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  • Alexander G. McKay (1924–2007)
  • Herbert W. Benario

I first met Sandy McKay in the summer of 1956 in Rome. I was a Fulbright student at the summer session of the American Academy, Sandy was leading a lengthy tour for the Vergilian Society of America. The Academy group afterwards went to the Vergilian Society’s headquarters in Cumae for a fortnight, a wonderful capstone to a remarkable summer. Our paths were fated to cross again the following year, unfortunately for Sandy, fortunately for me.

Early in June 1957, when I was scheduled to teach summer school at Columbia, I received a desperate telephone call from J. Appleton Thayer, the president of the Vergilian Society. Sandy had been scheduled to be a director for the program but had been suddenly taken ill and was hospitalized. Could I go, on such short notice, to Naples? I could indeed. After a colleague agreed to teach my summer courses, I was able to gain passage later that month on the ship that carried the Fulbright grantees, among whom was a charming woman who had applied for the Academy program at my strong urging and who had been a fellow graduate student at Johns Hopkins. Sandy’s misfortune proved [End Page 542] the key for a magnificent experience for me, as I learned a great deal about Campania and also returned to the United States with a fiancee.

In 1959, Sandy was director of the Vergilian summer program, my wife Janice and I assistant directors. During those several months we appreciated Sandy’s wisdom, charm, enthusiasm, and immense learning. Our young friendship never wavered in the almost half century that followed, during which he became an internationally renowned scholar and representative of our profession, one of Canada’s leading classicists and a well-known figure on the larger intellectual scene.

Sandy was born on December 24, 1924, in Toronto, his birthday easily remembered in the customary order of day/month/year, 24.12.24. He graduated from the University of Toronto with a specialization in classics. He received an M.A. from Yale in 1947, an A.M. from Princeton in the year following, and a Ph.D. in 1950. Among his early teaching posts was the University of Pennsylvania. Here began his relationship with the Classical Association of the Atlantic State (CAAS), which remained strong even when he had returned permanently to Canada.

The editor of The Classical Weekly, as it was then, Edward A. Robinson, had had the brilliant idea of introducing a series of bibliographical surveys on various authors, which would digest the scholarship that had appeared during the chaos of the war years and afterward. McKay was one of the early contributors, with an essay on Aeschylus. His skill and interest in this kind of investigation never waned. For much of his later life, they were directed to Vergil; for decades his surveys were a feature of Vergilius, the publication of the Vergilian Society.

He joined the Department of Classics at McMaster University in 1957, where he became, and remained, a luminary of the university for a half century, even after retirement. He was honored with membership in the Royal Society of Canada, of which he was later president, and he also served three major classical associations as president: the Classical Association of Canada, the Classical Association of the Middle West and South (CAMWS), and the Vergilian Society, of which he later became honorary president for life.

Although his scholarly interest focused upon Vergil, his interests in the lands that Vergil knew and loved, and which played such important roles in Roman history, led to a variety of publications. I mention only a few: Roman Lyric Poetry: Catullus and Horace, with D. M. Shepherd (1964); Vergil’s Italy (1970); Cumae and the Phlegraean Fields and Naples and Coastal Campania (Ancient Campania 1 and 2; 1972); Houses, Villas, and Palaces in the Roman World (1975); Vitruvius, Architect and Engineer: Buildings and Building Techniques in Augustan Rome (1978); and Roma Antiqua, Latium, and Etruria: A Source Book of Classical Texts (1986). He was honored by a Festschrift, The Two Worlds of the Poet: New Perspectives on Vergil, edited by R. M. Wilhelm and...

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