ΜARK LAWALL’S INTRODUCTION TO THE ARISTEIA AWARD PRESENTATION TO DANIEL LEVINE
JANUARY 20, 2024
AMERICAN SCHOOL OF CLASSICAL STUDIES AT ATHENS ALUMNI/AE ASSOCIATION ANNUAL MEETING
I am very pleased to introduce the winner of the Aristeia Award for 2024, Prof. Daniel Levine. I am also quite hesitant to do so. He is so much better at speeches and knowing just what to say when. I feel like Catiline trying to write a speech about Cicero.
Though Daniel’s oratorical skills are indeed praiseworthy, they are not the reason he is receiving the Aristeia Award. He is receiving this award because, quite deliberately, he has set himself up for one of the most difficult tasks at the School: the leadership of roughly 20 students of all ages, interests, and abilities, around the sites and museums of Greece during the absolutely hottest months of the year. Daniel has served as summer session director four times – 1987, 1995, 2006, 2018 and led a summer seminar on Greek views of death in 2022. This is not quite a record: Louis Lord did nine, way back when there were no downhill slopes, and the snow was always hip deep on the way to school, but no one complained, and all children ate their vegetables.
I have never been on a summer session. I have never led a summer session. I don’t function too well in extreme heat. But I have sat with Daniel in Loring Hall; I’ve heard and watched him interact with his students. I have always done so with awe and admiration. In part, this admiration is based on the skills he has developed, the masterfully compiled notebooks planning and recording each session he has led. These are works of art just on their own. But this admiration also arises from his always-apparent love of his fellow humans and his deep interest in them – whenever they lived, however they lived, and wherever they lived… but especially lives lived in Greece!
Daniel first came to Greece in 1973. After he escaped from the watchful eyes of his grandparents, Daniel fell in with some soldiers on Rhodes who taught him both the modern Greek language and the fun of an early 1970s disco.
The next summer, while studying Classics at the University of Minnesota, he enrolled in the ASCSA Summer Session under the leadership of Fordyce Mitchel. He graduated with his BA the 1975 and moved on to the University of Cincinnati for his PhD, which he finished in a mere 5 years including a year (1978-79) as the Seymour fellow at the School. His dissertation “ΓΕΛΩΙ ΕΚΘΑΝΟΝ: Laughter and the Demise of the Suitors in the Odyssey” was perhaps an early notice that Daniel could find the humor in anything! Upon completing his PhD in 1980 he joined the faculty of the University of Arkansas, and that is where we find him still.
Over his 40+ years of teaching he has received 19 teaching awards including the 1986 Burlington Northern Foundation Award for Teaching Excellence, the University Arkansas’ highest award for teaching, and the 1992 APA award for Excellence in the Teaching of Classics. His research has covered nearly all genres of Greek literature, edging into something of an obsession with feet in recent years; well, feet and tuna fish… but not together. He is unfailingly generous with his time providing service not only to his University but also to Eta Sigma Phi, the American Classical League, the Classical Association of the Midwest and South, the Society for Classical Studies, and, of course, the ASCSA.
Alongside all of this he has led at least twelve study-abroad trips for Arkansas, one for the Virgilian Society, and five for the American School. He summed up his approach to leading such trips in an interview in 2018:
The most important thing about being a Summer Session Director is having a good schedule. Keeping the program on time, the participants well rested, and making sure everyone is on the bus ready to go the next morning.
The notebooks I mentioned earlier are the key to ‘having a good schedule’. Consider this account of Thursday, June 28, 2018
07:00 Breakfast
08:28-11:24 Pylos to Bassae (rest stop 09:29- 09:55)
11:24-13:05 Bassae
13:10-13:20 Stop to photograph goats, terraces, threshing floor
13:30- 15:04 Andritsaina. Lunch
Two things stand out: 1) they had a rest stop on the way to Bassae and 2) they stopped to photograph the goats for 10 minutes; the American School equivalent of stopping to smell the roses. With each successive iteration he could hone his timing. No detail was lost, no occasion too insignificant: On Thursday, June 14, the group was on Crete; they saw Gortyn, Phaistos (with its snack bar), Kommos, Matala (for swimming and eating from 14.07 to 16.35) and then to Irakleio where, at 17.38 they sang the Greek Birthday Song to their bus driver, Spyros Triandafyllos.
