The following reminiscences were intended to be a supplement to Eleanor Dickey’s scholarly biography of Mabel to appear this spring along with a collection of her new and previously published Thucydidean studies (Thucydidean Narrative & Discourse, Michigan Classical Press). Ultimately, we decided that their personal tone ill suited the scholarly essays but that they were too good to consign to oblivion. We are grateful to their authors for permission to situate them on Mabel’s memorial blog.

Eleanor Dickey

Rick Hamilton

Mabel Lang Memorial Service Progam

Miss Lang was an amazing teacher. In fact, Miss Lang was the most amazing teacher I’ve ever known. I don’t say this lightly. After all, I went to Bryn Mawr, which is full of amazing teachers. And then I went to Oxford, where amazing teachers are not exactly rare, and since then I’ve been at a range of universities all of which have had at least some amazing teachers. But not one of them is the equal of Miss Lang.

That’s not just my opinion. Miss Lang had a cult status among Bryn Mawr students that I’ve never seen the like of. She was the living embodiment of all that our college stood for, and our nickname for her was Athena. It wasn’t just the students who took Greek who worshipped her; practically everyone on campus, that is at any one time about a thousand students who had never taken a course with her at all, knew that she was amazing. And they knew that if ever they had the courage to take a course from her, it would be the ultimate Bryn Mawr experience. Those of us who did have that courage often became addicts very fast. I took Baby Greek in my freshman year, and after that I couldn’t let a semester go by without a course taught by Miss Lang — if she wasn’t teaching one at my level, I always audited one at another level. When I was choosing a supervisor for graduate work at Oxford, I consulted Miss Lang about the Oxford Classicists. I asked her what each one was like until I got to one where she paused and said ‘She’s like me’. That’s the one I picked, of course, and she was a terrific supervisor, though not quite in Miss Lang’s class.

People who missed out on the Lang experience often ask me to explain HOW Miss Lang was such an amazing teacher. What did she do to inspire that devotion? It’s not an easy question to answer. On the face of it, her strategy was to assign an impossible amount of work and terrify the students into doing it. That doesn’t look like a recipe for success, and from anyone else it wouldn’t be. There has to be something else, and to be honest I haven’t managed to understand it 100%, because in two decades of trying to re-create the Lang experience for my own students, I haven’t quite managed it yet. But I think I’ve understood what the key is, and that key is respect. Miss Lang had respect for her students.

In a set of instructions for Wardens that Miss Lang wrote at the beginning of her teaching career she stated that one should always show students respect and never condescend, even when dealing with unimportant problems. That’s a principle she fulfilled absolutely as a teacher. Not in a superficial way, of course; after all she terrified us, she told us we were wrong, she told us we were worse than any other Baby Greek class in the last 40 years, and she frequently told us to shut up in so many words. Her respect for us was shown by really caring about us as people, and by believing absolutely in our abilities. She thought we were all her equals, and she expressed that not by trying to be chummy with us, but in ways that mattered far more: she never dismissed our problems as trivial, even when actually they were trivial, and on the rare occasions when she goofed up she always apologized frankly and sorted things out. Our lives were just as important to her as her own, and there was no effort she would not go to to help us. And I mean NO effort: she gave students substantial sums of money, she gave them her own possessions, and she gave her time so unstintingly that she had nothing left for herself, because she didn’t really have the concept of a self that was distinct from, and more worthy of her attention than, her students’ lives. Of course this side of her character was most apparent outside class, but I think it was also the foundation of her teaching style. Miss Lang’s idea of a great course was one in which she was challenged and she learned a lot, and naturally she expected that we all felt the same way and that we were all as smart as she was, so she gave us courses that were challenging to someone of her intellect. And then if we had trouble, she never thought that we might just not be up to it, because she had infinite respect for our abilities. She just figured that we weren’t trying hard enough, and gave us some, ah, encouragement to do more. Now frankly most of us probably were not as smart as Miss Lang. Certainly I’m not. But when someone you trust has that kind of faith in you, you live up to it, and you do the work, even if it takes you 20 hours to prepare for each class, which to be honest is what her graduate seminar took me. I didn’t think I could do that, but she knew I could, so I did it. And then of course once you’ve discovered what you can do, you realize that you can apply those new-found abilities to everything, and all of a sudden all sorts of things that used to be impossible become possible. If you can get through one of Miss Lang’s Greek classes, you know that with a similar level of strategic planning, determination, and hard work you can write a book, you can survive in the wilderness, you can save a historic house from demolition, you can fix the plumbing, you can win an election, you can run your own business — whatever you want to do. In fact all that will probably be easier than the Greek was. The fact is that by believing in our abilities so firmly Miss Lang caused us to have those abilities in the rest of our lives, and that is the most amazing gift that a teacher can offer.

