All Scholars

Andrew Thomas Cole, Jr., to avoid confusion with his father, a tuberculosis specialist, was known to friends and family as Tom, and professionally he published under the names A. Thomas Cole and Thomas Cole.

A precocious student, Cole left Urbana in 1946 at age 13 to attend Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He graduated cum laude in 1950, winning both the Faculty Prize (for the graduating senior with the highest grades) and the Andover-Harvard prize (a scholarship for an outstanding student who will attend Harvard). Somewhat young for his class, socially reserved, and physically awkward, Cole never went out for athletics and seems to have participated in only three clubs or activities in his later years at Phillips Academy, one of them being the Latin Play his senior year, Plautus’s Curculio. His natural diffidence and academic achievements earned him the contemptuous respect of his classmates, who voted him “Class Grind” and “Typical Exeter Man.” Cole had by this time distinguished himself as a gifted philologist, winning the Valpey Prize for Latin composition, the Johnson Prize for Greek composition, and the Catlin Prize (for the most outstanding classics student in the senior class). 

Cole matriculated at Havard in 1950, just days after his 17th birthday. There he began a life-long friendship with Eric Havelock (1903-88), who had joined the Harvard faculty only three years earlier. Cole graduated in 1954 summa cum laude with an A. B. in Classics, winning in his senior year the Bowdoin Prize for Greek composition with his translation of a passage from Cedric Whitman’s (1916-79) Sophocles, A Study of Heroic Humanism (1951) into Attic Greek (HU 89.165.1167). He also delivered the Latin Oration at commencement, which he entitled “De studiis humanis” (HUC 6954). Although short and replete with classical tropes, allusions, and platitudes, Cole’s oration is nonetheless of interest for what it reveals of his attitude toward the field to which he would devote his professional career. Adapting Horace Odes 3.1 [https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/horace/carm3.shtml] and anticipating C. P. Snow by several years, Cole laments the decline of the study of Classics, the growing prestige of the natural sciences, and what he saw as a concomitant cultural shift towards a depressingly philistine insistence on utility: et fateor, amici, ego istum praecipue virum odi et arceo, quisquis quotiens de re qualibet agitur, semper “cui bono” rogat, “quomodo hoc usui generi humano erit”– quasi debemus omnibus temporibus omnis orbis terrarium saluti consulere ("And I must confess that no one annoys me more than the man who, whenever any proposal is being discussed, always wishes to know who will profit by it and in what way it will serve the interests of society--as if it were our duty to consider the needs of the whole world in everything we do."--Cole's translation). If anything, the following decades only confirmed Cole in his view that not only Classics, but also the entire cultural life of the United States was in terminal decline. 

After graduating from Harvard, Cole won a Fulbright scholarship to study in Italy in 1954, most of which he spent in Rome, after which he was drafted into the U.S. Army, fulfilling two years of military service in Hawaii. Cole maintained his connection to the Italian academy for the rest of his professional life, returning to Rome and Urbino for sabbaticals and collaborating with Italian colleagues, particularly Bruno Gentili (1915-2014), whose Poetry and Its Public in Ancient Greece: From Homer to the Fifth Century he translated in 1988. Cole returned to Harvard in 1957 for his PhD. He submitted his thesis, directed by Havelock and John H. Finley (1904-95) in September, 1959 and graduated on March 14, 1960, at the age of 26. In his preface Cole credits Havelock’s recent book, The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics (1957), as the major intellectual and methodological influence animating his work. Cole published his thesis four years later in revised form as a long article in Historia (vol. 13, 1964)

Cole’s first academic position was at Stanford. In 1963 Havelock moved to Yale, where he became the Sterling Professor of Classics and Chair of Classics, with a mandate to remake the department from one that had been focused on ancient history and archaeology under Mikhail Rostovzeff (1870-1952) and his student C. Bradford Welles (1901-69) to one on the more literary model of Harvard. Cole was one of Havelock’s first recruits in his restructuring, serving initially as a visiting lecturer for the fall term of 1964, and a year later taking up a full-time position as Associate Professor of Classics in the fall of 1965. Six years later in 1971 he was promoted to full professor. This promotion, planned by Havelock as early as 1968 (based on correspondence between the two) and shepherded by Adam Parry (1928-71), whose Harvard thesis was also advised by Havelock, and who was himself promoted to full professor and chair of Classics at Yale in 1968, helped to cement one of the pillars of the new philological foundation Havelock had laid for Yale. In the event, it was a foundation that Parry would not have the opportunity to build upon, as he died immediately afterwards on June 8, 1971 in a motorcycle accident. Havelock himself retired two years later in 1973. Cole spent his entire academic career at Yale, retiring in spring 2000. He subsequently taught one semester at Harvard in retirement (Spring 2003).

