All Scholars

“Most eloquent among the sons of Scotland, educated at Glasgow and Oxford, you have for the last forty years enriched the world of classical letters with the richness of your scholarship. You have been at once a support and an ornament to humane learning in this, your adopted country. Generations of Columbia students can testify to the scope of your erudition and the precision of your wit. In nearly a score of books—doctis, Iuppiter, et laboriosis [Cat. 1.7]—you have charted the enduring forms and themes of literature, with a spirit as indefatigable as it is passionate. A Varro in learning, a Cicero in eloquence, you have not only defended the vitality and grace of the classical tradition, you have also embodied it.” So spoke Columbia President William McGill at the Spring 1977 commencement in awarding Gilbert Highet the D.Litt. for his stellar achievements as a world-class educator (McGill, Tribute of May 18, 1977). Consummate teacher, author, and literary critic, Highet became the first celebrity classicist, who used the classroom, his numerous publications, and the early electronic media to bring the brilliant writers of the classical world to the specialist scholar and the educated public. 

Born in Glasgow on June 22, 1906, Highet developed a zeal for reading as a young prodigy, which he cultivated while attending Hillhead High School (1913–24). At age eleven, challenged intellectually by his teachers, he began to learn French, Latin, and Greek—Greek from his Latin teacher James Buchanan during the lunch-hour and spare periods, exposing him during his studies to the advantages of the tutorial system. By age fourteen, he could read Homer and Vergil “with ease and for pleasure,” and by sixteen, Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, which he came upon via Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, and which, although difficult in Greek, he read “with passionate excitement.” By sixteen, he had read ten plays of Shakespeare and closely analyzed the characters of four of the greatest of them—Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Henry the Fifth, and The Merchant of Venice—“not the greatest from an adult point of view but great for sixteen-year-olds.” At sixteen, he wrote his first poem, after reading George Meredith’s sonnet “Lucifer in Starlight,” which he showed to his English teacher George Menary, who steered him to other poems of the same high quality (Highet, Letter of May 1, 1974, to Wesley Hartley).

After dazzling the faculty and his peers at Hillhead, Highet attended Glasgow University (1925–8), where he became the most famous classical scholar in Scotland. During his first year at Glasgow, he won the Blackstone Medal for Latin in a century-old oral competition and met fellow-student Helen MacInnes, who would become his lifetime companion and match his twenty-one books with her twenty-one spy-novels. At Glasgow, although he regarded his teacher J. S. Phillimore as a graceful translator of Terence, he was troubled by how Phillimore repeatedly engaged in scholarly polemic and ignored issues Highet felt would have sharpened the students’ critical perceptions. At Glasgow, he edited the Glasgow University Magazine, for which he also wrote articles, fiction, and poetry under the pseudonym of Cyrano, the eloquent hero of Edmond Rostand’s play, loosely based on the life of the writer and soldier Cyrano de Bergerac. He received his M.A. in Greek and Latin (the first degree awarded at Glasgow) in 1928 after winning both the Logan Memorial Medal and Prize and the Snell Exhibition and Newlands Scholarship, which served as his passport to four years of study at Oxford.  

Highet looked forward to leaving Glasgow, his “rough, ugly city,” and enjoying the graces that he associated with life at Oxford (Highet, The Immortal Profession, 151). At Balliol, Oxford (1929–32), he had three great teachers—Cyril Bailey, Maurice Bowra, and Gilbert Murray—and, although he admired all three greatly, he regarded Bailey “as the best teacher I have ever known” (Highet, Letter of February 8, 1949, to Cyril Bailey). At Balliol, he published articles, reviews, and poetry in Isis, Farrago, Oxford Poetry, Oxford Outlook, and Library Review, referring in a few of his pieces to the American scene and to some of America’s fresh writers, including T. S. Eliot and Archibald MacLeish. He also composed two verse-dramas—The Apple (on Joseph in Egypt) and Acts of Faith (on Scottish witch-trials)—which he staged and performed in the private theater of poet laureate John Masefield in honor of the Nobel Prize-winning poet William Butler Yeats. After winning the Ferguson Scholarship, the Craven Scholarship, and the Jenkyns Exhibition, he received his B.A. in Classics (the first degree awarded at Oxford) in 1932, with a double first in Mods and Greats, and married Helen MacInnes in that same year. 