There are about a thousand of us out there who learned our first Greek from Miss Lang, and many more who took other courses from her. Some of us have continued in the field and are aware every day how much we owe her for the solid foundation of knowledge she gave us. Many others haven’t continued as Classicists and don’t remember their Greek, but I’m sure they all remember Miss Lang vividly, affectionately, and still with a tinge of terror. Some are my friends who can’t be here now, and they have sent me a message to give today. They want, and I want, to say thank you to Miss Lang. Thank you for teaching us so well. Thank you for being such an inspiration and helping us discover abilities we didn’t know we had. And above all, thank you for caring about us and believing in us and making us into who we are now. Miss Lang, we will none of us ever forget you.

As you can see from the description in the program*, Mabel’s scholarly activity was largely archaeological, yet ironically she always stressed she was not an archaeologist. I used to assume she meant simply that she enjoyed texts as much as material objects, but now that I’ve looked a bit at her three publications of material excavated in the Athenian Agora I see more to it. All three books (weights, graffiti, ostraka) are collections of objects with writing of some sort, and Mabel’s goal is explicitly to find the mind behind the writing. I realized this when I read in her graffiti and dipinti book that she discarded three-quarters of the graffiti despite their writing because “the scope for interpretation is so wide they can give us little or no information”. If I were an archaeologist I would want to record all of them, but Mabel was after meaning and so studied only the graffiti which, in her words, “have sufficient content to be meaningful” and then in true Mabel fashion she added “whether the meaning is clear or not”.

She begins the graffiti book with a typically self-effacing disclaimer:

“Everyone enjoys verbal puzzles that challenge one’s powers of reading (ancient) minds, and many happy notions about these texts were evolved around the tea table so that the ‘onlie begetter’ may have been lost in obscurity”.

Now this may be modesty but above all I think it is Mabel describing her own enjoyment of verbal puzzles (and visual ones if you think of the frescoes) and her enjoyment of the to-and-fro with others over their possible solution, and I would like to spend some time with you now discussing Mabel the Puzzle-Solver.

Let’s start with the frescoes from the excavation of the Bronze Age palace at Pylos in southern Greece directed by Carl Blegen, which occupied Mabel for eleven years. Try to imagine being faced with 40 1’x 2′ trays filled with anywhere from thirty to a hundred pieces of a plaster jigsaw puzzle, each a different size and shape. As you start to piece these 3000 bits together you realize that “the mass of material is so great and the motifs represented are so many and so various” that it can’t be just one puzzle. You must add in the pieces from two dozen or so other puzzles rescued from a fire, some of which in Mabel’s words “were so badly burned that they returned to the lime from which they came; (other) pieces (were) often so incrusted with earth and lime deposit that it was impossible to see if they were painted at all”.