After some early publications, including his first monograph, Democritus and the Sources of Greek Anthropology, there followed a decade (1973 to 1983) in which Cole published nothing, but instead devoted his time to two major projects that ultimately appeared in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Epiploke (1988) and The Origins of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (1991). We know from a letter to John Finley (Aug. 19, 1973) that Epiploke was largely complete by 1973, but that Cole was having trouble finding a publisher for this infamously dense, highly idiosyncratic, and still controversial book which aimed at nothing less than a complete revolution in the rhythmical and metrical analysis of Greek poetry. Herbert Golder read the manuscript for his dissertation work in 1983, but Cole only succeeded in getting Harvard to publish the manuscript, after much revision, five years later in 1988. The Origins of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece – by far Cole’s most influential work – was also a long time in preparation and, as noted by several reviewers, clearly shows its intellectual point of departure in Havelockian theories of orality and literacy, tracing back to Cole’s dissertation work. Like his first book, and indeed all of his work, it was praised for its ingenuity and deep learning, even if it at times seemed to devolve into special pleading and failed to convince, in part because his claims were so holistic and totalizing. Even so, in the lapidary formulation of Thomas Hubbard (reviewing Pindar's Feasts or The Music of Power (1992)), “Cole is always stimulating, even when not fully convincing” (CW 88 (1994) 128). Ever drawn to some of the thorniest problems in philology, Cole’s last book, Ovidius mythistoricus: Legendary Time in the Metamorphoses is yet another characteristically ambitious project, this time to elucidate the elusive organizational principle of Ovid’s great epic. Finally, Cole advertised in 2002, but seems never to have completed, what he himself called his “most ambitious scholarly project,” a political history of fifth-century Athens tentatively entitled The Alcmaeonid Tyranny from Cleisthenes to Alcibiades.

A classicist’s Classicist, Cole was, from the start of his career at Stanford to his retirement at Yale, called on to teach Greek and Latin composition, stylistics, and metrics, classes to which he was not only well suited, but also for which he was, increasingly, uniquely competent to teach. He taught composition every term that he was at Stanford and during his term visiting at Yale in 1964 (Greek metrics (Classics 116a) and Latin Prose Comp (L 150a and b)), and thereafter regularly at Yale, including his very last class the Spring 2000 term (Advanced Latin Prose Comp (Latin 790a)). Indeed, no one else taught Latin prose composition at Yale during his thirty-five tenure except once: Ralph Hexter in 1989/1990. William Desmond recalls taking Latin Prose Composition with Cole in the mid-1990s:

"Latin Prose Composition was unexpectedly one of my favourite classes and I found it a tremendous experience not only to work through Bradley's Arnold but also to try a hand at Latin in different styles from Cato the Elder to Apuleius. There was a composition and author/style every week and I remember sweating over the composition of the week until it seemed perfect. Tom would mark it right then and there as he sat on the sofa in his office of Phelps, crossing out words and adding others with his red pen. In a few minutes it was mangled to pieces, barely clinging to life, and I would think, 'Oh God, now I'm in trouble.' But then he'd hand it back with a 'That was pretty good to my astonishment and relief. His knowledge of Latin was impressive, so I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to study with him. The class itself was in the morning and he used to come in and start lecturing straightaway without preamble. At some point in later years, he said to me that 'he had taught the class so many times that he could teach it in his sleep — and probably did'."

Cole was also the only professor in the Yale department during his time to teach seminars in both languages, poetry and prose, ranging across all genres and periods. From a curricular perspective, Cole was a Classics Department unto himself: in addition to the Greek and Latin surveys (both halves), he taught seminars on the 5th-century Greek Sophists, Pindar, Greek historiography, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, 4th-century Greek rhetoric, Roman comedy, Plautus, Terence, Lucretius, Cicero (oratorical and philosophical works), Livy, Lucretius, Ovid, Suetonius, Silver Age Latin, and Post-Vergilian epic. It seems that he never taught a large undergraduate lecture class or seminar in translation. His philological facility and breadth did not go unappreciated: his Yale faculty retirement tribute in 2000 praised his “legendary talents as a linguist,” being “doctus utriusque linguae,” and whose “ambidexterity flourished to the great benefit of the Yale Classics department, where alone among your colleagues you have regularly taught on both the Greek and Latin side: poetry, metrics, rhetoric, philosophy, and historiography.” https://fas.yale.edu/news-announcements/faculty-retirement-and-memorial-tributes/faculty-retirement-tributes-2000/a-thomas-cole

