms—astonishingly, even down to each line’s caesuras. The hexameter, the canonical meter of Greek and Latin epic, had long been deemed alien to English; hence the heroic couplet in most versions of classical epics at least since Dryden. Fred showed that such a judgment was unjustified.

Fred was often invited as lecturer and keynote speaker at national and international venues. A country he came to cherish during his last years was Brazil, where his impact went far beyond that of a respected scholar. His initial lecture in Brazil took place in 2013 at a seminar on heroes from Greece to the New World. It appeared as “Etimologias do heroísmo: a busca e a destruição da identidade de Odisseu a Lampião,” the opening chapter of the essay collection Kléos—entre deuses, homens e heróis (2022). His fourth (and last) visit to Brazil was at the invitation of the Sociedade Brasileira de Retórica in 2018; Fred was promptly elected an honorary member. (The society is dedicating this year’s meeting to him.) Each time he visited, he spoke at several universities and later gave online lectures. Brazilian scholars and translators valued the spirited conversations they had; some became personal friends. One sign of this was Primavera com Virgílio: Reading(s) of the Aeneid with Frederick Ahl in 2021, a series of twelve online readings and discussions, one for each Book of the Aeneid. It was organized by scholars at two Brazilian universities and had twenty-seven other participants from Brazil, the U.K., and the U.S. The sessions were recorded, and the organizers hope that Oxford University Press will grant permission to make them available to the public.

Fred, however, had an even farther reach. Voyager 1, launched by NASA in 1977, had a Golden Record on board, intended for potential alien intelligences. It included a message from Fred in classical Greek, Latin, and Welsh. In Virgil’s phrase: Sic itur ad astra. Those who came to know Fred quickly came to like him. Those who came to like him quickly came to love him. Those who love him know what they have lost.

Frederick is survived by his wife, Nicola Minott-Ahl; daughter, Katherine Ahl; sons, Eamonn, John, and Martin Ahl; his daughter-in-law Delphine; three grandchildren; his sister, Marie Corbin, and his brother-in-law, John.

A private commemoration of his life will be held at the convenience of his family. Donations in Frederick’s memory may be sent to Doctor’s Without Borders and/or Seneca County House of Concern Food Bank.

The family would appreciate shared memories, photographs, or commemorations below.