You have to really love jigsaw puzzles to take on something of this complexity and magnitude, but those of you who are jigsaw nuts can imagine, amid the drudgery of cleaning and restoring them, the excitement both of finding joins based on shape and even more of recognizing, “reading” if you will, what’s depicted on a piece and then setting about joining it to others. I think that’s where Mabel had the most fun and my evidence is the penultimate stage of her study that we discovered in her library carrel: photo cutouts of fresco pieces such as these. There are well over a hundred of these, which are spread out on a large table at the back of the room in hopes that you’ll play with them during the refreshments, much as Mabel herself must have played with them in making her final reconstructions. [You’ll also find the answer-book there–a copy of her volume on the frescoes, though you should be warned that you have to read the instruction manual to know how to use it.]

During those eleven years, Mabel was also occupied with two other sorts of puzzles: Linear B and Agora weights and measures, which must have been a pleasant respite particularly during those months of initial cleaning and restoring. The handout well describes the importance of Mabel’s work on Linear B and it is not hard to imagine the excitement each summer of transcribing and then deciphering dozens of tablets that had never been worked on by anyone before. In fact the field had just been invented and Pylos played a pivotal role. It was the Pylos tablets that allowed Blegen in 1953 to confirm for the world Ventris’ discovery of the previous year that Linear B was Greek, and a mere four years later here’s Blegen handing over all the new material to Mabel to publish.

More challenging intellectually were the puzzles presented by Athenian weights and measures. In Mabel’s words, “studies of ancient metrology have for the most part suffered under two severe handicaps: a modern scientific metrological system which admits of far finer distinctions than any ancient system contemplated and an excess of theory over practice which manipulates figures and calculates correspondences among standards almost in a vacuum.” Whereas with Linear B Mabel could work with a solid system of transcription and decipherment, here she had to start from the beginning, by, in her words, “allowing the weights and measures to set their own standards”. Beyond that, she wished, as she says, “to ask and, where possible, to answer the questions which the objects themselves raise: what are they? what is their relation to one another? when, how and by whom were they used? to what extent do they confirm, contradict or add to other evidence in what they can tell us about the public and private life of the ancient Athenians?”

After the weights and fresco books were done, Mabel turned to another set of puzzles, more like anagrams than the Linear B cryptograms: these were the bits of incidental writing on pots, either scratched into the surface, graffiti, or painted on it, dipinti. Here she was not concerned with the largest and most obviously meaningful groups—inscriptions painted as part of the design of black and red figured pottery; or commercial stamps in various types of pottery or ostraka, which were voting ballots scratched on sherds and which she later published. Instead she was left with a corpus of 3000 “informal” inscriptions, which were not inherent parts of the objects on which they were inscribed, the corpus I mentioned earlier that she whittled down from 3000 to 859 and that she and her friends discussed around the tea table. You can imagine what fun they had speculating on the story behind the message (B1) scratched in a skyphos base, “Thamneus put the saw under the threshold of the garden gate”, or why anyone would write down this command to a servant (B2), “boy, bring other new couches for Phalanthos”.

My favorite solution of Mabel’s is to C 31, which looks to be a simple “lovey-dovey” inscription: “Prosousia is pretty; Pantaleon is pretty” scratched doubly, on both the outside and inside of the sherd. Upon investigation, however, Mabel found that though attested as personal names in Athens at the time, these two are also the names of contemporary comedies by Euboulos and Theopompos and since the well in which this sherd was found also contained several pitchers with comic scenes painted on them she argues that “the sherd represents applause or favorable critical judgment of the two plays (and thus) would provide a definite cross-reference between two comic poets and a far closer absolute date than the scanty fragments of the plays allow”. (I might add that a decade later her interpretation was given strong endorsement and a full page of discussion in what has become the standard edition of Eubulus by Richard Hunter.)

