Google is a two-edged sword.  Sometimes the news is good, other times it depresses us.  And when we learn a friend or colleague of the older generation has died, it is painful.

Eleanor Winsor Leach

I was saddened to learn that Eleanor Winsor Leach, a classics professor at Indiana University, died last winter at the age of 80.  She was a Virgilian scholar whose graceful writing took my breath away.  She kept teaching till the very end, a Ms. Chips of the 21st century.  According to the IU newspaper, students loved her parties on Horace’s birthday (Dec. 8), at which time they also decorated her Christmas tree.

I tried to find a poem to celebrate her life and was deep into Horace’s Ode 2.XIV before I realized it was inappropriate.  Horace’s attitude to death is not comforting, not what I wanted to read after learning about her death alone in her house, found six days after her death.  But here goes anyway:  it is a tribute to Leach’s generation that we are still reading the Roman poets.  Here is my  translation:

This ode is addressed to a man named Postumus.

Ah, Postumus,
the fleeting years glide by, and piety will
not delay wrinkles, or
old age, or indomitable death;

Not if you sacrifice
three hundred bulls a day, my friend,
to pitiless Pluto, the god who confined
three-bodied monster Geron and Tityon

with the Stygian wave, the water certain for us all
who enjoy the gifts of Earth;
the waters must be crossed, whether
we are kings or poor farmers.

In vain we will escape bloody war
and the crashing waves of the Adriatic;
in vain we will fear the illness the South wind
brings in autumn.

We must behold the black wandering river
Cocytus, and Danaus’s infamous daughters,
and Sisyphus condemned to long labor,

The earth and home and your
lovely wife must be left, and none of the trees
you fostered will follow their short-lived master
except the hated cypresses.

A “worthier” heir will drink the Cacuban wine
you locked up with a hundred keys, and he will
stain the floor with unmixed wine
superior to that served at the haughty
banquets of priests.