Hans-Peter Stahl

Dr. Hans-Peter Stahl retired from the University of Pittsburgh at the end of the Spring 2013 school year. We miss him and wish him well in his retirement. He is sure to continue his research and have an busy retirement. Our many thanks to him for his years of dedication, care, and concern for all of his students!

Hans-Peter Stahl was Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Classics. He taught at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität and at Yale University before joining the University of Pittsburgh. He was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C., in 1961-1962, and a visiting Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1974-1975 (holding a Guggenheim Fellowship) and again in 1980-1981 (supported by an NEH Fellowship). In the Winter and Spring Quarters of 1988, he was a Visiting Professor at Ohio State University.

His earliest scholarship deals with the beginnings of propositional logic in Plato (1956, in German; English short version, 1971). Numerous articles on Greek and Roman literature and historiography are complemented by book-size publications: Propertius: 'Love' and 'War'. Individual and State under Augustus (1985). Vergil's Aeneid: Augustan Epic and Political Context (1998). Likewise, contributions include two conferences on Vergil he convened in Pittsburgh, PA [1995] and Oxford, U.K. [1996]). In 2003 appeared Thucydides: Man's Place in History, a revised and enlarged English edition of an earlier work. It won a Choice award of "Outstanding Academic Title for 2004". In 2016, Professor Stahl published the monograph entitled Poetry Underpinning Power: Vergil's Aeneid: the Epic for Emperor Augustus. A Recovery Study. (The Classical Press of Wales. Swansea, U.K. pp. 488).

Two essential foci of his work are the logic of writers as well as the political anthropology manifested in works of ancient prose and poetry.