Professor Charles Segal

Charles Paul Segal, classicist: born Boston, Massachusetts 19 March 1936; Associate Professor to the Professor of Classics, Brown University 1968-78, Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature 1978-86; Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, Princeton University 1987-90; Professor of Greek and Latin, Harvard University 1990-96, Walter C. Klein Professor of the Classics 1996-2002; President, American Philological Association 1994; married first Esther Rogers (two sons; marriage dissolved), second Nancy Jones (one daughter); died Cambridge, Massachusetts 1 January 2002.

Charles Segal, Walter C. Klein Professor of the Classics at Harvard, was the most distinguished literary scholar of his generation of American classicists. His speciality – or better, his wide range of specialities – was the interpretation of Greek and Latin poetry and plays.

Segal's output was prodigious: 21 books, plus innumerable articles and reviews, on Homer, Pindar and other Greek lyric poets, Sophocles and Euripides, Theocritus, Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid and Seneca, and much, much more. If he wrote so extensively – I sometimes complained, after receiving a fresh sheaf of offprints, that he wrote faster than I could read – it was because, as scholar and teacher, he continued constantly and passionately to rethink, revise, and elaborate earlier ideas in the light of new discoveries and new theoretical approaches, circling back again and again to Sophocles' Oedipus plays or Euripides' Hippolytus and Bacchae, and moving on from P, Q, and R to V, W and X when most people were still stuck somewhere around E, F and G. His scholarship, for himself and his readers, was always an adventure.

His main interests were epic and drama, through he began with a 900-page dissertation on Democritus and the Sophists that should, in an ideally just university, have made him a full professor on the spot. His best-known books are Tragedy and Civilization: an interpretation of Sophocles (1981), and Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides' Bacchae (1982); but many scholars have other personal favorites, such as Orpheus: the myth of the poet (1989) or Lucretius on Death and Anxiety (1990). Some books have been translated into French, Italian, and modern Greek.

Segal's literary interpretations are eclectic, accretive, and balanced. He began with New Critical emphasis on patterns of language, imagery and dramatic structure; but, like his gifted Harvard teachers John Finley and Cedric Whitman, he "joined literary criticism to a full grasp of philological and historical issues" (Segal on Whitman, 1982). The inner spirit of his work, like theirs, owed much to the classical humanism of the great scholars of pre-Hitlerian Germany, most notably Werner Jaeger, who came to Harvard in 1937.

In the Seventies he was much influenced by the French structuralists Marcel Detienne, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and, especially, Jean-Pierre Vernant; but he balanced their insights against those of Freud and Lacan ("Pentheus on the Couch and on the Grid"). His readings were always provisional, always open to new possibilities, new confluences of analysis. One reviewer called his Dionysiac Poetics "a discourse of extraordinary hospitality".

In the last two decades Segal drew judiciously on poststructuralism and narratology, genre studies and Bakhtin, gender studies and feminist scholarship. He heard the Sirens (Derrida, Lacan, Foucault) without ever surrendering his judgement, as others did, to any one interpretive discourse or ideology, and without losing himself and his readers in the endlessly self-mirroring, jargon-filled labyrinths of intertextuality, self-referentiality and écriture.

His critical sophistication was balanced by a good teacher's insistence on making himself clear to readers, as to students. It was balanced, too, by a strong and very compassionate sensitivity to human suffering and pain. He wrote so powerfully: about the "Poetics of Sorrow"; about pain, desire, and grief; about "human vulnerability, mortality, and vicissitude"; about the frailties and deformations of the human body, mind, and soul, and the compensating (or not compensating?) triumphs of art – all brought together most powerfully in the study of Ovid's Metamorphoses that he was working on when he died.

Segal taught, well and influentially, at the University of Pennsylvania, Brown, Princeton and Harvard. He received numerous fellowships and awards for study and many Visiting Professorships at home and abroad, especially in his beloved Paris and Rome. Among his signal honours he was a Senior Fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and President of the American Philological Association.

In The Heroic Paradox (1982), a posthumous collection of some essays by Cedric Whitman, Segal wrote, "What cannot appear from the printed page is the man's generosity, modesty, and unpretentiousness." We must say the same of him.

By Kenneth Reckford