Laudator Temporis Acti

Encounters & Reflections: Conversations with Seth Benardete. With Robert Berman, Ronna Berger, and Michael Davis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 23-25:

Ronna: Did you study with anyone in those first years on the Committee who impressed you?

Seth: Well, there was Einarson, the great Einarson, in the classics department.²²

Michael: Why do you call him "the great" Einarson?

Seth: He looked like the Michelin tire ad, do you remember?, the man made of tires. He had this very funny shape—totally rotund, as though he were blown up out of a balloon—a round head, with no hair, large glasses that were totally circular. He looked exactly like the Michelin tire man.

Ronna: What was his field?

Seth: His field was Greek, and he knew more than anybody else. Absolutely amazing knowledge. But everything he said was punctuated by a laugh. He was a student of Paul Shorey, and became a junior fellow on the recommendation of Quine.²³ Quine was in the first batch of junior fellows, and he said to the senior fellows, "Now here's an interesting guy." So Einarson became a junior fellow. Einarson had his three years at Harvard and then was asked to teach. And the story goes—this was the story I heard, I have no idea if it's true—that the student evaluation of the teachers came out the next year and Einarson, who had given a course on elementary Greek, got the worst evaluation that any teacher ever got. Apparently he went bonkers and ended up in a loony bin in Western Massachusetts for two years. When he came out he couldn't stop laughing.

Ronna: The laughing cure.

Seth: Someone said he had a very rare disease called "gelotophilia." It's so rare it's not in the dictionary; so rare that no one has ever heard of it. He couldn't stop laughing. What happened was, from that moment—this is the etiology of it—Einarson had finally worked out a universe in which it turned out that in fact everything was funny. So he got it right, you see. It worked perfectly.

Ronna: Did he ever write anything?

Seth: He did the text and the translation of Theophrastus, "On the Causes of Plants," and he did almost all the emendations in Festugière’s edition of Hermes Trismegistus. He was highly respected, in this very odd way.

Ronna: Did you learn anything from him?

Seth: He was very reluctant to teach anything, because he despised everybody for not knowing anything. So he had about a dozen things to say, which he would always trot out.

Robert: Always punctuated with a laugh.

Seth: Always. And he never allowed anybody to pause. If you wanted to translate, you had to translate at lightning speed, otherwise he would interrupt if you stopped. He would say, "yes," and then he would go on, absolutely flawlessly. So if you wanted to get through, you had to learn how to do it very rapidly. I remember one day I was coming down the steps of the library of the classics department, which used to be on the second and third floor of one of the buildings. Einarson was coming up the steps at the same time, carrying in two columns in his hands a pile of books. Each one was ten books high, and he was laughing his head o¤ as he carried the books up the steps. When he got to the top I said, "Why are you laughing so hard?" And he said, "Well, this is a complete set of Hazlitt which I just bought, but then I discovered that I already had a complete set."

Ronna: He didn’t offer them to you?

Seth: No, he gave them to Bruère.²⁴ Bruère had a very high giggle. So when the two of them got together it was absolute chaos. Did I tell you the Bloom story about Einarson? Bloom once came in to talk to Einarson and sat down on a chair. When the conversation was finished, he got up, and as he got up his pants ripped from the top to bottom. He looked back at the chair and there were these huge spikes sticking out of it, going up the chair. And Einarson was laughing his head off saying, "That was old Professor Shorey's chair."

22. Benedict Seneca Einarson, professor in the department of classics at the University of Chicago and translator of Theophrastus and Plutarch.

Laurence Berns, now a tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis, recalls attending Einarson's classes at Chicago. His favorite occupation seemed to be to find strange and rare Greek forms, then go to learned German, Dutch, or French specialized commentaries on them, which he translated in class. Finally the coup: "Ho, ho, ho, he forgot the exceptions," which then followed. A rare form came up at one point in a course on Xenophon's Anabasis: "Ho, ho, ho, I learned Hawaian over the weekend, and they have a form just like this." In one class the word hegoumai came up, and Berns remarked that, though clearly it had to be translated as "I think" or "I believe," in this case the speaker was also suggesting the other meaning of the word, "I lead." Einarson broke into a low chuckle and said, "Ho, ho, ho, you have to watch out for that sort of thing. I once had a student named Benardete, and he used to make remarks like that."

23. Paul Shorey (1857–1934), head of the Classics department at the University of Chicago until 1927, was a Plato scholar and editor-in-chief of Classical Philology from 1906 to 1934. Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000) was professor of philosophy at Harvard from 1936 to 1978 and made important contributions to logic and philosophy of language.

24. Richard Bruère, a Latinist who taught in the classics department of the University of Chicago until 1973, was a long-time editor of Classical Philology.

For a more sympathetic account of Einarson see the obituary by William M. Calder III in Gnomon 51.2 (April, 1979) 207-208. There is no entry for Einarson in Brill's History of Classical Scholarship: A Biographical Dictionary (Leiden: Brill, 2014).

Benedict Einarson as a young man: Benedict Einarson as an old man: Hat tip: Kevin Muse.