But in the same graffiti book Mabel also did some astonishingly thorough analysis of the 342 owners’ marks she collected:

“The large number of what seem almost certainly to be marks of ownership inscribed on complete vessels makes possible some useful statistics of various sorts: changes in letter-shapes and spelling throughout the range from early 7th century B.C. to the 6th century of our era; nature of identification, ranging from simple initial of the name to a complete sentence asserting ownership (with consideration of the number and kinds of abbreviations); location of the marks on various types of vessels; and the nature of the writing, whether graffito or dipinto.” Seven densely packed, economically expressed pages follow working out each of these topics exhaustively, even down to “how the direction of writing is related to the chronology”.

I’d like to end by turning to Mabel’s non-archaeological, literary work, which I think reveals the same puzzle mentality. Her earliest articles solve recognized problems coming from contradictions in sources on a particular topic: the varying accounts of the murder of Hipparchus, the inconsistent chronology of the Revolution of the 400, the apparently impossible chronology of the so-called Pentakontaetia of Thucydides and, most notoriously, the contradictions in the Odyssey so amusingly and cleverly presented by Denis Page in his Flexner Lectures given at Bryn Mawr in 1954, which Mabel countered by applying oral formulaic theory (what she called “oral thinking”) to plot construction: “[Page’s] comments [she says] would be very much to the point if the Odyssey had sprung full-armed from the pen of a single author, but they will not do for a poem that grew and was recreated again and again in the actively participating presence of audiences. That is, just as it was Penelope’s function in life to be a wife so it was the suitors’ function to be killed, and it would never have occurred to audience or bard that anything else could happen to either of them. Here was no author plotting logically how the marriage of Penelope would both obviate the necessity of killing the suitors and rid the house of them without such drastic measures; rather here was audience-bard collaboration in bondage to the facts of the story, with little will, and less power, to soar beyond them in imagination”. This is Mabel at her incisive and heretical best.

There is of course much much else that could be said about Mabel’s scholarship. Mabel the mathematician, for instance, who wrote not only the weights and measures book but three articles on the abacus and pieces on Mycenaean proportions and the Athenian calendar. And then there is her love of large catalogues. All her major archaeological books are large catalogues, and in later years she turned to large catalogues in her two literary books, first of the 861 speeches in Herodotus for the book based on her Martin Classical Lectures, where, not surprisingly, the appendices are twice as long as the text, and then of the 170 speeches in Thucydides, whose results are presented for the first time here in her six-day old book. It was Mabel’s rigorous and revealing analysis of Thucydidean speeches, in fact, that convinced Jeff Rusten, one of the world’s most prominent Thucydidean scholars, that her Thucydidean essays simply had to be published.

I could also go on and on about Mabel’s popular, service-to-the profession publications, the Agora guide and her many Agora picture books, noting first how serious she was about them—she completed five and was working on two more (Animals in the Agora, Women in the Agora)—and also how innovative and useful these are, not simply charming lectures for the general audience but solidly-researched and brilliantly illustrated little encyclopedias. We have displayed copies of all of them on the table at the back and if you haven’t seen them before I hope you will take a look—they are utterly charming.

But I have wanted to keep our focus on Mabel Puzzle Solver, first to give you a sense of the range, depth and quality of her inquiry but more importantly because I think it helps explain both Mabel’s disdain for self-promotion and her tireless drive.

Mabel wasn’t exactly modest. I am sure Mabel knew how good she was, but that wasn’t germane. Puzzle-solvers don’t brag; the point is the puzzle not the solver and one of the attractions of archaeology is that absolutely new puzzles are dug up all the time and they don’t carry the weight of centuries of scholarship. You can see in the introduction to the Pylos frescoes the pleasure took flying solo where she notes “it would have been desirable from many points of view for the publication of the frescoes to be undertaken by an historian of art steeped in the painting of the period and recognized for his judgment and knowledge therein. In the apparent absence of such a person, it seemed possible that intimate association with the Pylos fragments in their thousands might substitute for wider learning and that the freshness of an untutored and unprejudiced eye might stand in lieu of practised judgment. . .where the constant handling of the material has given rise to ideas not presented in the literature it has seemed worthwhile to propose them”.