Highet taught at St. John’s Oxford (1933–7) as Fellow and Tutor—a position for which Cyril Bailey had recommended him strongly (Bailey, Letter of December 4, 1931). While inspiring his students at St. John’s and studying for his M.A. in Classics, which he received in 1936, he coedited the New Oxford Outlook and wrote twenty translations for inclusion in The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation (Higham and Bowra, 1938). And yet he forbade his students to attend the lectures of E. R. Dodds, appointed Regius Professor of Greek in 1936, siding with Maurice Bowra and Denys Page, who opposed Dodds for favoring socialism and for focusing on postclassical texts (Stray 2019, 20–2). At St. John’s, while the Highets were raising their young son Keith, who would become an international lawyer, they co-translated from the German O. Keifer’s book, retitled Sexual Life in Ancient Rome, and G. Mayer’s book, retitled Friedrich Engels: A Biography. At St. John’s, Highet also published An Outline of Homer, a textbook for students who knew a little Attic Greek, and worked on Beginning Latin, a textbook for students who had no knowledge of Latin (Ball 2021, 18–9, for a detailed review of these textbooks).

During Highet’s fifth year at St. John’s, Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia, was preparing to recruit new faculty for the Department of Greek and Latin. He tried to hire Bowra, who declined, saying later in life: “I began to wonder how long I could hold out against money like that, but I finally decided that I couldn’t give up the corruption, ill will, and intrigue of the old world and went back” (Lerner 2017, 311). Bowra also allegedly told Butler that, although he probably would not be able to lure an Englishman to America, he might well be able to entice a Scotsman for the money, thus paving the way for Highet, who accepted the position of Visiting Associate for 1937–8. Having obtained a leave of absence from St. John’s, he looked forward enthusiastically to living in America with his wife and his son, disturbed by the lack of concern and the lack of opposition at Oxford dinner parties and high tables over the rise of Adolf Hitler. During his one-year appointment at Columbia, after negotiating with Butler about his title and his salary (Ball 2021, 6), he became a full Professor of Greek and Latin with tenure—a remarkable achievement in those days for someone just turning thirty-two.

Highet instantly became one of Columbia’s most popular teachers, living up to Cyril Bailey’s prediction that he would prove himself a brilliant force in the classroom. Early in his career at Columbia, he served as a tower of strength for the “Great Books” curriculum, where he taught the classical texts in English translation in the company of luminaries like Lionel Trilling, Mark Van Doren, and his fellow-classicist Moses Hadas. During his first year there, Butler asked William Abbott Oldfather, “Czar of Classics” at the University of Illinois and Visiting Professor at Columbia in Spring 1938, to prepare a report on Columbia‘s Classics faculty (Calder 1993, 364–72, for the text of the report). Although Oldfather evaluated the faculty in negative terms, depicting Highet himself as someone “not of professorial caliber [sic],” his report consisted of a series of shallow impressions, without any information about the classes he presumably had observed. Although universities did not conduct student evaluations in Oldfather’s time—today an essential part of a department program review—Highet’s students would applaud him in class and praise him in print (Ball 2021, 20 n. 66 and 71–6 for their testimonials).

At the outbreak of World War II, Highet was called up to serve in the British Army, which necessitated his requesting an extended leave from Columbia (1941–6). Serving under Sir William Stephenson, Director of British Security Coordination for the Western Hemisphere, he executed many activities shrouded in secrecy, which included the preparation of psychological profiles of Nazi leaders (K. Highet 2002, esp. 391–2). Using an approach developed by Sir Ronald Syme in his book The Roman Revolution, Highet predicted, with limited information about his German subjects, how they would behave in a variety of circumstances, based on his knowledge of the Roman emperors. He provided some information about these psychological “proso-profiles” (set up as “large card files”) during a radio interview broadcast in 1968 about the covert activities of British Intelligence in Latin America (Herron 1968 and Stevenson 1976, 348–9). Despite my many attempts to find out if the profiles still exist, the office of Sir Richard Moore, Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service of the British Government, refuses to confirm whether it has them out of concern for national security (Ball 2024, 101–2 n. 11). 

