Nicholas Horsfall
Prolific leading authority on Virgil whose career was noted for his enjoyment of a good feud
NICHOLAS HORSFALL, who has died aged 72, was considered one of the world’s leading interpreters of Virgil; though described by a French scholar as “l’un des plus grands savants de notre temps”, he was also famous for his feuds.
Horsfall’s reputation rested primarily, but by no means exclusively, on the massive commentaries – in total more than 3,000 pages – which he started to publish on Virgil’s Aeneid in his mid-50s. Those on Books II (2008), III (2006), VII (2000) and XI (2003) were published by Brill, with whom he characteristically fell out; VI was published in two volumes (2013) by De Gruyter.
Each of these works is dauntingly erudite, highly idiosyncratic, irrepressibly judgmental and embellished with personal reminiscences, which in VI extend to an appendix on Horsfall’s own education and intellectual development.
He also wrote Virgilio: l’epopea in alambicco (1991) and The epic distilled: studies in the composition of the Aeneid (2016), edited and mostly wrote A companion to the study of Virgil (1995), and contributed to the Enciclopedia virgiliana (1984-91). In 2010 he was awarded the Premio Internazionale of the Accademia Virgiliana in Mantua. He had been planning a commentary on Aeneid I, to be published by OUP, at the time of his death.
Nicholas Mark Horsfall was born on September 19 1946. His father, Thomas Mendelssohn-horsfall, was a descendant of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86) and served in the Royal Navy in both world wars. His mother, Sophie (née Szapiro), was of Russian-german origin and fled to Britain in 1939 from Berlin, where she had worked in the Mendelssohn Bank as their Mandarin specialist. A highly gifted linguist, she was rapidly recruited by the BBC as a Russian interpreter.
Theirs was a polyglot household and Nicholas was fluent in French, German and Italian. At Westminster, where he was a Queen’s Scholar, Horsfall determined on his future career after hearing a lecture by Hugh Lloyd-jones. A precocious undergraduate at Peterhouse, Cambridge, he won the Montagu Butler Prize, the Charles Oldham Scholarship and the Chancellor’s Medal for Classical Learning.
He moved to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he became an acolyte of Eduard Fraenkel and was supervised for his doctoral dissertation on Aeneid VII by RAB Mynors, RGM Nisbet and lastly Margaret Hubbard, with whom he enjoyed an enduring friendship (his published commentary on VII was dedicated to her).
From 1971 he taught in the Department of Latin at University College London, where he was devoted to successive Professors of Latin, Otto Skutsch and George Goold: for the former he edited a Festschrift (1988); the latter, “almost a second father”, was a co-dedicatee of his commentary on Aeneid XI along with his parents.
In 1987 he took early retirement after contracting multiple sclerosis (which, after treatment, remained in remission) and went to live in Rome, where every wall of his loft in Trastevere was piled high with books.
He returned to Britain in 2000 and lived in Oxford, before moving, a couple of years later, to Strathconon in the Scottish Highlands, where he was close to his cousin, the actor Bernard Horsfall, who lived on Skye. However, he continued to visit the Continent every year, regularly giving lectures in Italy as well as elsewhere.
Horsfall wrote on an extraordinarily wide variety of topics besides Virgil and had a knack of finding subjects which, while apparently tangential, frequently served as entrees to major scholarly concerns.
Among his other monographs and pamphlets are a translated edition of the historian/biographer Cornelius Nepos (1989) and The Culture of the Roman Plebs (2003), described on its dust jacket as an “attempt to reconstruct what your average Roman talked about in the bar or in the multi-seater latrine”. The former provoked a response from JL Moles (“On reading Cornelius Nepos with Nicholas Horsfall”), to which Horsfall took exception. Indeed he was never far from controversy and was always sensitive to perceived slights.
Though a private scholar for two thirds of his professional life, Horsfall was often invited to present papers at universities, though his insistence on being reimbursed in cash could cause problems. His speech, like his writing and indeed his general behaviour, was uniquely mannered; yet the mannerisms were not an act.
Although relations with him often resembled treading on eggshells, Horsfall was very generous with the help he offered to fellow classicists, especially those of a younger generation, and he was always pleased to encounter other enthusiasts for military history.
In recent years he was an honorary professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham. A profile on the department’s website observed that for Horsfall “there is life beyond classics, involving food and wine, cats, military history, cricket, music of discontinuous periods, chess problems and crime fiction. The need to split 30 tons of firewood per annum has reduced the energy that used to go into reviewing.”
Horsfall was married twice. His life in the Highlands was spent happily with Ailsa Crofts. He had major heart surgery in 2014 and suffered a stroke on Christmas Day 2018 which proved fatal.