I have stressed Mabel’s puzzle solving finally because it explains, for me at least, why she kept at research so long and with such intensity. Her last article was published in 2002, when she was 85. Those of you who do crosswords and anagrams and Sudokus know how utterly consuming puzzles can be—total concentration; no interruptions allowed—and the euphoria that results—headaches disappear, lunch is forgotten, time dissolves. And it is addicting.

In the Pylos book Mabel described herself as “one whose work has been primarily in history and epigraphy, albeit always with a leaning toward puzzles” and I think that is exactly right.

*This description is an excerpt from Eleanor Dickey’s superb scholarly biography of Mabel just published in Mabel’s Thucydidean Narrative and Discourse (Michigan Classical Press, 2011).

Psammites

Mabel L. Lang: The Sand Reckoner

I got to know Mabel L. Lang as a co-worker and conspirator of sorts the summer after my sophomore year, 1973. I was 19 and didn’t grasp her stature as a scholar enough to be intimidated or deferential; I simply spoke to her as if she were a peer. This audacity must have amused her and at the same time appealed to her humility. We were both country girls who loved animals and were drawn to Art.

I had taught myself some Greek in high school and bought a copy of Goodwin’s grammar on my first visit to Bryn Mawr, but for my freshman year I decided to start German instead and continue with Latin. The College Guide entry on Bryn Mawr had described “a female professor” who knit while using an abacus and deciphering Linear B. I passed this “Miss Lang” occasionally in Classics corridor of Thomas on visits to Mrs. Michels’ office and saw her walking across campus in her signature sneakers or sandals and pastel skirts. Other students spoke of the terror of being called on in “Baby Greek.” I saw on display the striped socks with Greek words that she knit for “the boys,” Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Dickerson. I heard that she had gone for rides on the back of a motorcycle and that she was a menace behind the wheel of her champagne-colored Mustang, having taken up motoring a bit late in life. Still, she seemed to me a fairly tame apparition.

In the summer of 1972, I got a year-round work/study job as editorial assistant in the Office of Public Information. Drafts and corrections went back and forth for press releases, the course catalogue, Bryn Mawr Now, and materials for a fund-raising campaign; my encounters with administrators and faculty were much less formal than in the classroom, where we were still addressed as “Miss.” Mabel was in the office frequently for one project or another. Public Information Director Michelle Osborne, extroverted and exuberant, was her great admirer, taking her classes in history and mythology.

Mabel and I teamed up to create a pamphlet on classics and archaeology at Bryn Mawr, one of a series being produced by Public Information for Admissions. Mabel wrote the copy, which we typed out in columns on her tiny field typewriter. Using the format of her Agora picture books, we pasted up a dummy on cream paper with my mockups in watercolor and ink of murals, vase paintings, statues and inscriptions. We planned and reviewed our work in the cool of her office or on the circular bench around the big tree in front of Thomas. When I finally got to Greece eight years later, I remembered the smell of the dust on our sandals, the shrilling cicadas and the heat of July and August. We were both crushed when our superiors found our efforts a little too “cutesie,” but we defended them, and the final publication reflected most of our original work.

After taking Greek philosophy in the second semester of my sophomore year, I was anxious to catch up in Greek, and with the encouragement of the instructor, John Mulhern, determined to work my way through Fobes’ Philosophical Greek over the summer. I don’t now recall how Mabel was brought into the project, but she agreed to correct my work, and Chase and Phillips was added. That summer, my father, who worked on the other side of town, dropped me off on campus before 7 a.m. I would go to Thomas Great Hall, study my lessons for the day and write out exercises or translations until reporting for work on third floor of Taylor. During my lunch hour, I went to Mabel’s office, and we would discuss the exercises she had corrected and do sight translations from the New Testament. “Do you even know what you’re reading?” she snapped, when I translated that St. John was dressed in “chameleon skin” rather than “camel hair.” But she was patient and encouraging, and by the end of the summer, we had read the Apology, Crito, and some Herodotus. The farther along I got, the more exhilarated I became and pushed myself harder. Later, I took a dark view of this, wondering if I had done it for praise, taking on the subject that was Bryn Mawr’s Holy Grail for so many. Now I don’t think so at all. I received a precious gift, and once I became a teacher myself, I understood the joy of having an eager and able student.

