A tribute to Pat Easterling (1934-2026)
We heard with sadness of the death of Professor Pat Easterling, in hospital in London earlier this month. Pat was a long-standing member of Newnham College having first read Classics here, which led to a distinguished career in the field. When she became Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge University in 1994 she was the first and, so far, the only woman to hold the chair.
Pat (NC 1952, Fairfax) was born in Blackburn, Lancashire, and studied Greek manuscripts as a graduate student before becoming an Assistant Lecturer at the University of Manchester. She returned to take up the same role at Newnham in 1958 and soon after became a Fellow, while concurrently a University Lecturer from 1969. During her long association with Newnham, Pat was also Vice-Principal (1981-6) and was elected an Honorary Fellow in 1987. Appointed Professor of Greek at University College London in 1987, she returned to Cambridge as Regius Professor, and Fellow at Newnham, until retiring in 2001.
Her research interest was in Greek literature, particularly tragedy, its performance and reception in antiquity, and its survival in later cultures. And she was recognised as a particular expert on the work of Sophocles. Pat’s articles are fundamental to her status as one of the most influential Hellenists of her generation.
Several members of the Newnham community have shared tributes:
Professor Dame Mary Beard studied and worked with her for many years and wrote: ‘I vividly remember the wise words of Pat, at a university meeting in the early 1990s when I was a young lecturer at Cambridge. Someone from the administration had asked the simple question: “What does Classics teach?” I had no idea how to answer and feared that I would be called out. But Pat responded instantly. “It teaches you to read difficult things,” she said. That has stuck with me ever since. Her point was that Classics was not only about great literature, the origins of western philosophy or theatre, or all the other things usually rolled out in its support.
'Students of Classics learned to struggle with language (and sometimes it was a struggle), with complexity and with things that were very hard to understand. Looking back, I now see that when she was teaching us Greek literature in her elegant room in Kennedy, she was also teaching us how to deal with that complexity and with how to confront the limits of our understanding. If we found, for example, reading the Greek historian Thucydides difficult (he can be close to incomprehensible), that was because he was trying to say difficult things. So how were we to face that?
'This did not make learning with her painful. I am thinking of my supervisions in the 1970s, when her teaching (accompanied by a cup of tea or – as then was the custom – a glass of sherry) felt like an oasis of humanity. It was indeed, reading and interpreting texts that took you out of your comfort zone, but you always knew that she was with you on that journey. We will miss her.’
Lucilla Burn, who studied Classics at Newnham and has Privileges of a Fellow Emerita, wrote, 'Like Mary Beard I have vivid memories of supervisions with Pat in her elegant room in Kennedy in the 1970s. Mary and I were fortunate to be of the generation of Newnham classicists who were taught by Pat and Joyce Reynolds, two truly phenomenal scholars with much in common in terms of care for and continuing interest in their students, but vastly contrasting teaching styles. While a supervision with Joyce would leave us in little doubt as to the yawning gaps in our understanding and historical intelligence, Pat’s gently Socratic line of questioning might guide us towards what we would go away believing were our own profound observations on, say, Sophocles. Her contributions to scholarship, to Newnham and to all her students are profound and enduring.'
Vice-Principal Barbara Blacklaws said, 'Pat was lovely to me when I first arrived in Newnham; always a thoughtful, calm and friendly presence in the SCR and in meetings. She will be much missed.'
Pat married (Henry) John Easterling in 1956, who predeceased her in 2021, and is survived by her son Tom and two grandchildren.
Elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1998, Pat was also awarded honorary doctorates from the Universities of Athens, Bristol, London (Royal Holloway), Uppsala and Ioannina, was elected an Honorary Fellow of UCL in 1997, and in 2013 associé étranger de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Institut de France, and was an Honorary Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
She was involved in many societies, in particular those that promote the Classics in schools and the wider public, including the Hellenic Society, the Classical Association and the Joint Association of Classical Teachers. Pat was also a member of the Guild of Friends and the Guild of Benefactors.
She founded (with Ted Kenney) Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics, a series designed to help students to translate, interpret and appreciate classical works, to which her Sophocles: Trachiniae (1982) belongs. Oedipus at Colonus will come out posthumously and Pat lived to see the two volumes of her collected papers published by Cambridge University Press earlier this summer. Her extensive editorial activity includes Cambridge History of Greek Literature (with Bernard Knox, 1985), Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (1997) and Greek and Roman Actors (with Edith Hall, 2002).
Photos: Top of page Pat Easterling (right) with fellow Classicists Mary Beard and Joyce Reynolds; when at Newnham in a photo by Dorothy Hahn; and in recent years when an Honorary Fellow.