Classical World

On October 8, 2008, the Classical community of Philadelphia lost one of its most loyal and beloved members, Professor John Mortimer Hunt, Jr. At sixty-five John was still serving as a full professor of Latin and Greek at Villanova University. He had attended Conestoga High School in the suburbs of Philadelphia, where he first was exposed to Latin. Inspired by his teachers there, John went on to study Classics at Lafayette College in Easton. After completing a Masters degree in Greek and Latin at Cornell University, he earned a doctorate in Latin from the Graduate School of Bryn Mawr College, where I first met him in 1968.

John began to teach on a part-time basis at Villanova, and then became a full-time faculty member in the fall of 1970. For two of his thirty-eight years at Villanova, John was a visiting professor of Classics at the University of California in Santa Barbara. From 1993 to 1999 he chaired the Classics department and then from 1999 to the present served as the Director of Villanova's graduate program in Classical studies.

All who knew John would inevitably acquire an enhanced appreciation of his scholarly specialty, textual criticism, at which he had no equal. Over sixty of his articles have appeared in journals such as Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Latomus, Liverpool Classics, Classical Journal, and Classical Review. John's command of English, displayed in his terse and meticulously crafted diction, was only outdone by his unparalleled command of Latin. His graduate classes in Latin Prose Composition, Horace, and Catullus were signature courses from which each student could recall specific moments of Hunt's brilliance. His international reputation as a true textual critic continued to grow. For twenty-five years he served diligently on the editorial board of Classical Philology. [End Page 496]

The constant focus of his textual criticism was the Historia Apollonii Regis Tyrii. This fifth or sixth century AD novella derived, as Hunt and others had suggested, from a third century AD Greek original, but its authorship remains anonymous. Hunt used the problematic Latin text to introduce his graduate students to the process, challenges, and value of textual criticism. While eloquently unfolding the adventures of the king and queen and their noted daughter as described in the novella, Hunt would glide with unparalleled ease through the cruxes created by the three surviving recensions of the text. While pointing out numerous ways in which this text influenced the medieval period on into the Renaissance, Hunt would present his ideas on how Shakespeare's Pericles was informed by this story. Most of Hunt's articles dealt with his suggestions on the manifold textual differences among the three recensions. Hunt also wrote in response to suggestions made in the texts published by Kortekaas in 1984 and in Schmeling's Teubner edition of 1988.

Gentle, humble, eloquent, soft-spoken, sincere, thoughtful, kind, and always there for others, John was an ardent supporter of Latin and Greek studies at all levels. The Philadelphia Classical Society, the Independent School Teachers Association, the American Philological Association (when locally convened), and the Philadelphia Meetings of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States, would often find him in attendance, supporting the presentations, panels, or papers presented by his former students, colleagues, and friends. Every Villanova Classical Languages graduate student, nervous at the onset of comprehensive examinations, can remember the comforting words and calming presence of Professor John Hunt.

For those of us who were honored to work side by side with John, his loss is most difficult not only to bear but to comprehend. He will be sorely missed. Plans are being made to honor his memory, but it was his wish to have memorial donations made to the Classical Studies Program c/o Dr. Kevin Hughes, Villanova University, 800 Lancaster Avenue, Villanova, PA 19085.