Mabel was a fountain of erudite and hilarious “ditties” with forced rhymes and meter for roasts and gifts and Faculty Shows. I began to understand these and the goofy knitting projects. She would not humiliate herself by attempting creative profundity, setting herself up instead to amuse. In her scholarship, she stuck to the facts. And yet, it is in her teaching and writing that, Hermes-like, she created Panofsky’s “infinitesimal calculus,” integrating the measure and mystery of a past time. There is a Greek Tea poster of a pair of yellow rubber boots with rainbow wings on the ankles. That was Mabel.

In her 2003 presentation to emeritus faculty on Taylor Hall, I believe that Mabel unwittingly described herself: “truly protean despite its staid stateliness,” “an ‘off with the old and on with the new’ kind of abandon somewhat at odds with its stern profile.” And her presentation for the same group on Faculty Shows: “what good sports … we were and how much fun we all had together.” says it all. Thank you, Mabel.

I met Mabel Lang in the fall of 1970 when I arrived at Bryn Mawr as a transfer student, infatuated with classical archaeology and having no idea of the many challenges that lay ahead, e.g., ancient Greek.  My class (1973) was characterized by hoards of baby Greeklings–Miss Lang had to open a second section to  accommodate nearly 50 students.  Even then I appreciated what an amazing response that was to what some might have thought was a disaster.  Miss Lang’s dedication and her matter-of-fact professionalism were always evident.  It was obvious from the outset that she  was a master and a character, but I had no idea what a profound effect she would have on my education and later on my own development as a teacher and a scholar.

In my years as an undergraduate and graduate student at Bryn Mawr, I had Mabel in every type of class–after Elementary Greek, I took Greek history and in my senior year  wrote an independent Study project  with her one on one.  As a graduate student, a year long Homer seminar formed the most coherent academic experience of my graduate career — amazing,  as I was a student in classical and near eastern archaeology and most of my course work was in that department.

Mabel deeply influenced  my own teaching.  From her I learned not to be ashamed of old-fashioned pedagogies like rote learning that cultivated memorization.  I can still remember where I sat in our classroom as we went around, rapid fire, chanting principal parts.  She deployed experiential learning before it was a trend, and I still remember excitedly channeling Solon to complete my own speech in his voice for a history assignment.  When she asked us, on our final exam, to compare the Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian Wars to the American Revolution and Civil Wars, I began to get an inkling of what my liberal arts education was all about.

Everything about a Miss Lang course was meticulously planned.  In her Homer seminar, each week brought an array of scholarship interpreting the passages we read.  The list went up on Tuesday morning;  class was Monday afternoon.  From her style of course management, I learned how much better students learn when a course is carefully structured and goals are clearly laid out.  She was quick to point out error, but her confidence was unstinting–I will never forget her presentation of Linear A, stating that she believed one of us might well unlock the code “…out of the mouths of babes…”, she said, her voice rising in a note of hopefulness.

Her standards were the highest;  her criticism cut to the bone, and her compliments meaningful.  When she told me that my final Homer paper “deserved wider dissemination”  it was a pivotal moment for me, imparting confidence that served as a fixed point to which I could return to seek  refuge and to regain confidence in the stormy seas of academic life.

She was unendingly curious and marvelously inventive.  She was often very funny.  I will never forget her telling me that she had to be sure to buy expensive clothes because she didn’t have good taste.