As World War II drew to a close, Highet, now a lieutenant colonel, participated in several other military activities that reinforced his contempt for Hitler and the Nazis. As a member of the British Army of occupation, he entered the smoldering remains of Hitler’s bunker, helped recover the gold reserves hidden by the Nazis, and attended the Nuremberg trials, where he watched Nazi leaders face the justice of their conquerors. While attending a performance of Jacques Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann in Berlin, he risked arrest by accidentally sitting in a stall reserved for a Russian general and his girlfriend (K. Highet 2002, esp. 407–9, for G. Highet’s account of this episode). As for the Germans, Highet despised only Hitler and the Nazis, although he differed, as did Moses Hadas, with two Columbia colleagues, not because they were German but for professional reasons (Ball 2021, 8–10 and 21–3, with reference to Obermayer 2008). Rarely away from his writing, he translated from the German W. Jaeger’s three-volume work, retitled Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, publishing volume 1 before the war and volumes 2–3 during the war—testifying to his respect for a great German scholar.

Returning to Columbia after the war, Highet published The Classical Tradition (1949), his pioneering book on the Greek and Roman influences on Western literature. While and after he served in the military, he somehow managed to (re)read/research an extraordinary number of classical texts for this volume, including all the relevant scholarship, with the result that he had the first draft accepted by Oxford in April 1947. Surveying the classical influences from the Dark Ages to the mid-twentieth century in a vigorous and well-organized manner, he packed chunks of information into every page and every footnote, while deliberately excluding the Latin texts of postclassical authors. His book received mostly positive reviews—from Edmund Wilson’s letter of November 7, 1949, which also raised sixteen scholarly questions, all recently annotated (Ball 2024), to Harold Bloom’s insightful appraisal of 2015, the foreword of the book’s latest reprint. Although Eduard Fraenkel stated that this book exemplified Dilettantiererei [sic] (Calder 2004 and 2005), it prefigured today’s reception studies and continues to offer a treasure trove of valuable information (Ball 2021, 33–5, for a detailed review of this volume).

On the heels of The Classical Tradition, Highet published The Art of Teaching (1950), which he dedicated to Cyril Bailey, whom he regarded as his greatest teacher. This book, reprinted numerous times and translated into sixteen languages (from Arabic to Urdu), consists of four highly readable and informative sections: the teacher, the teacher’s methods, great teachers and their pupils, and teaching in everyday life. Upon Highet’s request, Bailey sent him a letter expressing his views on the qualities he believed that a good teacher should possess, a letter that ultimately inspired the section of the book on the qualities of such a teacher (Bailey, Letter of April 2, 1949, to Highet). Highet’s insightful examination of great teachers includes Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Jesus, Renaissance teachers (including great authors), Jesuit teachers (including a long line of learned students), and teachers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book generally received positive reviews from various educators, charmed by its emphasis on the human/humane relationship between teacher and student, conveying a genuine aura of timeless truth (Ball 2021, 30–1, for a detailed review of this volume).

Highet taught many courses at Columbia, including a course based on The Classical Tradition called “Classical Influences in European and American Literature.” Although he enjoyed teaching this course, related to his trailblazing book, he enjoyed even more teaching the Latin authors in the original language—quite appropriate for the man who became Anthon Professor of the Latin Language and Literature in 1950. He loved most of all: Cicero, for his powerful oratory; Petronius, for making boring subjects interesting; Lucretius, for his tender un-Roman melancholy; Vergil, for giving Rome its epic masterpiece; and Juvenal, because he exposed decadence and corruption. He despised Plato, for setting out the principles of dictatorship, and Julius Caesar, for becoming dictatorship’s most accomplished practitioner—making no secret about his strong pull to the democracy he found in America, where he became a citizen in 1951. He would later write an essay about Thomas Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, a poetic collection that he credited with preparing him as a schoolboy to prefer democracy to aristocracy and a republic to a monarchy (Highet, Powers of Poetry,197–204, esp. 204).

