Yale Bulletin and Calendar

January 18, 2002Volume 30, Number 15Two-Week Issue


George P. Goold

George Goold: Chief editor of
Loeb Classical Library series

Internationally renowned classicist George P. Goold, 79, who was the William Lampson Professor Emeritus in Latin Classics, died Dec. 5.

During a career that spanned over half a century, Professor Goold served as the chair of the classics departments at three major universities -- Harvard (1971-1972), University College, London (1973-1978) and Yale (1984-1987). He was the chief editor of the Loeb Classical Library series for 25 years.

Professor Goold focused his research on the editing of Latin texts and Homeric studies. Later in his career, he was deeply involved in a project to create a computer program known as IBYCUS, which is designed for researchers in the classics and religious studies.

Born in London in 1922, Mr. Goold joined the Royal Air Force when World War II broke out. He was assigned to the Air Intelligence branch and worked with groups at Bletchley Park that broke German codes. After the war, he received both his bachelor's degree and his doctorate from University College, London, and then began his teaching career at University College, Hull.

His first appointment in the United States, to Harvard in 1965, followed tenures at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, and the Universities of Manitoba and Toronto in Canada.

Professor Goold returned to England in 1973 to teach at his alma mater, where he was elected Chair of Latin, a post that had earlier been held by A.E. Housman, whom Goold greatly admired. He joined the Yale faculty in 1977, where he taught until retiring in 1992. He delivered the Gray Lectures in the University of Cambridge in 1987 and held distinguished visiting professorships at Stanford University and the University of Victoria in Canada.

Professor Goold's scholarly publications spanned the second half of the 20th century and embraced the major Latin poets. His 100-page discussion of the text of Ovid's erotic verse (1965) is perhaps his best known paper. He edited a book on "Catullus" (with notes and translation) and produced Loeb editions of Propertius, the Greek novelist Chariton, and of the astronomical poet Manilius. His study of the latter made him an expert guide to the night sky. Professor Goold also published many articles, including ones on Homer, Ovid, Propertius and Servius.

Professor Goold is credited with transforming the Loeb Classical Library from a reference of last resort to a model of modern scholarship. The series, established in 1910, prints English translations opposite Greek and Latin texts. Widely known to English-speaking students of classical languages and literatures, the Loeb series was "frowned on in the days when students were expected to translate Latin and Greek themselves," according to Professor Goold's successor as editor, Jeffrey Henderson. But under Professor Goold's stewardship, the series took on an enhanced respectability among scholars as new translations of Sophocles, Euripides, Pindar, Martial and others were produced. Goold also revised some of the volumes himself, including one on Virgil. In the years before his death he was working on a volume on Greek novelist Heliodorus.

Zeph Stewart, a trustee of the Loeb Classical Library Foundation, attributed the growing stature of the series to Goold's "judicious editorial policies, vast knowledge of Greek and Latin languages and literatures, refined sense of style and meticulous attention to detail."

The Yale classicist was elected president of the American Philological Association in 1986 and was elected a corresponding fellow of the British Academy in 1994.

Professor Goold achieved his greatest renown as a philologist, according to Donald Kagan, the Hillhouse Professor of Classics and History at Yale. "He was an outstanding administrator and made a contribution to whatever community he was part of," Kagan says.

Professor Goold became an American citizen and spent his years after retiring from Yale at his home in South Hadley, Massachusetts.

He is survived by his second wife, Philippa Forder, whom he married in 1974, and by a son and a daughter from his previous marriage.

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