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Obituary Notice: Agnes Kirsopp Lake Michels

Those of you who are acquainted with the contributions of Kirsopp Lake
to the study of early Christianity and its worlds may be interested in
the following cross-posting from the Bryn Mawr Reviews concerning his
legacy in the person of his daughter Nan and her work. The children of
the giants sometimes become giants in their own right.

Bob Kraft, UPenn (with permission from BMCR) 

Forwarded message:
> Date: Wed, 1 Dec 93 18:08:32 -0500
> Version: 5.5 -- Copyright (c) 1991/92, Anastasios Kotsikonas
> From: bmr@ccat.sas.upenn.edu (Bryn Mawr Reviews)
> Subject: BMR 93.11.15, Nan Michels
> 
>        Agnes Kirsopp Lake Michels died in Chapel Hill N.C. on November 30. 
> She took her bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in Latin at Bryn
> Mawr College, where she was a member of the faculty from 1934 until 1975,
> serving for many years as department chair.  Hers was not an inactive
> retirement: she lectured widely in Canadian and American universitites in
> the 1970's and following her move to Chapel Hill frequently taught courses
> or seminars at Duke University as well as the University of North
> Carolina. 
>        Her interest in Roman religion, which may seem to have come
> naturally enough given her family background, was fostered by time spent
> in Rome as a Fellow of the American Academy and especially in the company
> of Lily Ross Taylor, and was the focus of her research.  She devoted years
> to the preparation of a deceptively slender volume, *The Calendar of the
> Roman Republic* (1967), which, like the article, "The Versatility of
> Religio" published ten years later, reflected albeit imperfectly the
> enormous intellectual and emotional effort she made to come to grips with
> the religious mentality of the ancient Romans. 
>        "Rome and the Gods" (the title of her Martin lectures) dominated
> her thinking over the years no less than the responses of individual
> Romans to them, and her favorite authors were those on whom religion had
> weighed heavily in one way or another: Lucretius, Cicero, Horace, Livy,
> Vergil and Ovid.  In her last article, "The Insomnium of Aeneas", which
> deals with the notorious problem of Aeneas' return to the upper world
> through the gate of false dreams, Nan consulted these same authors (and
> Artemidorus too) as informants in their own right to arrive at her
> conclusion. 
>         "Vergil must have agreed with Horace that God deliberately
> conceals the future from mortal men, who should not be unduly concerned
> with it, but cope with the present." The observation, like many she made,
> is pithily expressed, but it too reveals what long years of study,
> reflection and worry hand enabled her to grasp as few others of her
> generation in the field did: the peculiar driving force of ancient Roman
> religion. 
> 
> Russell T. Scott 
> Bryn Mawr College
>