In Alan’s memory … what a bitter phrase! We sometimes joked about which of us would write the other’s obituary. Alan was six months older than me but probably lived a healthier lifestyle, apart from his propensity for riding a bicycle at great speed around Manhattan. Even when he fell mortally ill in 2016, I like everyone else hoped that he would still be able to enjoy life for several years longer. That still seemed just about possible when I last saw him, at his Riverside Drive flat, in February 2017. I was spending the academic year in Berlin, and now sorely regret that I did not come back to New York in the summer when I knew that he was due to suffer more surgery. At least he got to see his new grandson Silas Cameron, which no doubt lifted his spirits much more than any visit from a contemporary would have done.
It is impossible to commemorate properly a friendship of more than fifty years’ duration in a few sentences or a few pages. For some forty of those years, though never members of the same department at Columbia, we often collaborated, worked with the same graduate students (Alan was more easy-going, in contrast with his way of dealing with the aberrations of published scholars) and tried to help the same younger faculty members. We were both very delighted to live in New York, for all its horrendous defects. We used to share characterizations of our professional colleagues and of Columbia administrators. On uncounted occasions we enjoyed each other’s hospitality (in early days some of Alan’s parties were so good that the neighbours complained). It pleased each of us that in mature middle age the other found himself married to exactly the right person.
In all that time we only once disagreed sharply, and the issue was quickly resolved and forgotten. As all his friends knew, Alan practised ataraxia in the best Epicurean manner. But that left plenty of room for generous indignation, which might be stirred by fraudulent politicians or obtuse scholars but never by students, who were always looked on with an indulgent eye.
Others have written about Alan’s scholarship. Two traits always typified him—energy and scepticism. Those of his undergraduate contemporaries who became scholars stayed, most of them, quite close to traditional classical fields, in their early years at least (Averil Cameron was the great exception). We were astonished to learn that Alan very quickly became a master of late Roman and Byzantine authors and historical problems that we scarcely knew existed. And this energy continued far into retirement; he was cut off when he could still have written so much more. And scepticism was, with him, practically physiological. He was not interested in philosophy or law, fields that reinforce a person’s natural scepticism, but no one was better at seeing that another scholar’s more or less pretentious edifice was a house of cards or something not much better. Arguments will continue about such subjects as the circus factions and the ‘pagan’ intellectuals’ opposition to Christianity, but it was Alan’s achievement to have re-set these and many other debates. His was truly a unique voice: he was not a classicist, not a literature scholar, not a historian, not an art-historian, but a blend of all of these. There remains an astonishing body of work—
William Harris