Adam Parry

Adam Milman Parry (February 1, 1928 – June 6, 1971) was an American classical scholar. He worked on Greek and Latin history literature, particularly the works of Thucydides, Homer and Virgil, and was a founding figure of the scholarly movement that became known as the Harvard School of criticism into Virgil's Aeneid.

The son of the Homeric scholar Milman Parry, Parry spent much of his early life in California following his father's early death in 1935. He subsequently studied at the University of California, Berkeley, at Harvard University and on a Fulbright Scholarship at the Sorbonne in Paris. While writing up his Harvard doctoral thesis, he took a post at Amherst College in Massachusetts, and moved between short-lived appointments at Harvard, Amherst, Yale University and University College London before settling at Yale in 1962. He was appointed full professor and department chair there in 1968, and remained at the university until his death.

Parry's work encompassed translations, critical annotations, historiography and literary criticism. His 1963 article "The Two Voices of Virgil's Aeneid" is regarded as a founding text of the Harvard School, an interpretative trend arguing that Virgil's poem contains a "private voice" drawing attention to the costs and horrors of Roman imperialism and the rule of the emperor Augustus. He opposed the Vietnam War and was known for his left-wing politics and bohemian lifestyle. He died in a motorcycle accident on June 6, 1971, alongside his second wife, Anne. In the following decades, his interpretation of the Aeneid became a dominant influence upon Virgilian scholarship.

Life
Adam Milman Parry was born on February 1, 1928, near Paris. He was the son of Marian Parry (Thanhouser) and the classicist Milman Parry, who was at the time studying at the Sorbonne in the city. In 1929, the elder Parry was appointed to a post at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the family first moved there, and subsequently with Milman's expeditions to southern Yugoslavia, where he carried out fieldwork into traditional Yugoslav epic poems, through which he demonstrated that the Homeric poems were works of oral poetry.

Milman Parry died in 1935, of a gunshot wound generally believed to have been self-inflicted and accidental. Marian Parry moved the family to California. Adam Parry studied under Ivan Mortimer Linforth and Harold F. Cherniss at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating in 1949. During his time there, he worked as a crewman on ships sailing between California and Seattle in Washington. He moved to Harvard University to embark on a Ph.D. programme the following year, now supporting himself by working as a taxi driver in Boston and periodically attending classes in his uniform. His teachers at Harvard included John Huston Finley Jr. and Cedric Whitman. He spent the 1950–1951 academic year at the Sorbonne in on a Fulbright Scholarship, and sat the preliminary examinations for his Ph.D. in the spring of 1952; among his examiners for the viva was the ancient historian Donald Kagan.

Later in 1952, while still writing up his doctoral thesis (titled "Logos" and "Ergon" in Thucydides and supervised by Eric Havelock), Parry took a post as an instructor in classics at Amherst College in Massachusetts. At Amherst he was a colleague of Wendell Clausen, John Moore and Thomas Gould. Along with his then-wife Barbara, he translated in 1954 from French Personal Religion Among the Greeks, a publication of the Sather Classical Lectures delivered at Berkeley in 1952–1953 by André-Jean Festugière. He later completed another translation, this time from modern Greek, of a chapter on the Old East Slavic epic poem known as The Tale of Igor's Campaign.

Parry remained at Amherst until 1955, when he moved to Yale University as an instructor, on the invitation of Frank Edward Brown. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1957. This was followed by a Morse fellowship at Yale, and a year as a research associate at University College London, during which he made several visiting lectures at other universities in England. In 1960, by now an assistant professor at Yale, he moved to a post at the same level at Harvard. While there, he directed a performance of the Ajax, a tragedy by the fifth-century Athenian playwright Sophocles, in ancient Greek: Parry played Ajax himself, with the younger of his two sons also in the cast. At the end of his first academic year at Harvard, he accepted a tenured post at Amherst, beginning there in 1961. That year, he wrote the notes for Robert Fagles's translation of the poems of the early Greek lyric poet Bacchylides. In 1962, he returned to Yale; in 1968, he was a made a full professor and chair of the classics department. In 1971, he published The Making of Homeric Verse, a collected volume of his father's academic works.