When I began my own career as a scholar and a teacher, I revisited my memories of  Mabel’s classes  many times as I developed my own.  Some of my most pleasurable moments as a scholar came when I used her Agora volumes on the Graffiti and the Ostraka.  Her idiom, her succinct turn of phrase, her amusement at human nature all came through in those scholarly works.

Mabel Lang’s contribution to Linear B  studies was impressive.  In 1961, when I was in America for the first time as a Junior Fellow of the Center for Hellenic Studies, I asked whether I could go and see her in Bryn Mawr. I had worked and was working on Mycenaean and I felt I could not miss the chance to see her. For me she was up there on a pedestal together with the grandees of Mycenology: John Chadwick, Emmett Bennett and Michel Lejeune. She was extremely kind to a perfectly unknown 24 year old graduate: she put me up, she was unbelievably sympathetic because I had the most horrible cold and could barely speak (apart from the fact that I hardly knew English), she gave me some off-prints and precious information about the new texts that she was editing. After that there were other occasions to meet  and she made a point of keeping me up-to-date with her Mycenaean publications. Her editions of the newly found texts at Pylos were authoritative and from the very start, as I learned later, she was considered one of the (few) reliable Mycenaean epigraphists. Apart from the editions she did not publish more than ten papers in the field, but looking back at one or two articles I am struck by the way in which she was ahead of her times. In that period we all thought that in order to interpret Mycenaean we had to be linguistically proficient and try to understand what was linguistically possible and what not. Of course she did it too, but e.g. in Cn Flocks (1966), an article which is still regularly quoted today, one sees that she is moving towards a new way of interpreting the texts: arranging them in sets, looking at the numbers and the ideograms even more than at the words, and trying to make sense of each set in terms of why it was written and in what context. This is of course how the current work of interpretation operates. In addition in Mabel’s work there is much clear argumentation and no words wasted. She stopped attending Mycenaean colloquia a long time ago, but if she could attend one nowadays she would be much more at home there than those of us who came to Mycenaean because of our linguistic interests. Her last three Linear B articles (1987, 1988, 1990), two of which are dedicated to her long standing friends and colleagues, John Chadwick and Emmett Bennett, concentrate on Pylos and the geography of Pylos. Again this last subject is ahead of its times; studies of that nature have become important more recently and the 1988 paper gives the impression to the reader of sheer intelligence. Perhaps it is worth quoting the start of the first article and the start and the end of the second because they are so perfectly Mabel Lang and once again point to a type of work which is strikingly modern.

Lang 1987: 333.  “Just as monophthalmic vision produces a two-dimensional image, and it takes two eyes to give the illusion of depth, so various aspects of Pylian life may appear more three-dimensional when seen through both poetry and pictures or both pictures and inventories.”

Lang 1988: 185. “Does it seem reasonable that there are, for example, 68 places […] that record or are concerned with men, women and children of various sorts, but have nothing to do with, or are of no account with regard to, livestock or agricultural produce, land ownership, taxes and tribute, or metals and military equipment?”

Ibid. 212 “In the final analysis, there is no real proof for the connections and locations, but evidence, however slippery and partial, cannot be ignored.”

Mabel used to wear a hand-knit sweater with a black spider web woven on the front. In the middle of the web was a black spider, and off to the side was a fly. I felt a good deal of solidarity with the fly.

When we read Thucydides’ description of the rebellion against the Athenians on the island of Lesbos, the first thing out of her mouth the next class was, “what are we to think of these revolting Lesbians?” She was not inclined toward humor, so none of us laughed, although if one of us had been reckless enough to let out one single giggle the rest would have fallen in. She would not have joined us.

She talked with me about an article she was submitting to a journal on a very subtle stylistic habit in the Iliad. Not an earth-shattering topic. “I always submit my articles anonymously,” she said; “I don’t want them reading it and saying, ‘ah well, the dear old gal’.” It was published.