And how, you might ask, did the students know this song? It is one of the first things Daniel teaches them when they arrive in Athens! After all, odds are good that someone is going to need it over six weeks! And you’re in Greece; why would you sing an American song!?
Daniel’s most recent stint as Gertrude Smith Professor, however, perhaps best exemplifies his commitment to the School, to the fundamental importance of travel-study programing, and to the value of studying Greece from prehistory to the present. Due to a tragic health issue impacting one of the selected seminar leaders, we put out a very late call for a replacement. Many of you applied, but Daniel was the first; the proposal – Thanatopsis: Greek Funerary Customs Through the Ages – was entirely new and original; and we all knew he would do a phenomenal job. The program included the Phaleron skeletons, the Kerameikos, the tholoi at Mycenae… so far, so predictable… they also visited the Ayios Spiridon Church in Nauplio where Kapodistrias was assassinated, the grave of Kazantzakis in Irakleio, the Etz Hayyim synagogue and the graves of the rabbis in Chania, and the Protestant, Orthodox and Jewish sections of the First Cemetery in Athens.
On day three, they were at the Agora and they stopped for a report on the Anastasios Adossidis Memorial Bench. For those who do not know, Mr. Adossidis was the business manager for the Agora excavations from 1931 until his death in the famine of 1942. Before he died, he ensured that the Swiss Red Cross took over the buildings of the School, so that the Germans could not.
The person who gave that report on the Adossidis memorial bench was Judith Levine. Judith had researched the bench while at the School with Daniel in 2008, and in 2018 she had helped to clean it so the dedicatory inscription would be visible.
At the end of the 2022 Thanatopsis seminar, one of the participants wrote:
“Dr. Levine and Judith are precious and should be considered national treasures.”
Another wrote, “Dr. Levine and Mrs. Levine cultivated an atmosphere of intense learning, questioning, and comradery.” Yet another, “I have left this trip feeling like twice the scholar I was ….”
The 2024 Aristeia Award for Distinguished Alumni/ae goes to Daniel Levine both for his ability to transform the lives of others through his leadership of five ASCSA summer programs, and for sitting with us – often Judith is there, too – on the porch at Loring Hall or in the Dining room, and reminding us all, through their example, to be good people.
Remarks by Daniel B. Levine on the occasion of receiving the Aristeia Award from the Alumni/ae Association of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.
January 20, 2024.
Ευχαριστώ πολύ, επίτιμοι φίλοι!
Lee Brice said I could say a few words, but he didn’t say how many. Let’s hope that open-ended offer wasn’t a mistake. [Spoiler alert: there are fewer than 500 words. Ι invite you count them as I speak.]
My first idea of an acceptance speech was to solemnly read a list of names of all the people I have met through the School – as a piece of performance art. I thought that was a brilliant conception, but none of my friends or family agreed with me. Too long a list!!
Nevertheless, in my world, the greatest gift that the School has given me has turned out to be the friends, hundreds of them — hundreds of you — whom I hold dear now, and have done over the fifty years since I first entered Loring Hall.
The School (with its members and staff) is a great place to learn… about all aspects of everything Greek, from the romance-tinged mists of pre-history to the confusing and frustrating modern age. This learning takes place in the School’s libraries, salonis, gardens, laboratories, terraces, and dining areas. But perhaps the most valuable learning opportunities it offers consists of the opportunities to leave Kolonaki’s confines and travel to my two favorite parts of Greece: the mountains and the sea. No other institution in Greece is as generous as the American School in offering such wide-ranging expeditions to see every nook and cranny of the country.