Highet became a living legend as a teacher, exemplifying his principles in The Art of Teaching, while providing instruction in a rigorous yet entertaining framework. When he entered the classroom—tall, erect, impeccably dressed, with his wry, tight-lipped smile—his students sensed that the curtain was going up on a Broadway play and even compared him to the distinguished award-winning actor Laurence Olivier.  With his Scottish-English burr and his riveting, rapid-fire delivery, he would dazzle his students with his powerful lectures, brilliant in their organization and brimming with critical insight, and sometimes even sing to make a point or to drive an argument home. He wielded a window-pole to imitate a Roman legionnaire, or impersonating Marius at the gates of Rome, crouched down and sprang across the floor to battle his rival Sulla, thereby employing a showmanship very likely unparalleled in the American classroom. The inspired anecdotes, the poignant pauses, and the sudden bursts of laughter (the laughter possibly an echo of Maurice Bowra [Calder 1978, 430]) all played a part in an intellectual experience that furnished his students with a solid foundation for learning.

Highet published Juvenal the Satirist (1954), his most controversial book, which ignited a great debate among classical scholars about Juvenal and his poetic expertise. In it, Highet attempts to reconstruct the life of Juvenal, analyzes each of his sixteen satires individually, and traces the reception of his satires from the Roman Empire to modern times—all on the assumption that Juvenal speaks exclusively in his own voice. This book received mostly positive reviews, with some criticism (even from his own teacher [Bailey, Letter of September 21, 1954, to G. Highet]) that Highet was basing his reconstruction on fragmentary evidence he had examined in his 1937 article on Juvenal. Criticism also centered on his use of the biographical approach, expressed primarily by W. S. Anderson (1955), who was beginning to advance the persona-theory, triggering decades of disagreement, with scholars arguing each side of the issue in equal numbers. Although the controversy continues to this day, where a middle-ground position seems appropriate, Highet’s book continues to provide the only comprehensive examination of Juvenal’s satires in English (Ball 2021, 36–40, for a detailed review of this volume).  

Highet then published Poets in a Landscape (1957), on a more lighthearted subject, directed primarily at a general audience rather than at an audience of classical scholars. In it, making a pilgrimage through Italy, Highet studies seven Roman poets (Catullus, Vergil, Horace, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, and Juvenal) while examining their poetry against a backdrop of the places associated with them, ending with a homage to Rome. It contains forty-eight black-and-white photographs of those locations, taken by Highet himself, and his translations of numerous passages from the seven poets, in which he gracefully employs his own guidelines for translating the epic, elegiac, and lyric meters. Scholars like Brooks Otis (1958) pardoned his use of the biographical approach in this book because of the book’s great appeal and reviewed it favorably from its publication to Michael Putnam’s eloquent critique of 2010, the foreword of the book’s latest reprint. In 1957, the Italian government awarded Highet the Premio ENIT (Ente Nazionale Italiano per il Turismo), a gold medal for all this book was doing to promote and celebrate Italian culture and Italian tradition (Ball 2021, 40–3, for a detailed review of this volume).

By the mid-1950s, Highet became fully committed to Columbia and to New York as his home, at which time he also became widely recognized by the educated public. For Columbia’s bicentennial, he wrote Man’s Unconquerable Mind (1954), on the powers of the intellect (ending with a dedication to Columbia and other great universities), and The Migration of Ideas (1954), about the influence of powerful thoughts on human affairs. He served as chief literary critic for Harper’s Magazine (1952–4), in which capacity he would review new books every month, or rather, clusters of books on different subjects, as reflected in the title of his column, which would change from one month to another. He served as chair of the Editorial Advisory Board for Horizon (1958–77), for which he wrote numerous articles, including his translation—the first to appear in English and in the original meters—of Menander’s newly discovered comedy Dyskolos (Highet 1959). As a member of the Board of Judges for the Book of the Month Club (1954–78), where fellow judge Clifton Fadiman (1976) called him its most learned member, he reviewed over 400 books for Book of the Month Club News, books on classical and modern subjects.

