All Scholars

Mr. Bruère, as we all called him, was very much the Old School. He was part of the WASP ascendancy. His father had been president of the Bowery Savings Bank in New York. He had gone to the best schools. That meant Exeter and Harvard, where he wrote his dissertation under E. K. Rand and later became part of the Servius team. I do not know why he deserted the East for Chicago. Rand would have had colleagues there in Latin palaeography. Like so many of his generation, he was loyal to one institution. He was a wealthy, modest, cultivated gentleman with a winter home in Florida who did not need to raise his salary by deceiving his colleagues. He managed administration efficiently and fairly. He taught—usually graduate seminars—for 37 years at Chicago with an occasional quarter free for research. Classical Philology, the journal founded by Paul Shorey and Edward Capps, was the center of his life. As editor he was ably assisted by Benedict Einarson and E. L. Bassett. It flourished under his aegis. Many, many articles were improved by his exactitude. His terse, expert reviews guided generations of readers. He was ever ready to encourage the deserving young but unyielding in his standards. The cost was that he never completed his commentary on Ovid, Metamorphoses nor a book on Lucan. He knew too much. He was ahead of his time in valuing late poets, after Housman Lucan, but also Silius Italicus, even Petrarch and Vida, when no one else did. His famous articles on Lucan's Virgil anticipated much modern Rezeptionsforschung. His view of the title of the epic has been widely but not universally accepted. Although modern critics, e.g., F. M. Ahl, may disagree, Bruère posed the questions and provided the answers that must be refuted rather than ignored, when not accepted. He belonged to a species today not just endangered but extinct. He was a gentleman and a scholar.