 Cole in retirement himself reflected on his teaching career thus:  

"Since I began work on my Harvard dissertation in the late fifties almost all of my research and writing has been concerned with things Greek–political theory, philosophy, historiography, metre, lyric poetry, rhetoric–and most of my teaching, at least since I came from Stanford to Yale in the mid-sixties, with things Latin–prose and prose authors by and large, though I have also taught Plautus and Terence, Lucretius, Ovid and Lucan." (Nota Bene: What’s happening at Harvard Classics, vol. 8.1, Fall/Winter 2002, p. 5)

Despite his ability and willingness to teach just about anything in the classical curriculum, Cole despaired of his ability as a teacher. Ironically for one who had studied ancient rhetoric as closely and thoughtfully as any classicist of his generation, Cole himself had no native gifts as a communicator and seemingly little confidence (or perhaps interest) in fashioning himself into a more inspiring or accessible teacher. As quirky and unpretentious as he was tall and rangy (he was 6’ 4”), Cole was well known for his idiosyncratic habit of entering a seminar room, immediately scooping up the wastepaper basket from the corner and upending it on the table, oblivious to whatever might spill out onto the table, so as to use it as a lectern for his hand-scrawled notes. His seminars were typically lectures, with any discussion left to the end when students might ask questions, which he sometimes invited by asking, "Does anyone want to refute me?" William Desmond reflected that Cole “lectured in the ‘old’ style, in the sense that he was having a debate with other scholars (going back to the 19th-century Germans!) as much as teaching the students in front of him.” Indeed, during his lectures Cole did not actively engage with his students, and in fact only rarely made eye contact, usually focussing instead on his notes or the ceiling. Many undergraduates who took his classes found it difficult to avoid the impression (like Desmond) that his lectures were directed at some audience other than the one assembled, or that students were in fact accidental to the occasion of the lecture. 

Cole’s teaching style stemmed in part from his deep introversion, and in part from the conviction, forged at Andover and confirmed repeatedly over the subsequent years that in the Age of Iron in which he lived, few had the requisite preparation to engage with the Classical tradition on the level at which he operated, and fewer still were interested in what he had to say. He harbored no disdain or resentment for students, but felt, often correctly, that what he had to offer was fundamentally out of step with the prevailing intellectual currents of his day. In fact, he more than once lamented that he had not instead turned his energies to South Asian or Chinese philology, since there remained in those fields so much of the sort of research he believed that he did best and would have made a greater impact. During his career the Yale Bulletin did not typically describe the contents of courses, but one gets an immediate sense of Cole’s sardonic and self-deprecating view of his own intellectual interests from a course description published for Spring 1998: “Post-Vergilian Epic (Classics 827b): A study of the principal discursive modes–fictional, ironic, burlesque, allusive hyperbole–cultivated by Latin narrative poetry in the first five centuries of the Christian era. Authors read will include Ovid, Lucan, Statius, Claudian, and – if time and the endurance of the class allow – some of their less known and less talented contemporaries.” 

While Cole may not have met with much success as a classroom teacher, he was generally highly regarded by the graduate students who worked with him, even if they, too, often felt it difficult to befriend him personally or collaborate with him professionally. One of his early students, Kevin Crotty, recalls:

"There was a Tom Cole “mystique" amongst the graduate students back in the 70’s. He had a reputation for brilliance, and there was a kind of Olympian remoteness to him. This remoteness may have been due to a certain personal shyness or reticence. But if I call it “Olympian,” it’s partly because he was so tall, and his remoteness therefore was partly a matter of his being actually a lot taller than anyone else—but this physical attribute also seemed to enhance the air of intellectual distance separating him from the rest of us."

It would perhaps surprise Cole to learn that many former graduate students who sat in his classes have not only shared stories of his forbidding teaching style, but also independently volunteered that they still use notes they took in his seminars decades ago when teaching today. 

Cole was universally appreciated as a dissertation advisor and reader. One of his last students, William Desmond, described Cole as 

"a great dissertation advisor … A careful reader of chapters, he would give them back fairly quickly with lots of useful corrections, suggestions, and questions. He was generous with his time, knowledge and ideas, and could comment on anything from missing iota subscripts to larger intellectual issues. He always struck me as a truly free thinker, unconventional in his approaches, which was always challenging and stimulating."