He died, along with his wife Anne, in a motorcycle accident near Colmar in France on June 6, 1971. The couple had recently bought the motorcycle and were using it to travel back to France from Germany. Shortly before his death, his term as chair of the Yale classics department had been extended for a fourth year. He had also been contracted by Oxford University Press to write a book, The Mind of Thucydides, expanding his doctoral dissertation, and by Cambridge University Press to serve as an editor for the Cambridge History of Classical Literature.

Assessment and legacy
Four days after his death, the professors of Greek at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Bristol – Denys Page, Hugh Lloyd-Jones and Geoffrey Kirk – co-signed a letter in The Times calling Parry one of the best Greek scholars of his generation. A posthumous Festschrift in his honor was published as a volume of Yale Classical Studies in 1975, edited by Kagan. His collected papers were published as The Language of Achilles and Other Papers by Lloyd-Jones in 1989.

Parry's 1956 article, "The Language of Achilles", was described by Peter Rose as the most radical challenge to Milman Parry's thesis that Homeric poetry saw no friction between an idea and the language available to express it. In 1973, Michael Reeve described it as one of the most important works on Homer in the preceding half century: Lloyd-Jones considered it Parry's most important contribution to scholarship. In 1975, Havelock wrote that it remained a widely cited work on its topic, and noted that Kirk had selected it for his 1964 edited collection, The Language and Background of Homer.

Influence on the Harvard School
Parry was a leading figure in the Harvard School, sometimes known as the "Harvard Pessimists", which questioned the then-orthodox view of Virgil's Aeneid as propaganda for the emperor Augustus. In 1963, he published "The Two Voices of Virgil's Aeneid" in the literary journal Arion, arguing that the poem contained what he called "a private voice of regret" alongside its "public voice of triumph", and used this private voice to emphasise the costs and flaws of Augustus and of Roman imperialism. This essay is regarded as a foundational text of the Harvard School's mode of reading the Aeneid as a poem which challenges Augustan ideology. Other prominent Harvard School writers included W. Ralph Johnson, Wendell Clausen, Michael Putnam, Oliver Lyne and Robert Angus Brooks.

Richard Jenkyns, in 2017, described "The Two Voices of Virgil's Aeneid" as "practical criticism at its best" and praised both its eloquence and its clarity. The article has frequently been cited as a major influence on Virgilian scholarship. In 1989, Richard F. Moorton called it "one of the most influential essays on the Aeneid ever written". In 2000, Stephanie Quinn called it one of the most influential of the previous thirty-five years. In 2006, Brian Breed cited it as a text of "great influence", particularly on Oliver Lyne's 1987 Further Voices in Virgil's "Aeneid"; a 2017 retrospective on the Harvard School by Julia Hejduk called it "seminal". In 2018, Susanna Braund wrote that "if there is one single scholarly intervention that shifted our view of the Aeneid, it was surely Adam Parry's essay". In 2017, Ward Brooks referred to the dominant paradigm of Virgilian studies in the generations after Parry's article as "a kind of Parryitis".

Personal life
Parry variously went by "Adam" and "Milman" as his first name. He married Barbara Pfeiffer on October 22, 1948. Lloyd-Jones recounted a story that Adam and Barbara Parry had been the inspiration for the 1962 novel Love and Friendship by Alison Lurie. Lurie's characters are the parents of children who burn down two college houses, and Lloyd-Jones wrote of being told that this detail had been based on the Parries. Adam and Barbara had three children, and later divorced. Parry married Anne Reinberg Amory, a visiting lecturer at Yale and previously his contemporary as a Ph.D. student at Harvard, in April 1966.

Parry was known to have strongly left-wing politics. In 1967, he wrote a letter to the Yale Daily News condemning the decision of Yale's Timothy Dwight College. of which he was a fellow, to invite Ronald Reagan, then a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Parry described Reagan as "one of the most savage proponents of American belligerence" in Vietnam.

Lloyd-Jones described Parry as "one of the most delightful and accomplished human beings I have known. Handsome, elegant and witty, he had a most unusual charm, by no means diminished by a streak of bohemian wildness." In a 1975 obituary, Havelock wrote that Parry maintained "a faint flavour of France and French culture" in his personal style. Lloyd-Jones wrote that Parry had once told him that he had only ever imagined being a classical scholar, a lawyer or a beachcomber, and that he would never have become the former had he not outlived his father.

Explanatory notes
