Harry Costas Avery (1930–2023)
The Department of Classics at the University of Pittsburgh mourns the death of Harry C. Avery, who passed away peacefully at age 93 on June 9, 2023. His research and teaching ranged widely from Greek tragedy and fifth-century Greek history, with a focus on matters of Herodotus and Thucydides, to interests as far afield as Caesar, Marius, Homer, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Lysias.
After military service between the Second World War and the Korean War, Harry enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania where he earned his B.A. in Classics. In 1953-1954, he received a Fulbright grant to go to Greece, where he attended the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. He went on to earn an M.A. in Classics at the University of Illinois and a Ph.D. degree from Princeton University in 1959. His thesis entitled “Prosopographical Studies in the Oligarchy of the Four Hundred” was supervised by Profs. Antony E. Raubitschek and John Van Antwerp Fine, Sr. After short teaching positions at the University of Texas (where he met his wife JoAnn) and Bryn Mawr College, Avery joined the Classics Department at the University of Pittsburgh, serving as chairman for seventeen years. During the 1963-64 academic year, Harry was a visiting fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C. In 1971-72, he returned to the American School as annual professor, offering a seminar on Herodotus. He retired from his position as Professor of Classics in 2015.
Former colleagues and graduate students fondly remember the occasional department cocktail parties Harry and JoAnn hosted in the late 1970s, with guests wearing three-piece suits, smoking cigarettes in cigarette holders and drinking martinis. “Harry’s laughter would echo through the entire house hanging like an umbrella pine over a haze of cigarette smoke.” At first glance an imposing figure (he looked like he could start as center for the Pitt basketball team), Harry was gentle, kind, and compassionate—and also rather spirited: he apparently never used a sheet of plain, white-paper in his life, much preferring green, pink, yellow, or blue.
He was a brilliant scholar but never took himself too seriously. His passion for classics was palpably genuine, and his classes were ones that no graduate student ever regretted taking, not just because he never assigned any exams, but because he gave his students complete freedom to engage with the material as little or as much as they wanted, an approach that made them engage all the more heavily so as not to be any less prepared than he invariably was. The classes are remembered as having had some of the most interesting conversations and most serious opportunities for learning. “It was as if Dr. Avery knew that if he gave us some freedom, he would be repaid with interest.”
Harry was much beloved by his students, both undergraduate and graduate. They regularly praised his deep knowledge of Greek and Latin literature, his passion for the subject, and his uncanny ability to bring the past to life in the classroom. They loved his sense of humor and his brilliance as a storyteller, a desirable quality in an historian. In his teaching and mentoring he gave his students a strong sense that the practice of historical scholarship is a serious undertaking: finding and investigating the sources, acknowledging the limitations of the evidence, and assessing the work of one’s predecessors are all activities of central importance not only in an academic discipline but in the ‘real’ world as well.
Harry harbored a real fondness for Classics undergraduates, serving as faculty mentor for Eta Sigma Phi who in turn were always eager to find a way to get him involved in whatever they were doing. Particularly memorable seems to have been a party Eta Sigma Phi organized to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his doctorate. As a sign of their enduring affection for him, many of his students stayed in touch after graduation. They would drop by the department and pay him a visit in his office or invite him out for coffee. If they were unable to visit, they would correspond with him by email or by the more traditional method of letters and post cards. Harry had a lasting impact on their lives.
Harry was an enthusiastic fan of the novels of Anthony Trollope. He admired Trollope’s business-like approach to writing, his detailed depiction of the mundane realities of everyday life, and his keen eye for social manners and customs. Harry himself was a shrewd observer of human behavior. As an avid reader of Trollope, Harry set out to collect, one by one, a complete set of the pocket-sized Oxford World Classics edition of the novels (46 volumes). In the course of that long and assiduous search, he was willing to enlist the help of others who frequented used book stores and thus might stumble on a desired volume; he had ready a list of wants for that purpose and would share it with volunteers who felt challenged by the search.
The Department of Classics offers its condolences to our former colleague’s family. He is survived by his children Eugenia "Genie", Anna (Alison Gross), Constantine, and William (Joanne Shaw) as well as his grandchildren Sofie Avery, Grace Avery-Gross, and Lily Avery-Gross.