Steven Strange, 1950-2009
MS
I was saddened to hear that Steven Strange died on October 28 of this year. Steve was one of my favorite professors from grad school at Emory University. I remember his late seminars that ran from 6-9 pm or something like that.. we made beer runs over the break. I took Hellenistic philosophy and Neoplatonism from him. His teaching style in these seminars was highly digressive, picking up on this or that point and running with it. It seemed to me that he consciously worked to connect his material to general philosophical questions that might be of interest to graduate students with various foci, but really he just wanted to talk about the ins and outs of ancient thought. He was at his best when reconstructing lost works and making guesses about intellectual dependence.
One aspect of his work that I early learned to respect was the total commitment to working with a text in the original language. When I first arrived at Emory (as a student in comparative literature) I struggled every week to make my way through Plutarch with him (On Isis and Osiris). He was willing to do an independent study with me even though I was based outside his own department. Anyone who showed interest in reading ancient philosophy in Greek or Latin could get some of his time.
Dr. Strange was the king of the reading group. When he was teaching a seminar in ancient philosophy he would hold weekly Greek and Latin reading sessions. These reading groups (which as you might guess were often small) were the times when Dr. Strange really shined as a teacher. When he was concentrated on a text (as opposed to giving a general introduction to a topic) he was fantastically knowledgeable. I will never forget the year or so I attended the weekly reading of Seneca’s letters. We would work through the Latin and Dr. Strange would note where the ideas were coming from and who Seneca was arguing against.. even speculate about what lost Stoic classic lay behind the direction of Seneca’s thought.
Through his influence, and others at Emory (Peter Bing, Garth Tissol, Gay Robbins, and Walt Reed) I came to see simply reading a text closely and talking through its ideas as an essential part of learning. My favorite teachers were never lecturers but readers who could open up lines and words. Dr. Strange was definitely a reader and not a lecturer. His attention to historical context, concrete intellectual inheritance, and fascination with the pure details of the ancient world have left their mark on the way I read texts. These days I read medieval Arabic texts.. and Seneca and Epictetus not so much, but I don’t believe I would be as curious or attentive a reader without the influence of Dr. Strange.
Dr. Strange is a tough one for me to imagine at a liberal arts college, such as my home institution Lawrence University in Wisconsin. He didn’t take a particularly personal interest in his students—there’s no way I would have gone to him with a personal issue. He was not a “great teacher” in the way that gets tossed around in a teaching centered undergraduate institution. He was not student centered.. he was idea centered. If you were willing to think about these things that no one else knows about, then he was there to think about it with you; he was there to read that obscure Greek text (Cave of the Nymphs anyone?). As was perhaps inevitable given his name, he was eccentric.. and difficult to follow at times, but he modeled a passionate search for knowledge.
In the winter of 2003 I wrote a short reflection on life as a graduate student, and I mention Dr. Strange and our Seneca reading group:
“Any student who wants to read Latin can come to our meeting, but there are only two takers: Keith, in the philosophy department, and myself. Dr. Tissol and Dr. Strange are a perfect combination for reading Seneca. Dr. Tissol, always neatly and simply dressed, calm mannered, provides the Latin backbone to the reading, solving questions about tenses and straightening out the un-Stoically elegant style of Seneca, making sure Keith and I understand the Latin details. Dr. Strange, on the other hand, clothes often more rumpled than ironed, hair no exactly in place, and more impetuously than calmly, explicates the Stoic doctrines and arbitrates about whether Seneca is arguing with Posidonius or some other Stoic. George, the fifth habitual attender, neither student nor professor, does his best to poke holes in Dr. Tissol’s Latin.. a blood sport.
“It is one of the less important events of my week, so far as any objective auditor of my week could determine. And weekly Seneca reading will not show up on any official transcript. But to me it is a symbol of what I enjoy most about academic life: the simple process of working together with other people to understand the thought and expression of a person in the past who actively reflected on life. No competitive spirit breaks into our enjoyment of figuring out what this Roman is talking about and where he is getting it from.
“One of my favorite stories from the semester is of Dr. Strange ambushing a hapless Classics lecturer who made some kind of statement about nobody knowing when glass windows were introduced. Dr. Strange called up Seneca’s 92nd letter and found the passage which we had recently read: Quaedam nostra demum prodisse memoria scimus, ut speculariorum usum perlucente testa clarum transmittentium lumen… that is: ‘We know certain things have been brought forth in our own memory, such as the use of windows transmitting clear light through transparent tiles.’ The speaker had to admit she had never seen this text, and upon this clear academic victory, Dr. Strange built an argument on the date of window glass: Seneca clearly states these windows were introduced recently.. “in our memory”.. and further, Rome as the capital would probably be the first place where a new luxury would catch on.. so window glass must have been invented toward the middle of the first century AD. I can imagine that the lecturer was glad to move on to the next question. The rest of us can only hope for such a fortuitous application of our Seneca reading.”
In that last story you really get a real sense for Dr. Strange. As a philosophy professor you don’t expect him to leap into a conversation about the origin of glass windows.. but Dr. Strange loved that kind of thing.. and he loved nothing more than this kind of situation where he could chase down an idea. If you know him, you can see him flailing at a text, reading the Latin on the fly, pushing back his hair, and steaming straight ahead impetuously with an idea, not always stopping to let someone else talk.
I trust that in his final days he found some personal consolation in the ancient philosophical tradition he loved so much.. which after all is strong on consolation. Dr. Strange wrote important articles, but everyone who knew him will surely admit that the knowledge he carried around in his head was the most impressive thing about him. His legacy will live in students, like myself, who remember fondly his love of ancient thought, and look for our own window realizations.