Cole was never Chair of the Classics Department at Yale, but served several stints as Director of Graduate Studies (1966-1968, 1974-1978, and 1996-1997). He was either the principal thesis director or a significant thesis advisor for the following: Michael Gagarin (1968); John Patrick Lynch (1970); Peter Crosby Brush (1971); Kevin Crotty (1975); Walter Moskalew (1975); Jerome Caveney (1977); David Tandy (1979); Thomas Hubbard (1980); Charles Frederic Ahern, Jr. (1983); Herbert Alan Golder (1984); Vasily Rudich (1984); Adele Scafuro (1984); Hayden Pellicia (1985); Thomas Michael Tuozzo (1987); Emily Katz Anhalt (1989); Sarah Mace (1992); Elio Colagioia (1997); Patrice Rankine (1998); William Desmond (2001); and Daniel Berman (2001).

 In his personal life, Cole led simultaneously the most conventional and unconventional of lives. He spent almost his entire adult life at one Ivy League institution or the other, was married, had a family, and owned property. He was, if anything, a conservative in his cultural tastes, in the sense that he loved high art, museums, film, and opera. In 2004, he and his wife Katherine moved to Manhattan, largely for the cultural life of the city (NYT, July 17, 2005). As noted above, his intellectual interests in classical literature appeared almost atavistic in the late 20th century. But this would be to see only half the man and the scholar. 

Politically, Cole once remarked that his politics were closest to the anarcho-syndicalists of the Spanish Civil War. He married Katherine Stein (who took his surname), a graduate student whom he met at Stanford University, not because they were believers in the institution of marriage, but only (as both insisted) “for tax reasons.” Be that as it may, they remained married until Cole’s death on Dec. 30, 2021, with Katherine caring for him even during the final, most debilitating and difficult stages of Alzheimer’s. (His death had been erroneously reported by the Yale Daily News in 1996 (Sunday, Jan. 14, 1996), when he was confused with his colleague Thomas Gould [https://dbcs.rutgers.edu/all-scholars/8738-gould-thomas-fauss], who had died on May 13, 1995.)

During their time in New Haven, both Tom and Katherine were known to support both liberal causes and cultural institutions. So, their house at 194 Canner Street in the East Rock neighborhood of New Haven was for the better part of two decades the effective depot for the New Haven/Leon Sister City Project, which was founded in 1984 to organize cultural exchange and relief supplies and missions for Leon, Nicaragua, in opposition to the Reagan administration’s support for the Contras. Cole also actively supported the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (since 2016 known as Local 33) and its push to unionize graduate students at Yale. Katherine was deeply involved with the New Haven Film Festival, and the two made an annual pilgrimage to the Toronto International Film Festival until he could no longer travel. Both of them volunteered as literacy tutors. 

Cole had few close friends in the Classics Department or the wider Yale faculty. Perhaps his closest friends in the department, apart from Havelock, were two former graduate students, Michael Gagarin and Vasily Rudich. Gagarin was his first student (1968), who after graduation taught as an Assistant Professor of Classics at Yale until 1973, when he moved to the University of Texas. Gagarin and his wife remained in contact with and visited the Coles regularly, even after their move to New York. Ramsay MacMullen was Rudich’s principal advisor, but Rudich acknowledges Cole in his dissertation (1984) as a reader who had offered “insightful suggestions.” Like Gagarin, Rudich went on to teach at Yale (1984–1995) and was in this period close to Cole, who found him sympathetic for his brilliance, iconoclasm, and somewhat similar status as an outsider. All in all, it would be fair to say that the Coles were perhaps more closely connected to New Haven than to the university: to visit the Cole home was to step through a window into the other intellectual and political communities active in New Haven. There one would often find artists, activists, and students, many who stopped by to chat, debate, plan, or share a meal, often lubricated by margaritas that Cole had perfected over decades of exacting practice. 

William Desmond’s reflection is a fitting envoi:

"One phrase always comes to mind when I think of Tom. It’s a concluding phrase of The Islandman by Tomás Ó Criomhthain, a book about the Blasket Islands (off the southwest coast of Ireland) where people lived a pre-modern life until the 1950s. In writing of the passing of the old way of life, that Thomas ends his autobiography with the reflection that “the like of us will never be again” (ní beidh ár leithéidí arís ann). The phrase is often used in Ireland for the passing of a generation or of someone monumental. In my memory, Tom was such a person, isolated somehow in his profession and intellect -- but rugged, splendid, a real American original."