Laudator Temporis Acti

Hugh Lloyd-Jones, "Ritual and Tragedy," in Fritz Graf, ed., Ansichten griechischer Rituale. Geburtstags-Symposium für Walter Burkert (Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner, 1998), pp. 271-295 (at 271-272):

During the summer of 1959 the new papyrus of Menander's Dyskolos had just been published. The first edition was obviously inadequate, and the world of scholarship was swept by an epidemic of an illness which Eduard Fraenkel called Dyscolitis. Scholars everywhere were publishing emendations; most of these proved to be identical with the emendations of other scholars, so that Bruno Snell suggested a new siglum, which meant 'omnes praeter Martinum'. I had been commanded by Paul Maas to bring out an edition in the hope of checking this disease. Knowing this, Reinhold Merkelbach sent me a telegram inviting me to come to Germany to lecture on the Dyskolos. This happened during Merkelbach's brief but important time as professor at Erlangen, where he was not far from Karl Meuli and where Burkert had just become a Privatdozent. In order to finance my expedition, he arranged for me to lecture also at Cologne and Würzburg.

This was my first visit to a German-speaking country, and I had scarcely ever spoken German; it was almost as if I had suddenly found myself in a place where I had to speak ancient Greek. My education had owed much to the presence in Oxford of famous exiles from Germany, so that it was an exciting experience for me. I went first to Cologne, where I met Günther Jachmann, Andreas Rumpf, Josef Kroll and Albrecht Dihle. From Erlangen I went to the neighbouring Würzburg, where I met Friedrich Pfister and Rudolf Kassel. In Erlangen itself I met Alfred Heubeck and Walter Burkert. Merkelbach felt that Burkert's teachers in Erlangen had not insisted strongly enough on the importance of textual criticism, so he decided that the three of us should go through the Dyskolos together. On the first day, we got halfway through the play. Burkert explained that on the next day he could not come to the institute; he was about to become a father for the first time, and must remain at home. 'All right!', said Merkelbach, 'then we meet in your house!', and we did meet there and finished the play, poor Frau Burkert sustaining us with an agreeable dish of rhubarb.