One year ago a college friend of mine informed me that our teacher the Emperor was dead. It had been a number of years since I had last seen him. On that occasion, I remember resolving to do so more often, and, as with many similar resolutions, subsequently failed to keep this one. The realization put me in mind of Samuel Johnson’s saying that “A man should keep his friendships in constant repair”, which I could imagine the Emperor quoting at me by way of a wry chiding. Much or most of our talk over the years, in the classroom and out, had been of books, and it was a rare occurrence when I chanced to mention any author, great or small, Ancient or Modern, with whom he was not on terms of at least passing familiarity. Louis (this was his Christian name; “The Emperor” was a sobriquet which had been bestowed on him sometime during his professorship; I suspect by himself) was one of those rare teachers whose casual talk was as informative as the best lecture, and whose lectures had the unaffected ease of casual talk. An hour-long coffee or lunch with him might, after a bit of polite catching up, pass from something in Erasmus’ letters (the editing of which was Louis’ long and never quite finished academic labor) to a new book about Verdi’s Shakespearean operas to some stray joke in an Ernst Lubitsch comedy from 1935. One came to recognize, after knowing him for a time, that many of his deepest interests and loves had little to do with the Greek and Latin classics which he taught for decades, and of which he never tired. Like all truly great teachers, he was more than the sum of his expertise. He had an abundant vitality which stood in amusing contrast to his labored pretence to laziness; his office in the college of languages had the appearance of having last been properly cleaned sometime during the construction of the Tower of Babel. He did not notice, or affected not to notice, that many of his clothes were visibly too large for him. I gather he was as popular with faculty as he was with students, and while he was drawn into the officious futility of campus politics much more than he wished, he bore the annoyance with a generous grace. The pettyfogging mediocrity of university governance he sometimes denounced in general terms, but never spoke anywise but well of individual colleagues, and if he carried grudges, he kept them conscientiously to himself. Magnanimity in the strictest sense-that of being “large-spirited”-marked his conduct in both significant and trivial actions, and it would have embarrassed him slightly to hear this said in his presence.

The first class I took from him was in my freshman year. Thereafter I enrolled in at least one course with him every semester, I believe, until graduation. Louis must have left an enduring impression on nearly everyone who studied under him for even a brief period, and was, as I remember, well-liked even by students who suffered under his grading pen. He never embarrassed or shamed anyone for a bad examination score or other shoddy work, though he didn’t pretend to be taken in by a slovenly performance either (“As the dog returneth to its vomit, so Mr. __________ stumbles recidivistically over a botched passive periphrastic.”). For his students’ shortcomings he had enormous patience, and even atrocious errors he felt were best corrected with humour rather than rebuke. His wit was often outrageous and never caustic or cruel. I remember him reducing a room of thirty or so to gasping laughter thirty seconds into a lecture on The Frogs of Aristophanes, his opening statement being something along the lines of “This comedy is set in Hades. Here we meet the god Dionysius, whom the playwright represents as an ostentatious fag.” At the end of another lecture one autumn, which happened to be during an election year, a student asked Louis if he had any voting advice. Smiling slightly, he replied, “Naturally, I encourage civic engagement, but try as much as I can to keep partisan politics out of the classroom. I will only say that you should vote in accordance with your conscience, whether that be Democrat or Green Party.” Another time, when I slunk into class a few minutes late, he turned towards me, bright with expectant glee, and remarked, “Ah, Mr. Banks, welcome, welcome. A funny thing, I had the good fortune of meeting your parents on campus recently. Curious that such an upstanding couple could have sired such an irreligious runt as yourself. But as we were,” etc.

His tastes, in books, art, film or music, were discriminating enough to make one give even his prejudices due consideration. When I remarked once that I had not read The Ecclesiastical History of the English People he replied that he had and I need not bother, for the Venerable Bede, while no doubt a very scrupulous and saintly man, was also a sedulous dullard. Suetonius had “a flypaper mind-everything that sticks to it carries infection.” The plays of Terence, in his view, contained all of those elements that make for excellent comedy-playfulness, a light touch, an urbane style-except that they are none of them especially funny. Without being a snob in the least, he systematically avoided all popular music of the past couple generations, remarking that the last occasion he found himself listening to anything on the Top 40 “must’ve been back when Paul Anka was culturally relevant.” Were you to ask him to recommend a piece of music, he would usually name a favorite aria, and could describe variations in how it was interpreted by, say, Maria Callas or Birgit Nilsson. Opera mattered to him nearly as much as literature, and for some years he hosted a local radio program dedicated to introducing the classics of the genre to as many people as might be willing to lend their ears. I don’t believe it could have been any great number. Nor would this have mattered to him greatly.

Most every exceptional teacher is bound to do some of his best work outside of the lecture hall, and this was the case with Louis. Of the many of his bon mots I still carry around with me, a considerable quotient took place either while going to class or coming out of it. Outside of his office one day towards the end of my sophomore year, which happened to coincide with budgetary cuts to his department, I told him that I was going to be changing one of my majors from Philosophy to Classics. “I am most glad to hear this,” he replied, “but don’t you know that it’s normally the practice for rats to leave a sinking ship, and not scurry into it?” He wasn’t the type of academic who made a point to be chummy with every one of his students, but would have some of us over for dinner occasionally. From those dinners I remember departing always with the thought that heeding my parents’ advice and going to college might not, after all, have been such a waste of four years as I had initially expected. Louis made not just the study of the ancient world with its poets and philosophers, but the life of the mind itself, seem to be an activity not merely sufferable for the sake of a degree at the end of the passage; it was transfigured through his conversation into a vocation of rare allure.

After these few paragraphs, I hope it is superfluous to say that I miss him. So do many other of his students who acquired much knowledge or little in his classes, where one learned quickly not to sit in the front row, as the Emperor was prone to spit accidentally on the forward ranks when his subject worked him up into a fit of enthusiasm. He was not a leading figure in his profession, nor was ours a distinguished university. I believe he left it nonetheless with a sense of fulfillment, of having done the work of many years honorably and well, having guided into his own profession more than a few students who have thereby acquired an unpayable debt. Those of us who succeed him in the task may be presumptuous to expect more than this.