• Date of Birth: July 02, 1934
  • Born City: Cardiff Glan
  • Born State/Country: Wales
  • Date of Death: April 09, 2001
  • Death City: Northampton
  • Death State/Country: MA
  • Married: Nadia Margolis, 1984.
  • Education:

    B.A. U. of South Wales, 1954; Oxford, 1956; M.A. 1960.

  • Professional Experience:

    Instr. class. 1959-61, Amherst Coll., asst. prof. 1962-68; asso. prof., 1968-73; prof. 1973-2001; asst. lectr. Latin & Greek, U. Liverpool, 1961-62; ACLS fellow, 1976-77; Guggenheim fellow, 1980-81.

  • Publications:

    “Gelliana Graeca,” CQ X (1960) 179-80; “Four Lexicographical Notes on Gellius,” Mnemosyne XV (1962) 272-74; “The Date of Birth of Aulus Gellius,” CP LVIII (1963) 143-49; Noctes Atticae, I: Libri I-X; II: Libri XI-XII (ed.) Oxford Class. Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969) REVIEWS: G&R XVI 1969 232-233 Sewter | AC XXXVIII 1969 582-584 Knecht | Latomus XXVIII 1969 707-709 Verdière | REL XLVII 1969 544 Marache | CW LXIII 1970 174 Avery | RBPh XLVIII 1970 462-464 Luck | CR XXI 1971 385-390 Goodyear | Mnemosyne XXV 1972 95-98 McGushin | Emerita XL 1972 215-216 Mariner Bigorra | CJ LXVIII 1972 87-88 Welsh | AAHG XXVI 1973 69-71 Schmidt; “Pietro da Montagnana and the Text of Aulus Gellius in Paris B.N. Lat. 13038,” with A.C. De La Mare & R.H. House, Scriptorium XXX (1976) 219-25; Vitae (ed.) Bibl. script. Graec. et Rom. Teubneriana (Leipzig: BSB Teubner, 1977; 3rd ed. 1991) REVIEWS: BStudLat VIII 1978 122 Cupaiuolo | DLZ XCIX 1978 847-848 Luppe | CR XXIX 1979 55-56 Winterbottom | Gnomon LI 1979 748-751 Malcovati | Helmantica XXX 1979 364 Guillén | Latomus XXXIX 1980 898 Jal | CP LXXV 1980 85-87 Håkanson (3rd ed.): AC 62 1993 313-314 B. Rochette; The Manuscript Tradition of Cornelius Nepos BICS Suppl. XXXVII (1977) REVIEWS: Emerita XLVII 1979 455-457 Mayer | RPh LIII 1979 174 André | AC XLVIII 1979 311-312 Knecht | CR XXIX 1979 53-55 Reeve; “Clare College Ms. 26 and the Circulation of Aulus Gellius 1-7 in Medieval England and France,” with J. Martin & R.H. Rouse, MS XLII (1980) 353-94; “Further Thoughts on dicto = dictito,” LCM VII (1982) 120; “The New Morel,” LCM X (1985) 71; Isidore de Séville. Étymologies: Étymologies, Book ii: Rhetoric (ed. & trans.) Coll. Auteurs lat. du Moyen Âge (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1983) REVIEWS: REL LXII 1984 454-457 Holtz | MH XLII 1985 365 Paschoud | StudMon XXVII 1985 177 Olivar | Euphrosyne XIV 1986 260-261 Nascimento | JRS LXXVIII 1988 265-267 Hillgarth | RH CCLXXIV 1985 567-568 Tilliette | Gnomon LX 1988 653-655 Hiltbrunner; “A New Manuscript of Tiberius Claudius Donatus,” in “Owls to Athens”: Essays on Classical Subjects Presented to Sir Kenneth Dover, ed. E.M.  Craik (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) 363-65; “Tiberius Claudius Donatus on Virgil Aen. 6. 1-157” (ed.) Manuscripta 37 (1993) 3-20; Hygini Fabulae (ed.) Bibl. scriptorum Graec et Roman Teubneriana (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1993) REVIEWS: AC 1996 65: 332-333 Pierre-Jacques Dehon; Servius and Commentary on Virgil, Occasional papers, University of North Carolina at Asheville 5 (Asheville, N.C.: Pegasus Press, 1997); “The Spangenberg Bifolium of Servius: The Manuscript and the Text,” RFIC 128,2 (2000) 192-209.

  • Notes:

    Peter K. Marshall, Moore Professor of Latin and Clas­sics at Amherst College, taught at Amherst for nearly forty-two years. As a student at Canton High School in Cardiff, he excelled not only in his classwork, but also in chess: he became champion of Wales as a competitor in international tournaments. Accepted at Oxford University at age 15, he began his studies there, but soon became homesick and returned to Wales. After graduating from the University of South Wales, he moved on to Wadham College at Oxford, where he studied with Roger Mynors, re­ceiving a B.A. with First Class Honours. By then he had already moved to the United States and joined the faculty at Amherst Col­lege, where, apart from a year at the University of Liverpool, he spent the rest of his career.When Peter came to Amherst in 1959, he taught a vari­ety of courses in Greek and Latin and also assumed re­sponsibility for a survey course in Roman Civilization that had been offered at the College in one form or an­other since 1918. Under Peter's watch the course was immensely popular, sometimes attracting as many as 240 students, well over 15% of the student body. Stu­dents came to learn about Latin literature and Roman history and their influence on later Western civilization, and also to hear Peter's anecdotes about people of all times and places, from ancient Rome to twentieth-cen­tury Oxford. His dry wit and tautly dramatic style of lecturing left indelible impressions on four decades of Amherst students. Quite a few have followed his lead in going to Oxford to study or in becoming classicists, or both; one of them, Peter Derow, now holds the chair once held by one of Peter's own mentors, George Forrest, at Wadham College. Peter's specialty was textual criticism. Not infrequently he would remind his students and colleagues of the shaky ground lying under some of the texts we were reading; his own work was directed primarily to improving upon that situation. His thorough and rigorous investigations uncovered new manuscripts and brought order to the tangle of manuscripts already known. His work has given us editions of a quality to endure in all three of the ma­jor publishing houses of classical texts: Aulus Gellius, with Oxford, Cornelius Nepos and Hyginus, both with Teubner, and later authors less known by most classi­cists, Isidore of Seville, in the Budé series, and Servatus Lupus, with Teubner again. As this list suggests, Peter was particularly interested in the scholarship of anti­quity, that is, in authors who were themselves scholars.

  • Sources:

    Amherst Student (11 April 2001); APA Newsletter (June 2001) 9-10.

  • Author: Rebecca Sinos / Cynthia Damon