Roger Allen Hornsby
1926-2009
Roger Allen Hornsby was born in Nye, Wisconsin, on August 8, 1926. After receiving his B.A. from Adelbert College of Western Reserve University in 1949, he received the A.M. (1951) and Ph.D. (1952) from Princeton. After service in the Army, he began his teaching career at the University of Iowa in 1954, where he remained until his retirement in 1991. In 1960 he married a colleague in French, Jessie Lynn Gillespie. He chaired the Classics Department from 1966 to 1981. Remembered by his students as a learned and generous but strict and exacting teacher who made Latin poetry accessible and rewarding, he put much of his classroom technique into Reading Latin Poetry (1967), which is still the best book for teaching students to appreciate the varieties and nuances of Latin verse free from any critical ideology. His second book, Patterns of Action in the Aeneid: An Interpretation of Vergil’s Epic Similes (1970), is a sensitive study of uses to which Virgil puts his epic comparisons. The book is only marred by the absence of any mention of Homer. After retiring he served a term as Whichard Distinguished Professor of Classics at East Carolina University 1997-8. He was President of CAMWS in 1968-69 and a director of the APA 1974-7. He was a trustee of the American Academy in Rome, a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, and a trustee of the Virgilian Society. He died in Iowa City on October 19, 2009.
— Ward Briggs