Barbara P. McCarthy

Barbara Philippa McCarthy (September 25, 1904 – October 28, 1988) was an American Hellenist and academic. McCarthy is mainly known for her work on Lucian of Samosata and his interactions with the Menippean satire.

Barbara Philippa McCarthy
Born	September 25, 1904 Providence, Rhode Island, US
Died	October 28, 1988 (aged 84) Pawtucket, Rhode Island, US
Occupation	Classical Scholar

Education

McCarthy completed her B.A. at Pembroke College, the private women's college of Brown University, in 1925. Between 1925 and 1927 McCarthy was a postgraduate student at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. She was awarded an M.A. by the University of Missouri in 1927. McCarthy completed her PhD at Yale University in 1929 with a dissertation titled The originality of Lucian's Satiric Dialogues, under the supervision of A. M. Harmon. She was awarded the title of Doctor of Letters by Brown University in 1980.[1]

Career

From 1929 to 1970 McCarthy taught at Wellesley College, where she was Professor of Greek from 1929 to 1955, and Ellen A. Kendall Professor of Greek from 1955 to 1970. In 1934 at Wellesley McCarthy initiated the production of plays in Greek, which she directed. She was lecturer at Holy Cross College between 1970 and 1974, and visiting professor at Brandeis University in 1973.[1]

In 1956–1957 McCarthy was the president of the Classical Association of New England, by which she was later awarded the Barlow-Beach Award for Distinguished Service, in 1978.[1]

Barbara McCarthy is mainly known for her work on Menippean satire, and especially for her article 'Lucian and Menippus' (Yale Classical Studies 4: 3–55), an adaptation of her PhD dissertation. Here McCarthy engaged with the theses of the philologist Rudolf Helm.[2] In the book Lucian und Menipp (1906),[3] Helm claimed that Lucian was heavily indebted to the Cynic Menippus. In her article, Barbara McCarthy did identify similar motives, themes and frames between Lucian's writings and the Menippean fragments. However, she argued that there was no evidence of a close copying of forms and thematic of Menippus' satires by Lucian.[4] Her work supports Lucian's claim of originating his form of satiric dialog.[2]

Death and legacy

McCarthy died October 28, 1988.

In 2000, McCarthy was commemorated by her former student at Wellesley Lynn Sherr in a talk given at the Classical Association of the Atlantic States meeting at Princeton (29 April 2000).[5] In 2004, a panel of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States spring meeting in New York was dedicated to the memory of McCarthy (24 April 2004): New Directions in Research and Teaching on Elementary Greek and Greek Prose Authors, Commemorating the One Hundredth Birthday of Barbara Philippa McCarthy, Ellen A. Kendall Professor of Greek, Wellesley College.[6]

List of publications

Articles

• McCarthy, Barbara (1934) 'Lucian and Menippus,' Yale Classical Studies 4: 3–55.
• McCarthy, Barbara P. (1931) 'Line omissions in Homeric papyri since 1925', Transactions of the American Philological Association 22: 151–155.
• McCarthy, Barbara P. (1943) 'Sarcasm in the Iliad,' The Classical Weekly 36 (18): 215–216.

Chapters in edited volumes

• McCarthy, Barbara P. (1936) 'The form of Varro's Menippean satire', in Robinson, R.P. (ed.) Philological studies in honor of W. Miller. Columbia: 95–107.

Books

• Elizabeth Barrett to Mr. Boyd: Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Hugh Stuart Boyd. Introduced and edited by Barbara P. McCarthy. New Haven: 1955.

References

1. Lefkowitz, Mary; Briggs, Ward W. (1994). Biographical dictionary of North American classicists. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. p. 379. ISBN 978-0313245602. OCLC 29952043.
2. Little, Charles E. (1935). "Review: Reviewed Work: Yale Classical Studies, Vol. IV by Austin M. Harmon". The Classical Journal. 30 (9): 564–566. JSTOR 3290304. She seems by these to prove Lucian's claims of originating the artistic form of his satiric dialogs.
3. Helm, Rudolf (1906). Lucian und Menipp. Leipzig.
4. Weinbrot, Howard D. (November 16, 2005). Menippean satire reconsidered : from antiquity to the Eighteenth Century. Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 14. ISBN 9780801882104. Retrieved 29 October 2018.
5. "Why In Heaven's Name are You Majoring In Greek?, by Lynn Sherr of ABC News". Society for Classical Studies. 2010-06-09. Retrieved 2018-09-20.
6. "Classical Association of the Atlantic States Program for the Spring Meeting, Sheraton Hotel and Towers, New York City, Friday and Saturday, April 23 and 24, 2004". The Classical World. 97 (2): 201. 2004. JSTOR 4352849.

Further reading

Post mortem homages

• American Philosophical Association Newsletter (Feb. 1989) 15.
• Lefkowitz, Mary (1989) 'In memoriam' , Wellesley 73.2: 26–27.

Dedicated entries

• Who's Who of American Women 1970–1971: 812.
• Who's Who in America 1978–1979: 2139.
• Lefkowitz, Mary (1994) ‘McCarthy, Barbara Philippa’, in Briggs, Ward W., Jr. (ed.) Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists. Westport, CT and London: 379.
• Lefkowitz, Mary. ‘McCarthy, Barbara Philippa,’ Rutgers Database of Classical Scholars.

Dedicated contributions

• Hallett, Judith P. (2014) 'Eli's Daughters: Female Classics Graduate Students at Yale, 1892–1941', in Wyles, Rosie and Hall, Edith (eds.) Women classical scholars: unsealing the fountain from the Renaissance to Jacqueline de Romilly.[1] Oxford 2016: 260–274.

1. Wyles, Rosie; Hall, Edith, eds. (2016-10-27). Women Classical Scholars. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198725206.001.0001. ISBN 9780198725206.