O Captain! Our Captain!

There’s a line in the Aeneid where a heartbroken Aeneas steels himself to tell his shipwrecked compatriots that a time will come when they will look back with fondness on their misfortunes. 

'My friends, this is not the first trouble we have known,’ he says in the West translation I read back in UCD thirty years ago. ‘We have suffered worse before, and this too will pass. God will see to it. You have been to Scylla's cave and heard the mad dogs howling in the depths of it. You have even survived rocks thrown by the Cyclops. So summon up your courage once again. This is no time for gloom or fear. The day will come, perhaps, when it will give you pleasure to remember even this. Whatever chance may bring, however many hardships we suffer, we are making for Latium, where the Fates show us our place of rest. There it is the will of God that the kingdom of Troy shall rise again. Your task is to endure and save yourselves for better days.'

I’ve been thinking of this a lot since Saturday, when I got the shocking news that Vic Connerty had died. These few days have been ones where deep sorrow has mingled with gratitude, and the thought that I’ve been so lucky to have been taught and guided by Vic, and to have known him for so long as a friend.

It’s strange to think back to to those magnificent lectures in UCD where Vic could cast his spell over a packed Theatre L, the 450 or so students who were meant to be there bolstered by cohorts who’d come over from the faculties of Engineering, Science, and Architecture to hear Vic tell us about the Gracchi, of Marius and his seven consulships, of Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, and the constant fatal relationship of land and the army. Despite how many wonderful lecturers there were in the Arts faculty at that time - I had a lot of great ones across Greek and Roman Civilization, History, and one year of English - it’s hardly surprising that when thousands of UCD alumni were polled a dozen or so years back and asked who their favourite lecturer had been, Vic was the winner for the 1990s.

Starting second year I met my tutor from first year, the lovely Jane McEntaggart, who said Mr Connerty wanted to meet me, so when I spotted him in a stairway a few days later I nervously approached him. We were talking in no time at all about my working in the pub in Palmerstown, about the comics convention I’d been at in London because I’d wanted back then to be a comic artist, and about how he and my mum had both moved here from Liverpool within a couple of years. Within a a week or so the tutorial lists were up and I was thrilled to see that I was in his group, along with Valerie who I’d known from the previous year, Claire who’s still a dear friend to this day, Joanne, Paula, Johanna, Gerry, Jacqui, and Suzanne. And so began a year of such wonderful memories, anecdotes, lessons, and ideas. Too many to share, though I’ll never forget in particular how Vic told us of the last words attributed to the emperor Vespasian, distracted from the canonical “I think I’m becoming a God” by the sight of a rainbow apparently ending in the bushes of Belfield.

Small wonder, then, that I did his third-year course on the decade of the Triumvirate, immersed in Caesar, Cicero, Plutarch, and others, letting the ancients speak for themselves, even if we viewed them at times with sceptical eyes. And even now I can’t but think of those classes without hearing Vic’s warmly growling voice with that unforgettable cadence, quoting Cicero’s “to listen to him you’d think he lived in Plato’s Republic, and not in the sink of Romulus.”

And so the following year I started my Master’s and became a tutor under Vic’s mentorship, making a host of friendships I still am so lucky to have, even if we’ve lost a few since: poor Renate passed on a couple of years ago, and Carine died just a few months back. Vic would be my boss whether tutoring or invigilating, my supervisor when Andrew Erskine was away in Munich, and most importantly my friend through the decades of his retirement: I was so glad to be able to build my first flexi-day off from my current job around one of our regular coffee meetings at Dunne and Crescenzi, there to talk of life and academia and the very different fortunes of our respective Merseyside football clubs. I’d never have imagined it would be our last coffee meeting, or that seeing him at UCD’s Classical Society Inaugural a couple of months back would be our last meeting of any sort.

In truth, countless people could tell stories like mine: when one of my friends shared the news of his death on Facebook she began with the words “O Captain! My Captain!” I’d had those words - whether thought of as Walt Whitman’s, or Robin Williams’s, or Ethan Hawke’s - in my head ever since Tom had sent me the news, and I’m sure there are so many others who could say the same.

I want to say that the world is darker today, but Vic’s was a fire that lit thousands of candles. One of my friends described him the other day as a champion of the ancient world who exemplified how to be a person in the modern world, and this is surely right: his warmth, his wisdom, his curiosity, and his deep care for people are things that will surely stay with me and so many others as long as we live. May he rest in peace.