We are fortunate to have been able to explore the land and to learn together. These group experiences connect us intimately with Greece’s topography, history, and material remains, but more importantly, they connect us with each other.
And of course through our School involvement we meet “real scholars”: role models to admire and to imitate. The School gives us a unique gift here, and this just occurred to me… we learn that scholars have bodies. It is one thing to read scholarship by the likes of Gene Vanderpool, Colin Edmonson, Angeliki Laiou, Eve Harrison, Evelyn Smithson, Homer Thompson, Fordyce W. Mitchel, Andy Stewart, Fred Cooper, Willy Coulson, Charlie Beye, the Dinsmoores, the Shears, the Immerwahrs, and… hundreds of others. Through our involvement with the American School of Classical Studies we get to read their articles, and then to meet the real articles, in the flesh, and to appreciate who they really are. Their physical presence and their personalities become part of our understanding of their work, enriching and contextualizing it for us, making them – and us – more human.
And that’s basically what I want to say today on the occasion of this honor: I thank you all for keeping the Humanities human…by your work, your warmth, good humor, and your active and loving care for the people who endorse and support the School’s mission to promote “knowledge of Greece in all periods, as well as other areas of the classical world, by training young scholars, sponsoring and promoting archaeological fieldwork, providing resources for scholarly work, and disseminating research.”
Ευχαριστώ πολύ.
Χάρικα.
Να πάτε στο καλό.
ΜARK LAWALL INTRODUCTION TO ARISTEIA AWARD PRESENTATION TO DANIEL LEVINE
JANUARY 20, 2024
AMERICAN SCHOOL OF CLASSICAL STUDIES AT ATHENS ALUMNI/AE ASSOCIATION
I am very pleased to introduce the winner of the Aristeia Award for 2024, Prof. Daniel Levine. I am also quite hesitant to do so. He is so much better at speeches and knowing just what to say when. I feel like Catiline trying to write a speech about Cicero.
Though Daniel’s oratorical skills are indeed praiseworthy, they are not the reason he is receiving the Aristeia Award. He is receiving this award because, quite deliberately, he has set himself up for one of the most difficult tasks at the School: the leadership of roughly 20 students of all ages, interests, and abilities, around the sites and museums of Greece during the absolutely hottest months of the year. Daniel has served as summer session director four times – 1987, 1995, 2006, 2018 and led a summer seminar on Greek views of death in 2022. This is not quite a record: Louis Lord did nine, way back when there were no downhill slopes, and the snow was always hip deep on the way to school, but no one complained, and all children ate their vegetables.
I have never been on a summer session. I have never led a summer session. I don’t function too well in extreme heat. But I have sat with Daniel in Loring Hall; I’ve heard and watched him interact with his students. I have always done so with awe and admiration. In part, this admiration is based on the skills he has developed, the masterfully compiled notebooks planning and recording each session he has led. These are works of art just on their own. But this admiration also arises from his always-apparent love of his fellow humans and his deep interest in them – whenever they lived, however they lived, and wherever they lived… but especially lives lived in Greece!
Daniel first came to Greece in 1973. After he escaped from the watchful eyes of his grandparents, Daniel fell in with some soldiers on Rhodes who taught him both the modern Greek language and the fun of an early 1970s disco.
The next summer, while studying Classics at the University of Minnesota, he enrolled in the ASCSA Summer Session under the leadership of Fordyce Mitchel. He graduated with his BA the 1975 and moved on to the University of Cincinnati for his PhD, which he finished in a mere 5 years including a year (1978-79) as the Seymour fellow at the School. His dissertation “ΓΕΛΩΙ ΕΚΘΑΝΟΝ: Laughter and the Demise of the Suitors in the Odyssey” was perhaps an early notice that Daniel could find the humor in anything! Upon completing his PhD in 1980 he joined the faculty of the University of Arkansas, and that is where we find him still.