Highet captured the public eye most of all with his lectures on his weekly radio program (1952–9), initially broadcast on WQXR, the radio station of the New York Times. His lectures, carried by over 300 radio stations in the United States and Canada, and by the BBC and Voice of America, recalled the broadcasts presented on the BBC by Gilbert Murray, whom Highet may have seen as a model for his own career (Suits 1990, 183). Highet’s lectures focused on classical and contemporary subjects, many of which he revised and published in his books People, Places, and Books (1953), A Clerk of Oxenford (1954), Talents and Geniuses (1957), The Powers of Poetry (1960), and Explorations (1971). His lectures centered on such luminaries as Horace and Apuleius, Shakespeare and Dickens, and Bach and Brahms, and enabled Highet, who had studied piano and given private recitals in his youth, to draw analogies between literary and musical styles. Although WQXR has made 74 of his original 283 radio lectures available online, CBS has no record (as far as I have been able to determine) of his two television lectures on Pieter Bruegel’s paintings (Sources, Highet, for details on these extant/lost programs). 

Having published a book on his “darling” Juvenal (as he called Juvenal in class), Highet published another book, The Anatomy of Satire (1962), on the entire satiric genre. In it, he examines from classical antiquity to the mid-twentieth century a wide variety of authors from different cultures and different countries, all within the framework of three main (at times overlapping) satiric categories: monologue, parody, and narrative. Embracing not only literary satire but also the satiric impulse found in art and music, he celebrates in satiric style the satiric aspects of such classical authors as Aristophanes, Lucilius, Lucretius, Horace, Persius, Seneca, Petronius, Juvenal, Apuleius, and Lucian. The reviews included the criticism that he had clothed his text with the form he aspired to anatomize (Witke 1963), their mixed nature epitomized by Ulrich Knoche’s phrase in dem eigenwillig-ingeniösen Buch (“in this eccentrically brilliant book”) (Knoche 1971³, 3). In 1963, Highet received the Goodwin Award of Merit from the APA (now the SCS) for this book’s contribution to classical scholarship, a book exemplifying Highet’s uniquely humane brand of scholarship (Ball 2021, 43–6, for a detailed review of this volume).

During the 1960s, Highet became increasingly intrigued by Vergil’s Aeneid, a work he had regarded earlier in life as a poor carbon copy of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Coming to appreciate Vergil’s epic as a masterpiece of creative adaptation, he would teach it in its entirety, in the original Latin, over the course of an academic year: Books 1–6 (the Odyssean books) in the fall and Books 7–12 (the Iliadic books) in the spring. His cogent lectures would cover structure, character development, Vergil’s adaptations of Homer, Vergil’s subtle, double-edged treatment of Augustus, and the sound effects Vergil had planted in the speeches of his characters to reveal their innermost emotions. Reciting key hexameters, he would hiss like Dido sibilating at Aeneas (Aen. 4.305–6 [s’s emphasized]), groan like Turnus preparing for death (Aen.12.648–9 [m’s emphasized]), and stutter like Juno finally bowing to Jupiter’s wishes (Aen. 12.808–9 [t’s emphasized]). He became particularly fascinated by the speeches in the Aeneid, delivered a lecture on them in 1965 for the Columbia Seminar on Classical Civilization, and conducted much scholarly research on them in preparation for the book he would publish on the subject.  

During his thirty-five-year career at Columbia, Highet never found anything as disturbing as the student protests that erupted on campus beginning in Spring 1968. The protests, sparked by Columbia’s plans to build a controversial gymnasium near Harlem and fueled by America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, culminated in the students’ occupation of five buildings and their removal by the police in a violent clash. The initial protests occurred toward the end of Highet’s three-year appointment as Chair of Greek and Latin, when, about to take a sabbatical, he invited Alan and Averil Cameron to teach at Columbia on visiting appointments for the 1967–8 academic year. When Alan told Highet that Averil would be giving birth just before Columbia’s on-duty period, Highet and his colleague William Calder, for well-intentioned reasons, tried to dissuade them, or at least Averil, from coming to New York until Spring 1968. Undeterred by Calder's advice to “leave the baby with mamas or fecund aunts [sic],” Averil spent all 1967–8 at Columbia with her baby (Letters of Highet, Calder, and Alan Cameron in the Alan Cameron Papers; Ball 2022, n. 22; Averil Cameron 2021 and 2024).

