In Memoriam Adam and Anne Parry

Summary

Adam Parry was born in Paris forty-three years ago and although he was to spend most of his life in the United States it is fair to say that his personal style always had in it a faint flavour of France and French culture. His father at that time was attending the Sorbonne where he published the thesis, heralding a new era in Homeric scholarship, to which his son, forty years later, was to pay signal tribute. The elder Parry, himself, was a graduate of Berkeley, but on his appointment to the Harvard faculty in the department of Classics the family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their travels were not ended. It was with the aid of a grant from the university that Adam's father was enabled to pursue those studies in the oral poetry of Southern Yugoslavia which were to confirm the thesis that the Homeric poems were orally composed. He took his family to Yugoslavia with him. One of Adam's earliest memories was a recollection of the great blue pot of goat's milk simmering on the stove. There at an impressionable age he encountered hardy men and strenuous conditions of living, while his eyes rested on the rugged mountains of the Balkan peninsula, a Homeric landscape haunted by memories of latter-day heroes. Soon after their return to the United States the father's life by tragic accident was ended before it had scarcely begun, and Adam's mother took the family with her back to California. It was at Berkeley that Adam, like his father, achieved his initial mastery over the Greek tongue.