Classical World

In accepting the Gold Medal for Distinguished Achievement of the Archaeological Institute of America in 2005, Jimmy Casson, as his friends called him, tells the story of the encounter that confirmed his early fascination with ships and the sea. In 1953 he met Jacques Cousteau, the noted oceanographer, at the now famous site of the Grand Congloué, near Marseilles. He was involved in a TV taping showing how he used his special vessel to raise ancient amphoras from sunken ships on the bottom of the sea. "It was an eye-opening experience. I knew at once that I was in on the beginning of a totally new source of information about ancient maritime matters and I determined then and there to exploit it." An excellent classical scholar, he was in a position to do so, using evidence from literature, papyri, coins, and iconography, along with his own familiarity with the sea, to build up a picture of ancient ships and seamanship and to become the undisputed master of the field. The Ancient Mariners (1959), and later Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World (1971, often reprinted) made the maritime story of the ancient world available to both the scholar and to the non-specialist.

His interests and many publications extended far beyond seamanship. Like Cousteau, he had a gift for communication, wrote clearly and elegantly, and was much in demand by publishers for both scholarly and popular books and articles, as well as for advice on matters of scholarship. His first major book was on the papyri of Nessana, Egypt (1950). The New York Times review of his last book, on ancient libraries, entitled "Shh! There's no Talking in the Papyrus Section," (July 11, 2001), is studded with typically witty asides, such as his reference to "the prolific author Didymus (known as Bronze Guts for his mind-boggling output of an estimated 3,500 to 4,000 books)".

During World War II (1942–1946) he served as Lieutenant in the Department of Naval Intelligence, where he was trained to interrogate Japanese prisoners of war. Except for this period, Casson's scholarly career was spent at New York University, where he taught from 1936 through 1979. He was twice chair of the Classics Department, but his leadership was crucial for a much longer time, and the practical sense and decisiveness I admired in later years as his colleague helped the Department to survive the difficult years of the Depression, when it developed innovative courses and became involved in projects for the WPA. He developed and long taught a course on Ancient Comedy when scholarly circles ignored the subject as being too frivolous, translated Plautus and Lucian's Satires, and wrote Masters of Ancient Comedy as a textbook for the course. His Travel in the Ancient World opened up another field of research. The Periplus Mari Erythrae (1989) was written when Jimmy was leading the monthly meetings of the informal Ancient Civilization Group, where he managed—in [End Page 495] almost every case—to cut the speaker off after 10 minutes. Regular members were Bluma Trell, Blanche Brown, Annalina Levi, Morton Smith, Alan Schulman, who regaled us with tales of Egypt, Tessie Goell, who reported on Nemrud Dagh, Arthur Schiller who discussed points of Roman Law, and frequent visitors Cyrus Gordon, Theodore Gaster, and many others. He will be missed in all the worlds to which he belonged, by his colleagues, friends, and family—Judy, his wife of 63 years, and their daughters, Andrea and Gail.

We honor him for what he has done here and abroad for scholarship, and for the vision of antiquity that his books have made a little clearer and more exciting. This is a democracy, and there are no titles. Otherwise, we would be remembering Sir Lionel Casson—or Sir Jimmy—today.