While I was writing my master’s thesis with her, she would have me come in once a week and simply read aloud whatever I had written. It took a long time, but, in a way it was very efficient. I got immediate feedback. While writing back at home, I felt I was writing letters to a specific audience and could hear her voice commenting on my work. Writing became a daily habit and came more and more easily. At the end of the exercise, she had already read – or rather listened to – the whole piece, so there were very few revisions. I finished a month early.

A local minister, 40 years Mabel’s junior and quite athletic, approached me at a party and said, “I hear you studied with Mabel Lang.” His eyes grew wide when I said yes. “I’ve hiked in England with her and she’s very hard to keep up with.” I agreed.

To fortify her German, she read German translations of the novels of Jane Austen. Having read them in English over and over in her youth, she had them essentially memorized. She just had to fit the German together into what she already knew were the sentences.

One of my proudest moments was when, in Thucydides class, she handed out an inscription that was missing a fragment. She pointed out that the missing space was about big enough for two letters: “What would they be?” she asked. We were silent, afraid to reveal the shortcomings of our Greek. Then I heard my own voice saying, “an” — the tiny, untranslatable particle with such charming subtlety. She looked about as astonished as I had ever seen her — not very. But she did have to pause if only for a breath at this blink of intelligence from a graduate student. Then she said, “right” and moved on. I felt triumphant.

My last face-to-face visit with Mabe was nearly two years ago. One day, sitting in the sun on the patio, we shared memories and points of view.

About her name: “Mabel is a nice name,” our mother would say defensively, but it is not scholarly. Somehow dropping the ‘l’ makes a difference to some of us, and so she is Mabe.

Throughout my recollections, please remember that Mabe and I are nearly nine years apart in age. But more than years separate us. She was ever the scholar while I was a homemaker and mother for many years. She can’t have thought I would appreciate her classroom and publishing accomplishments, but I do recall hearing about the popularity of her baby Greek course, references to her role in BMC faculty shows, her knit socks of original design for a campus benefit.

Mabe spoke at Colgate in the ’70s — I have hanging on my bedroom wall a photo of her as she spoke. By then I was working in PR and publications at Colgate and was more aware of my sister’s many distinctions so I put her name forward for an honorary degree. The very next year (1978) we were proud to see this “home town girl” among those honored. Our brother, who was the family “rock,” came from Roanoke for the occasion though fighting leukemia (he died the next year).

We heard about summers of study in Greece and digs in Turkey, the American School of Classical Studies, and saw evidence of her research in books and monographs but never any details except a suggestion that August was not the time to visit Athens.

For years Mabe faithfully (dutifully) returned to Hamilton for Christmas, but she seemed less and less to take part in our family gatherings. Our sister Helen always made gingerbread men and it was Mabe’s special job to decorate them.

“Dutiful” reminds me of letter writing particularly when Mabe was at Cornell. She wrote home every Sunday, and if there was no letter from her in Tuesday’s mail our mother would worry. I seem to remember a laundry case going to and from Hamilton and Ithaca (remember, that was the late ’30s!).

Mabe was born in Utica where our father was an apprentice baker (having emigrated from Germany after 1900). The family, which then included Walter, Helen and Mabe moved to Hamilton in 1924 when our father purchased the bakery there. At Hamilton Central School Mabe played basketball and was a member of the Almeda Literary Society (for initiation her costume was something with a fish pole). I recall proudly walking to school with my big sister now and then. While in high school she became acquainted with a faculty couple named Garrison (baby sitting?) and I believe Anne Garrison may have led Mabe toward the study of Greek. At Cornell she was guided by Professor Harry Kaplan. She lived in one of Risley Hall’s towers (sixth floor) and developed a heart murmur (wouldn’t use the elevator).

After Mabe died, nine members of our family, plus Pat McPherson and Peg Healy from Bryn Mawr, met at Cornell to scatter her ashes. We shared a luncheon of Greek food, recollections, and an ouzo toast before we, plus our five dogs, went to Cornell’s Beebe Lake where from a bridge each of us released some ashes.