Over his 40+ years of teaching he has received 19 teaching awards including the 1986 Burlington Northern Foundation Award for Teaching Excellence, the University Arkansas’ highest award for teaching, and the 1992 APA award for Excellence in the Teaching of Classics. His research has covered nearly all genres of Greek literature, edging into something of an obsession with feet in recent years; well, feet and tuna fish… but not together. He is unfailingly generous with his time providing service not only to his University but also to Eta Sigma Phi, the American Classical League, the Classical Association of the Midwest and South, the Society for Classical Studies, and, of course, the ASCSA.
Alongside all of this he has led at least twelve study-abroad trips for Arkansas, one for the Virgilian Society, and five for the American School. He summed up his approach to leading such trips in an interview in 2018:
The most important thing about being a Summer Session Director is having a good schedule. Keeping the program on time, the participants well rested, and making sure everyone is on the bus ready to go the next morning.
The notebooks I mentioned earlier are the key to ‘having a good schedule’. Consider this account of Thursday, June 28, 2018
07:00 Breakfast
08:28-11:24 Pylos to Bassae (rest stop 09:29- 09:55)
11:24-13:05 Bassae
13:10-13:20 Stop to photograph goats, terraces, threshing floor
13:30- 15:04 Andritsaina. Lunch
Two things stand out: 1) they had a rest stop on the way to Bassae and 2) they stopped to photograph the goats for 10 minutes; the American School equivalent of stopping to smell the roses. With each successive iteration he could hone his timing. No detail was lost, no occasion too insignificant: On Thursday, June 14, the group was on Crete; they saw Gortyn, Phaistos (with its snack bar), Kommos, Matala (for swimming and eating from 14.07 to 16.35) and then to Irakleio where, at 17.38 they sang the Greek Birthday Song to their bus driver, Spyros Triandafyllos.
And how, you might ask, did the students know this song? It is one of the first things Daniel teaches them when they arrive in Athens! After all, odds are good that someone is going to need it over six weeks! And you’re in Greece; why would you sing an American song!?
Daniel’s most recent stint as Gertrude Smith Professor, however, perhaps best exemplifies his commitment to the School, to the fundamental importance of travel-study programing, and to the value of studying Greece from prehistory to the present. Due to a tragic health issue impacting one of the selected seminar leaders, we put out a very late call for a replacement. Many of you applied, but Daniel was the first; the proposal – Thanatopsis: Greek Funerary Customs Through the Ages – was entirely new and original; and we all knew he would do a phenomenal job. The program included the Phaleron skeletons, the Kerameikos, the tholoi at Mycenae… so far, so predictable… they also visited the Ayios Spiridon Church in Nauplio where Kapodistrias was assassinated, the grave of Kazantzakis in Irakleio, the Etz Hayyim synagogue and the graves of the rabbis in Chania, and the Protestant, Orthodox and Jewish sections of the First Cemetery in Athens.
On day three, they were at the Agora and they stopped for a report on the Anastasios Adossidis Memorial Bench. For those who do not know, Mr. Adossidis was the business manager for the Agora excavations from 1931 until his death in the famine of 1942. Before he died, he ensured that the Swiss Red Cross took over the buildings of the School, so that the Germans could not.
The person who gave that report on the Adossidis memorial bench was Judith Levine. Judith had researched the bench while at the School with Daniel in 2008, and in 2018 she had helped to clean it so the dedicatory inscription would be visible.
At the end of the 2022 Thanatopsis seminar, one of the participants wrote:
“Dr. Levine and Judith are precious and should be considered national treasures.”
Another wrote, “Dr. Levine and Mrs. Levine cultivated an atmosphere of intense learning, questioning, and comradery.”
Yet another, “I have left this trip feeling like twice the scholar I was ….”
The 2024 Aristeia Award for Distinguished Alumni/ae goes to Daniel Levine both for his ability to transform the lives of others through his leadership of five ASCSA summer programs, and for sitting with us – often Judith is there, too – on the porch at Loring Hall or in the Dining room, and reminding us all, through their example, to be good people.
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