Published October 10, 2023 by Ben Raab, Yale Daily News:
Before taking Joseph Solodow’s “Roman Dining” seminar, Anya AitSahlia ’25 had no intention of becoming a Classics major. Within weeks, she changed her mind.
“It only took a few class sessions for me to realize I wanted nothing more than to study Classics here,” AitSahlia wrote to the News. “And, more, to study Classics with him.”
Solodow, a Latin professor in Yale’s department of Classics, died of cancer on Wednesday, Oct. 4. He was 76.
Solodow was born on Nov. 13, 1946, in Brooklyn, New York. He attended Erasmus Hall High School in Flatbush, a neighborhood home to many working-class Jewish families.
At Erasmus Hall, Solodow briefly considered a career in architecture but quickly developed a love for Latin from his teachers — a feeling he would later look to recreate in his own students. He was no stranger to foreign languages at home. His father, Philip, was a Russian-American Jew who spoke Yiddish, Russian, Hebrew, Polish, German and English. His mother, Yetta, spoke French, German and Latin.
Solodow spent his undergraduate years at Columbia University and earned a doctorate in Classics from Harvard University. His doctoral dissertation, “The Latin particle quidem” — which analyzed a single Latin word, “quidem” — is regarded as a “masterpiece” by Victor Bers, a professor emeritus of Classics.
“Joe was universally admired,” Kirk Freudenburg, Classics department chair, said. “He was very interested in the mechanics of language and had this ability to really research the points of nuance and tiny details that are really the last frontier of knowing a language well.”
To read the full tribute, please visit: Joseph Solodow, ‘universally admired’ professor and scholar of Latin literature, dies at 76
