Timothy Gantz

Athens - Timothy Gantz, long-time Professor of Classics at the University of Georgia, eminent scholar and author of the widely used Early Greek Myth, died Tuesday morning, January 20th, at 5:30 a.m. at Athens Regional Medical Center of heart failure. He was 58 years old.
Dr. Gantz' wide-ranging scholarly interests in Classics extended from Aeschylus, early Greek poetry and Greek mythology to the archaeology of the Etruscans and early Rome.
He received his A.B. in Classics in 1967 from Haverford College and his doctorate in Classics in 1970 from Princeton University. He began his life-long love affair with Italy in 1966 when he participated in the first year of the Bryn Mawr College Excavations at Murlo, an important Etruscan site situated in Tuscany near the city of Siena, where he worked closely with his greatest mentor, eminent archaeologist, Kyle Phillips. As a long-term member of the staff, he helped excavate the only major Etruscan civic building known to this day. He also worked with the archaeological remains of the earliest phases of the ancient city of Rome and was widely known as the translator of Einar Gjerstad's seminal work, Early Rome. But his time in Italy wasn't entirely devoted to archaeology. He was, in addition, a connoisseur of fine Italian wine, a first-class Italian cook, a passionate devotee of Wagnerian and Italian opera, an avid student of mediaeval and Renaissance art, and of history in general. He dreamed of writing a book on the art and history of Siena and its Palio.
He joined the faculty of the University of Georgia in the fall of 1970 and soon became involved with the University's Studies Abroad in Rome Program, serving as Director of the Program since 1985. This seven-week program introduced students to the ancient sites of Rome and included day trips to Pompeii, Herculaneum, Oplontis, and Paestum. It was not unusual for University students who participated in the program to come back and report that Dr. Gantz had changed their lives, so intimately did he research the city and so generously did he share its ancient and modern marvels with his students.
Besides his archaeological field work and commitment to Studies Abroad, Dr. Gantz contributed to the life of the University and the Classics Department in many ways. He served as Secretary of the Faculty Senate early in his tenure at UGA and won wide respect in that position as a moderating voice and a humorous one. Within the Department he served as Graduate Coordinator and in more recent years as the in-house computer expert. Completely self-trained, he set up and maintained the department computer lab and extensive collection of software, served as webmaster, and handled the 'care and feeding' of the temperamental departmental server. He also digitized thousands of slides and photographs of classical sites and objects and set up digital photo albums so that his students could always have access to this material for study and review. Faculty meetings were often enlivened by his wit, his colleagues were helped by his intellectual rigor and generosity, and his students were exposed to the wide range of his knowledge and his palpable love of the classics.
Among classicists, Timothy Gantz is known as an eminent scholar. In particular, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources has become indispensable to Classics scholars and students of ancient Greek myth. First published in 1993, this book was hailed as 'nothing short of remarkable .... a staple of all classical libraries for years to come' by reviewers. At the time of his death he was finishing a lexical and grammatical commentary on Aeschylus' Oresteia, accompanied by notes on the implications of the different manuscript readings adopted by the editors of commonly used editions of the trilogy. In addition to this work on Aeschylus, the culmination of his life-long engagement with that author, he was also writing an article on some of the constellations mentioned in Ovid's Metamorphosis, in particular on the identity of the constellation represented by Arcas, son of the Great Bear Callisto. As an avid star gazer himself, he was often up at dawn looking at the sky over his back yard, charting the stars and communing with the neighborhood cats and other wild animals who often joined him.
Dr. Gantz leaves behind his wife, Elena Bianchelli, his son Tavish, age 9, his twin brother Jeffrey, Jeffrey's fiancee Ann Dailey, and his mother Charlotte. A wake will be held Friday, January 23, 2004, at Lord and Stephens Funeral Home on Jimmie Daniel Road from 6-8 p.m. and a funeral mass at the Catholic Center on Lumpkin Street on Saturday, January 24 at 2:30.
In lieu of flowers, the family has requested donations to the University of Georgia Classics Department for a scholarship in Timothy's memory.
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Athens Banner-Herald, Friday, Jan. 23, 2004