Jason Koski/University Photography

Fred Ahl with classics scholars at a conference in his honor Sept. 7 at A.D. White House.

A Sept. 7 conference to honor Frederick Ahl, professor of classics and comparative literature and a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, brought scholars from around the world to Cornell. “Speaking to Power in Latin and Greek Literature” explored topics such as speaking truth to power and the power of the personal voice.

In addition to the Cornell conference, Ahl’s achievements have been honored internationally recently, with an invitation to give the keynote address at a conference in Brazil and to speak at a multidisciplinary conference in Australia.

“Fred is one of the greats in Latin literature in our field,” says associate professor of classics Mike Fontaine, who organized the conference.

Classicist Jeffrey Henderson of Boston University says: “Even in such a literary field as classics, great literary minds are rare, and Fred is one of those. No one is a closer reader or more attentive to the drama of literary language, its range of meaning, what’s between the lines or just offstage, and as a translator he is uncannily brilliant at recreating in English the subtlest effects of such famously intricate poems as Virgil’s ‘Aeneid.’ He is truly subversive, in the best sense: changing the way we read and listen to great literature and think about its authors.”

Former student Patricia Johnson ’77, M.A. ’79, now a classicist at Boston University, recalls Ahl’s “commitment to a rigorous and conspiratorial brand of undergraduate pedagogy” that culminated in his “legendary” student/faculty Aristophanes play readings in the Temple of Zeus.

“I love teaching,” Ahl says. “I love the theater, and I can’t imagine teaching theater without actually being on the performance side of it.” In addition to performing with the Savoyards for many years, he’s directed many full-scale plays at Cornell and in Greece.

Ahl’s books include “Two Faces of Oedipus,” which incorporates Ahl’s translation of the Oedipus of Sophocles and of Seneca, two plays written hundreds of years apart. He’s also written a landmark book on Ovid, “Metaformations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other Classical Poets,” and his translation of Virgil’s “Aeneid” is increasingly becoming the standard text in classrooms.

His “Sophocles’ Oedipus: Evidence and Self-Conviction” exposes the propensity of people to believe in things, what he calls “catechism” thinking. “Before people read Sophocles’ ‘Oedipus’ they’re told this is a story about a man who inexorably pursues the truth about himself and discovers he has unwittingly killed his father and married his mother,” explains Ahl. “While it’s quite true that he concludes this, the so-called evidence, which is mostly hearsay and gossip, is delivered by people who either have no possible means of knowing this information or have reasons to want to be rid of him. So you’re left with an interpretation of the play that is based on the belief that everyone is telling Oedipus the truth.”

Ahl is currently working on a book that looks at the parallels between W.S. Gilbert (of Gilbert and Sullivan) and classical Greek authors. While he acknowledges that puts Gilbert “in pretty elevated company,” he contends the librettist is a master of the type of associative writing used by Sophocles, Virgil and others, which establishes “all detectable connections among ideas at all levels, often with great and paradoxical intricacy.”

Linda B. Glaser is staff writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.