Lawrence Richardson Jr.

Lawrence Richardson Jr. (born December 2, 1920 in Altoona , Pennsylvania ; died July 21, 2013 in Durham , North Carolina ) was an American classical philologist and classical archaeologist .

Lawrence Richardson Jr. studied Classics at Yale University and obtained his BA in 1942. The prize publication "Poetical Theory in Republican Rome" , written and supervised by Clarence Whittlesey Mendell (1883–1970), was dedicated to the works from Catullus to Virgil and in particular to the development of the roman epyllion . He came to the American Academy in Rome in 1947 as a Rome Prize scholarship holder and belonged to the first generation of young scientists who received such awards after the Second World War . Further funding through the Fulbright Program , the Guggenheim Scholarship and a scholarship from the American Council of Learned Societies enabled him to extend his stay in Rome with interruptions until 1954. In 1950 he became a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, 1952 was carried Promotion to Ph.D. at Yale University. The topic of his dissertation was "Pompeii: The Casa dei Dioscuri and Its Painters."

From 1952 to 1955 he was the chief field archaeologist of the excavations carried out by the American Academy in Cosa , Italy , an area of ​​research with which Richardson was long connected. In 1955 he returned to the United States with his wife, the archaeologist Emeline Hill Richardson , with whom he had been married since 1952 and who, like him, had participated in the excavations at Cosa. In 1961 he became James B. Duke Professor of Classical Studies at Duke University in Durham and held this chair named after James Buchanan Duke - industrialist and founder of the tobacco company American Tobacco , who, like his family, sponsored the Duke University, which was renamed after them until his retirement in 1991. Over the years he was an active member of the American Academy in Rome, serving in various positions, including on the executive committee. In 1979 he was also resident of the academy. In 1981/82 he was Mellon Professor-in-Charge at the School of Classical Studies , one of the institutions that merged to form the Academy .

The focus of his research, with the results of which he repeatedly triggered important discussions and apparently questioned well-known things, were, in addition to his philological investigations, for example on Properz, the Pompeian wall painting , the topography of Pompeii and above all Rome.

In 2012, Richardson received the gold medal of the Archaeological Institute of America for his achievements in the field of field research, teaching and publication activities - here his influential New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome should be mentioned in particular . After his wife's death in 1999, he donated a Rome Prize scholarship for doctoral students on her behalf .

Publications (selection)

• Poetical Theory in Republican Rome. An Analytical Discussion of the Shorter Narrative Hexameter Poems Written in Latin During the First Century Before Christ (= Undergraduate Prize Essays. Yale University. Volume 5). Yale University Press, New Haven 1944 ( digitized ).
• Pompeii: The Casa dei Dioscuri and its Painters (= Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome. Volume 23). American Academy in Rome, Rome 1955.
• with Frank E. Brown, Emeline Hill Richardson: Cosa II. The Temples of the Arx (= Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome. Volume 26). American Academy in Rome, Rome 1960.
• Properties: Elegies I-IV. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman OK 1977.
• Pompeii. An Architectural History. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1988.
• A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1992.
• with Frank E. Brown, Emeline Hill Richardson: Cosa III. The Buildings of the Forum (= Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome. Volume 37). Pennsylvania State University Press, Pennsylvania 1993.
• A Catalog of Identifiable Figure Painters of Ancient Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 2000.

literature

• Mary Taliaferro Boatwright, Harry B. Evans (Eds.): The Shapes of City Life in Rome and Pompeii. Essays in Honor of Lawrence Richardson, Jr. on the Occasion of His Retirement. Caratzas, New Rochelle [NY] 1998.

Web links

• Lawrence Richardson, Jr., FAAR'50, RAAR'79 . Obituary of the American Academy in Rome