As the Vietnam War continued, the student protests erupted again in Spring 1969, during which time Highet strove to maintain the highest standards of teaching. Although he had misgivings about America’s participation in the war, he despised the student radicals for exceeding the purpose of staging an antiwar protest, at whom he allegedly directed his paraphrase of Matthew 7.6: “I shall not cast pearls before swine.” When some threatened to burn down Butler Library tier by tier, he may have recalled the Dark Ages, which almost extinguished the Greek and Roman classics—for him, minds alive on the shelves, silently communicating the wisdom of the ancient authors. In Spring 1969, he participated in the doctoral defense of classicist (then candidate) David Sider—a defense plagued by the loud rhythmic shouts of a protest rally, which reminded Highet of the SIEG HEIL! SIEG HEIL! SIEG HEIL! of a Hitler demonstration. When demonstrators blockaded the exit to his building, he declared that he would be damned if he would leave by the window and got them to remove the barricades to a critical stairway (Highet, The Immortal Profession, 126–8, and Ball 2021, 14–5 and 74).

Highet published The Speeches in Vergil’s Aeneid (1972)—directed at classicists—a book Georg Luck had read in draft and had evaluated for him in writing (Ball 2020). Six learned chapters consider: the importance of the speeches; their length, number, and distribution; formal speeches (political, legalistic, etc.); informal speeches (factual and emotional); the speeches and their models; Florus’s question Vergilius orator an poeta? Seven rich appendices list: all the speeches in sequence; speeches by type (apostrophes, commands, etc.); speeches isolated or in groups; speeches by the names of the speakers; speeches by disguised characters; speeches in larger speeches; speeches in oratio obliqua. Highet’s book has received favorable reviews from its publication well into the twenty-first century except for criticism (Anon. 1973) that it relies too heavily on the statistical material in the appendices, which scholars generally regard as a very valuable resource. Its seven citations in The Virgil Encyclopedia (Thomas and Ziolkowski 2014) and thirty-five citations in a book on the reception of Vergil’s speeches (Vallat 2022) signify that it has indeed stood the test of time (Ball 2021, 46–51, for a detailed review of this volume).

In 1972, the year in which Highet published The Speeches in Vergil’s Aeneid, he retired from his position as Anthon Professor and became Anthon Professor Emeritus. After the student protests, no longer regarding Columbia or New York City as peaceful and friendly, he and his wife transferred their official residence from their Park Avenue apartment (which they retained) to their summer home in East Hampton, Long Island. During retirement, Highet published twelve articles in classical journals and completed six articles he was planning to publish in classical journals, with most of the eighteen centering on major Greek and Roman authors, all listed above under Articles (Selected). The published articles include, most significantly, “Masks and Faces in Satire” (Highet 1974), his parting defense of the biographical approach, in which he passionately turns W. S. Anderson’s rationale for the persona-theory (Anderson 1964) back on Anderson. Of the articles he was planning to publish, “Mutilations in the Text of Dio Chrysostom” (Highet 1977) deserves serious consideration, in which he contends that Dio’s speeches survived in a single mutilated copy, attributable to their circulation on papyrus codices. 

Toward the end of his retirement, Highet published his final book, The Immortal Profession (1976), which serves as a sequel or companion to his book The Art of Teaching. Dedicated “To My Pupils 1932–1972,” covering his five years at St. John’s and thirty-five years at Columbia, his final book contains eleven essays on “the joys of teaching and learning,” words inspired by Cyril Bailey (Bailey, Letter of April 2, 1949, to Highet). This book includes: seven essays on a liberal education; “The Class of ’64,” a lecture given at Adelphi University; and three essays on three of the world’s great teachers—Gilbert Murray, Albert Schweitzer, and Jesus (about his relationship with his disciples). In “The Class of ’64,” a bravura performance in which Highet rose to the occasion, he took the graduates via a reverse time warp from 1964 to 1864 to 1764 to 1664 to 64 B.C. and to 64 A.D., describing life during pivotal and critical moments in world history. This book, like The Art of Teaching, generally received favorable reviews from various educators, charmed by Highet’s ongoing optimism about what teaching had meant for him and could mean for others (Ball 2021, 31–2, for a detailed review of this volume).

