All Scholars

George Duckworth was noted as a humane and learned teacher who began his career chiefly as an instructor in Greek, later shifting mostly to Latin (prompted in part, he used to claim, by being once introduced to an audience as “a man who knows his Greek from alpha to zeta”). He was the author of seven books and over fifty articles. He is best known for his work on Roman comedy, particularly Plautus, a standard work on the subject that contained information and fair representations of arguments on either side of the many questions surrounding sources and performance of Roman Comedy. In the 1960s, before computers were involved in humanities research, Duckworth manually scanned every line of Latin hexameter poetry to show favorite combinations of dactyls and spondees in the first four feet of the line in all Latin poets. He had begun the project by working on Virgil's metrics (he contributed several useful surveys of Vergilian scholarship)  and discovered to his satisfaction that not only Virgil's poetry but all Latin poetry was based on the Golden Proportion, the notion that a smaller portion of an object tis to the larger portion as the larger portion is to the whole. This is expressed numerically as 1.618 and it was not long before Classics students at Princeton wore t-shirts that said, "Altertumswissenschaft=1.618."  Duckworth was, in the words of his student Karl Galinsky, "a 'professor' in the best tradition: he had his own bent of mind and therefore encouraged others to develop their own; he never stopped working and looking out for new horizons; and he was both authoritative and humane."