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Adam Milman Parry (February 1, 1928 – June 6, 1971) was an American Classics. He worked on Greek and Latin history literature, particularly the works of Thucydides, Homer and Virgil, and was a founding figure of the scholarly movement that became known as the Harvard School of criticism into Virgil's Aeneid.
The son of the Homeric scholar Milman Parry, Parry spent much of his early life in California following his father's early death in 1935. He subsequently studied at the University of California, Berkeley, at Harvard University and on a Fulbright Scholarship at the Sorbonne in Paris. While writing up his Harvard doctoral thesis, he took a post at Amherst College in Massachusetts, and moved between short-lived appointments at Harvard, Amherst, Yale University and University College London before settling at Yale in 1962. He was appointed full professor and department chair there in 1968, and remained at the university until his death.
Parry's work encompassed translations, critical annotations, historiography and literary criticism. His 1963 article "The Two Voices of Virgil's Aeneid" is regarded as a founding text of the Harvard School, an interpretative trend arguing that Virgil's poem contains a "private voice" drawing attention to the costs and horrors of Roman Empire and the rule of the emperor Augustus. He opposed the Vietnam War and was known for his left-wing politics and Bohemianism lifestyle. He died in a motorcycle accident on June 6, 1971, alongside his second wife, Anne. In the following decades, his interpretation of the Aeneid became a dominant influence upon Virgilian scholarship.
Milman Parry died in 1935, of a gunshot wound generally believed to have been self-inflicted and accidental. Marian Parry moved the family to California. Adam Parry studied under Ivan Mortimer Linforth and Harold F. Cherniss at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating in 1949. During his time there, he worked as a crewman on ships sailing between California and Seattle in Washington. He moved to Harvard University to embark on a Ph.D. programme the following year, now supporting himself by working as a taxi driver in Boston and periodically attending classes in his uniform. His teachers at Harvard included the classicists John Huston Finley Jr. and Cedric Whitman. He spent the 1950–1951 academic year at the Sorbonne in Paris in on a Fulbright Scholarship, and sat the preliminary examinations for his Ph.D. in the spring of 1952; among his examiners for the Oral exam (oral examination) was the intellectual historian Eric Havelock.
Later in 1952, while still writing up his doctoral thesis (titled " Logos" and " Ergon" in Thucydides and supervised by Havelock), Parry took a post as an instructor in classics at Amherst College in Massachusetts. At Amherst he was a colleague of the classicists Wendell Clausen, John Moore and Thomas Gould. Along with his then-wife Barbara, he translated in 1954 from French Personal Religion Among the Greeks, a publication of the Sather Classical Lectures delivered at Berkeley in 1952–1953 by André-Jean Festugière. He later completed another translation, this time from modern Greek, of a chapter on the Old East Slavic epic poem known as The Tale of Igor's Campaign.
Parry remained at Amherst until 1955, when he moved to Yale University as an instructor on the invitation of Frank Edward Brown. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1957. This was followed by a Morse fellowship at Yale, and a year as a research associate at University College London, during which he made several visiting lectures at other universities in England. In 1960, by now an assistant professor at Yale, he moved to a post at the same level at Harvard. While there, he directed a performance of the Ajax, a tragedy by the fifth-century Athenian playwright Sophocles, in Ancient Greek: Parry played Ajax himself, with the younger of his two sons also in the cast. At the end of his first academic year at Harvard, he accepted a Academic tenure post at Amherst, beginning there in 1961. That year, he wrote the notes for Robert Fagles's translation of the poems of the early Greek Lyric poetry poet Bacchylides. In 1962, he returned to Yale; in 1968, he was a made a full professor and chair of the classics department. In 1971, he published The Making of Homeric Verse, a collected volume of his father's academic works.
Parry died, along with his wife Anne, in a motorcycle accident near Colmar in France on June 6, 1971. The couple had recently bought the motorcycle and were using it to travel back to France from Germany. Shortly before his death, his term as chair of the Yale classics department had been extended for a fourth year. He had also been contracted by Oxford University Press to write a book, The Mind of Thucydides, expanding his doctoral dissertation, and by Cambridge University Press to serve as an editor for the Cambridge History of Classical Literature.
Parry's 1956 article, "The Language of Achilles", was described by Peter Rose as the most radical challenge to Milman Parry's thesis that Homeric poetry saw no friction between an idea and the language available to express it. In 1973, Michael Reeve described it as one of the most important works on Homer in the preceding half century: Lloyd-Jones considered it Parry's most important contribution to scholarship. In 1975, Havelock wrote that it remained a widely cited work on its topic, and noted that Kirk had selected it for his 1964 edited collection, The Language and Background of Homer.
Richard Jenkyns, in 2017, described "The Two Voices of Virgil's Aeneid" as "practical criticism at its best" and praised both its eloquence and its clarity. The article has frequently been cited as a major influence on Virgilian scholarship. In 1989, Richard F. Moorton called it "one of the most influential essays on the Aeneid ever written". In 2000, Stephanie Quinn called it one of the most influential of the previous thirty-five years. In 2006, Brian Breed cited it as a text of "great influence", particularly on Oliver Lyne's 1987 Further Voices in Virgil's "Aeneid"; a 2017 retrospective on the Harvard School by Julia Hejduk called it "seminal". In 2018, Susanna Braund wrote that "if there is one single scholarly intervention that shifted our view of the Aeneid, it was surely Adam Parry's essay". In 2017, Ward W. Briggs referred to the dominant paradigm of Virgilian studies in the generations after Parry's article as "a kind of ".
Parry became a trade union member during his time working at sea, and known to have strongly left-wing politics. In 1967, he wrote a letter to the Yale Daily News condemning the decision of Yale's Timothy Dwight College, of which he was a fellow, to invite Ronald Reagan, then a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Parry described Reagan as "one of the most savage proponents of American belligerence" in Vietnam War.
Lloyd-Jones described Parry as "one of the most delightful and accomplished human beings I have known. Handsome, elegant and witty, he had a most unusual charm, by no means diminished by a streak of Bohemianism wildness." In a 1975 obituary, Havelock wrote that Parry maintained "a faint flavor of France and French culture" in his personal style. Robert Kanigel describes him as having a sarcastic sense of humor: during a dinner with his paternal aunt Lucile, she opined that she wished she had "peasant blood", to which Parry replied "well, Lucile, what do you think you have?" Lloyd-Jones wrote that Parry had once told him that he had only ever imagined being a classical scholar, a lawyer, or a Beachcombing, and that he would never have become the former had he not outlived his father.
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