Following a two-year battle with cancer, Highet died on January 20, 1978, and soon afterward, in keeping with his wishes, his ashes were scattered over the Atlantic. In a poem imagining how he might die, he hoped that he would take his final breath climbing a hill with his head “quite full of poetry and music, climbing / together with his one true friend and love …”—an allusion to Helen MacInnes (Highet 1963, “Obit”). In another poem, echoing Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, 1.3.39–40), he asked MacInnes to remember him as they lived secretly and happily, saying: “He was a merry man, God rest his soul; / he was a merry man, and loved you well” (Highet 1971, “Post-Obit”). Six months before his death, he composed a poignant piece of poetic prose, a dialogue between the Archangel Gabriel and the Blessed Virgin Mary, in which he reunited them on the day of her Assumption into Heaven (Highet 1977, “A Justified Assumption”). Although he did not expect to be remembered for his work (“a paragraph at most”: his words to MacInnes in “Post-Obit”), glowing obituaries about him appeared in many newspapers, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the London Times. 

On the Ides of March, 1978, Columbia held a memorial service for Highet in St. Paul’s Chapel, where, eleven years earlier, he had given the eulogy for Moses Hadas. The service included testimonials by five individuals from the academic and literary world, who spoke in alternation with moving, uplifting musical selections by Purcell, Vivaldi, Bach, and Brahms—composers whom Highet had greatly appreciated in life. The five speakers included: Professor Alan Cameron; Julian Muller, Vice-President of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers; Professor Peter Pouncey; Clifton Fadiman, Highet’s fellow judge on Book of Month Club; and Columbia President William McGill. Cameron, who had taught at Columbia in 1967–8 at Highet’s invitation and eventually succeeded Highet as Anthon Professor, stated that never again would the profession see the entire field of Classics surveyed through the perspective of one man’s vision. Ann Dewey, a former student of Highet, who regarded the service as balanced and as polished as any of his lectures, upon hearing Purcell’s Trumpet Voluntary, remembered how Highet would conclude a class by declaring: “Always leave them on a high note!”

At his memorial service, Highet indeed left his audience on a high note, as he had left generations of students, after inspiring them with the wisdom of the ancients. And yet, some colleagues saw him as distant and unfriendly (Suits 1990, 189) or as a popularizer promoting middlebrow culture (Rubin 2006 and 2013)—colleagues who failed to realize that no one had done more for Classics in America (Calder 1978, 431). Nevertheless, a popularizer in the most positive sense, he wore that label as a badge of honor, and, unlike the stereotypical academic, he invited the scholar and the educated layperson to celebrate the wisdom, strength, and brilliance of the great classical authors. Regarding classical literature as the fountainhead of moral and intellectual standards, he would encourage his students to cultivate above all else and with equal strength “a good intellect and a good character” (Highet, Letter of January 31, 1971, to Robert Ball). Regarding these two attributes as the key to success and to happiness, he lived up to his vision of the true liberal teacher as a liberal traditionalist—a vision one may observe in his final book, in which his love of teaching becomes entwined with his love of learning.  

One may also observe Highet’s love of learning entwined with his philosophy of life in his final book, in this illuminating passage: “The pleasures of learning are indeed pleasures. But in fact the word should be changed. The true name is happiness. There are three other types of happiness, superior to that of learning: the happiness of love fulfilled; the happiness of serving mankind; and the happiness of creation. Though it is beneath these, learning is still a great happiness, and can be a help toward the attainment of those others; and it is an essential part of a complete life. No learner has ever found that he ran short of subjects to explore. But many people who avoided learning, or abandoned it, find that life is drained dry. They spend thirty years in a club chair looking glumly out at the sand and the ocean; in a hotel lounge gossiping about the other inmates; in a porch swing waiting for somebody to drive down the road. But that is not how to live. The chief aim of education is to show you, after you make a livelihood, how to enjoy living; and you can live longest and best and most rewardingly by attaining and preserving the happiness of learning” (Highet, The Immortal Profession,19).