Eugene Numa Lane (2007)

Eugene Numa Lane (1936-2007) was salutatorian of his Princeton class (1958). He received an M.A. from Yale in 1960 and his Ph.D. two years later. After a year at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, he taught at the University of Virginia (1962-6), then the University of Missouri, Columbia, where he rose from associate to full professor, serving a term as chair and another as graduate director. In teaching and scholarship Greek was his preferred language and he taught it at all levels in classes ranging from small seminars to auditorium-sized mythology classes. He returned to the Athens to teach at the American School in the summer of 1992 and after retiring in 2000 he served on the School's Managing Committee. His scholarship enlarged our understanding of Greek cults in Rome by means of his superb editing of the four-volume Corpus monumentorum religionis dei Menis (Leiden: Brill, 1971-8) and two of the three volumes of Corpus cultus Iovis Sabazii (Leiden: Brill, 1983-9), permanent testimony to the breadth and precision of his scholarship. His sourcebook, Paganism and Christianity, 100-425 C.E. (edited with Ramsay MacMullen) (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), is invaluable on its subject. His piety, demonstrated by his editing Cybele, Attis, and related cults: essays in memory of M. J. Vermaseren (Leiden: Brill, 1996), inspired similar impulses in his students, resulting in his own Festschrift edited by Cathy Callaway (Stoa Consortium, 2002). He died of complications of Parkinson's Disease on New Year's Day 2007.