All Scholars

Juliette Ernst was of German extraction, but prior to World War I her father retired from his firm and moved to La Rosiaz, in Switzerland. Her education took place in nearby Lausanne, where she met fellow Classics student Berthe Marti (1904-95). After receiving her degree, Ernst taught school briefly in Yverdon, then worked in Geneva for the young League of Nations, which had an interest in international bibliography. She continued her studies in Paris at the École pratique des Hautes Études under Roman legal historian François Olivier-Martin (1879-1952), a student of Hermann Diels (1848-1922). There she met the scholar who would direct her life’s work, the bibliographer Jules Marouzeau (1878-1964), who had just released Dix Années de Bibliographie Classique (1928). The previous authority was the German Bibliotheca Philologica Classica, published annually at Leipzig from 1874 to 1942. It merely listed citations, while Marouzeau realized that a précis of each article or at least the substantial ones, would be of more value. He was also interested in bringing French scholarship to the world dominated by German bibliographies and judged Ernst’s fluency in German, English, and Italian to be invaluable in making contacts across Europe and the Anglophone world. He did not have wide connections around the philological world and his work, done in haste, contained errors and omissions. He had decided to omit archaeology (this would be the responsibility of Archäologische Bibliographie from the German Archaeological Institute. Summaries of the entries made it a true bibliography and not simply a register and in total give a picture of the interests and achievements of the classical world in a given period. She assisted anonymously in the first two volumes but by 1928 she was acknowledged in the preface and from the next year she provided the major part of the listings, though for years the publication was known to scholars as “Marouzeau.”  In her small apartment on the Rue René-Coty, she maintained the gathering, arranging, and analysis of publications aided by Marouzeau’s countless contacts in France and beyond. Whenever possible she travelled to meet her contacts and from 1933 on she made extensive visits to Italy to make use of the library of the Istituto Germanico. She visited America for several months at the Widener Library at Harvard and made contacts in New Haven and Bryn Mawr, including her former classmate Berthe Marti. In 1937 she visited excavations in Greece and in 1938 she spent time at the British Museum and lectured at the School of Librarianship in London. 

      World War II made extensive travel and study in European lands impossible. She spent the war in Basel where she was a lecturer at the University, the Girls Gymnasium and the People’s University. She enjoyed almost unlimited access to the university’s library, which continued to receive materials from Germany as well as from the UK and US, with only brief interruptions. Getting proofs back and forth to the printer in France at times resembled an espionage operation. Nevertheless, her post-war editions needed wartime additions from relatively few countries.

       During World War II, her fluency in English, German, and Italian helped her maintain contacts around the world as best she could and after 1945 she gathered up the work of the war years in regular volumes. Due in part to the war, her German counterpart, Bibliotheca philologica classica went out of publication in 1942, which led German scholars to submit citations to APh. The post-war explosion of scholarship due to the expansion of American colleges and universities and her new contacts in Eastern Europe meant a radical increase in the size of the APh volumes, but she always maintained her high standards and rigorous practices. She had free use of the resources at the Sorbonne and was even given an office there to cope with the large number of citations now being submitted. In 1947, with the help of Marouzeau, she was awarded a contract position at the Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), which organization also supported APh. She frequently found resources during travel at the American Academy in Rome, the British School at Rome, the Swiss Institute. 

      Because of her wide-ranging contacts across Europe and North America she became instrumental in the founding of the Fédération Internationale des Associations d’Études Classiques (FIEC) in September 1948 at the instance of the Association G. Budé. Marouzeau had transformed the French Society of Classical Bibliography into the International Society of Classical Bibiography (SIBC) which joined FIEC. Under this aegis Ernst was given a UNESCO award which continued to support the office through Ernst’s retirement. She was its first deputy secretary general, advancing to full secretary general in 1954 and secretary-in-title upon the death of Charles Dugas (1885-1957). She remained in that position until her retirement in 1974. FIEC gave her entrée to an even wider range of contacts and allowed her through her annual reports to its Congresses to publicize and proselytize for the APh. She was ableto hire assitants by way of grants in 1950 and added members to her team through 1978. Marouzeau remained director of APh until 1963 when ill heath caused her to retire. In the 1960s, the burden was becoming overwhelming and CRNS would not support a co-director in France. After consulting European contacts, she wrote her friend from Lausanne, Berthe Marti, who urged her to found an American office at Chapel Hill, where Marti had joined the faculty in 1963. She suggested that her Bryn Mawr colleague T.R.S. Broughton (1900-93), who would come to Chapel Hill in 1965, chair the American Office. Broughton meanwhile secured international letters of support, submitted them to the UNC administration, and the office was established in 1963 and began its work in 1965. Broughton chose graduate student William W. De Grummond (1934-2022) as his collaborator. Fortunately, the recently established (1965) National Endowment for the Humanities provided crucial support for nearly 50 years as did the American Philological Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the University of North Carolina.  The purview of the American office was all classical scholarship from nearly all English-speaking nations, chiefly America, the UK, and members of the British Commonwealth.  In 1968 the chair of the UNC Classics Department, George A. Kennedy (1928-2022) became director with Professor William West as collaborator. West was director from 1974 to 1987, followed by Laurence Stephens from 1988 to 1991, and Lisa Carson from 1992 to the present. In 2005 the American Philological Association became sponsor of the APh and the journal was moved to the University of Cincinnati and in 2010 the office moved to Duke University. In 1975 the classicist and computer company heir David W. Packard, Jr. (b. 1940) joined the faculty at UNC and supported significant technological advancement in the collecting and arranging of data. Mme. Ernst was reluctant to yield to the technological revolution in the Paris office until the end of her career, but in 1987 she agreed to an online version of the journal. 

       This success of the American Office led in 1974 to the founding of a German office with help from Viktor Pöschl (1910-97) was established at Heidelberg to handle scholarship from Germany and Austria, which is about 20% of each year’s total. Mrs. Helga Gaertner was the first collaborator. Correspondents were appointed in Genoa, Madrid, Moscow. Subsequently offices were established in Lausanne (1977), Genoa (1995), and Granada (2000). 

      In volume 50 of APh (1979) Mme Ernst told the story of the creation, maintenance, and expansion of the project over the previous half-century. She was also instrumental in supporting the International Committee of the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae and represented the publication on the International Council for Philosophy and Human Sciences. She added offices in America and Germany, but maintained all of her work on paper, yielding only to computers very late, despite energetic proposals that she do so for the previous decade. 

      She deplored the proliferation of Symposia and Colloquia whose proceedings can reliably contain articles of tertiary importance.  She did not like the fashion for Mélanges or memorials of dead colleague, who could be better served by publication of their Kleine Schriften. 

      She retired from most of her other positions in 1974 but continued to attend FIEC meetings through 1988. She retired from APh in 1990 after more than 60 years of service, a view of the growth and change ofclassical world for the bulk of the 20^th century. She removed to Lausanne and entered into a home for the elderly in Lutry.