It is always a time of great sadness when we lose a member of our academic community. The Division of Humanities and Fine Arts joins the Department of Classics in mourning the passing of Emeritus Professor Apostolos Athanassakis. Below is a tribute to his life and scholarship prepared by his colleagues.
— Daina Ramey Berry, Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts
Apostolos Athanassakis, Professor of Classics at UC Santa Barbara from 1968 until his retirement in 2011, passed away in Athens, Greece, on October 4, 2025, at the age of 87. Athanassakis was a renowned scholar of archaic Greek poetry, an award-winning translator, and a powerful poet. He received his BA in Classics in 1961 from Lincoln University, the first degree-granting HBCU in the US, and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1965. Athanassakis taught at Claremont Men’s College (now Claremont McKenna) for three years before joining the Department of Classics at UCSB, where he worked for the next 44 years. In 2001, he became the inaugural James and Sarah Argyropoulos Professor of Hellenic Studies, an endowed chair established by the Argyropoulos family to promote Greek culture, both ancient and modern. As Argyropoulos Professor, Athanassakis launched an annual program of performances, screenings, and lectures that continues to engage the Santa Barbara community in celebrating Greece.
A prolific author whose expertise spanned genres and languages, Athanassakis published widely in the fields of ancient and modern Greek linguistics, archaic Greek culture, Hesiod, and the Homeric epics. He was also an accomplished Latinist whose edition of Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis (“Pumpkinification of Claudius”) brought an understudied satire about this Roman emperor into the public view. At the heart of Athanassakis’ contributions to the field of Classics were his studiously accurate yet elegant translations of The Homeric Hymns, The Orphic Hymns, and Hesiod: Works & Days, Theogony, and Shield, all published by Johns Hopkins University Press, and reprinted many times. These translations, which earned Athanassakis a 1987 Guggenheim Fellowship, had a poetic sensibility that rekindled the imagination of ancient Greece. Athanassakis served as Dean of Philology at the University of Rethymnon, Crete, for a number of years. A poet as well as a scholar, Athanassakis published four books of original poetry, most recently When They Have Burned Down Your House (Pella, 2010), a reflection on the theme of xenitia, or the experience of being a foreigner away from home, in modern Greek with an English translation.
Athanassakis lived the life of a scholar and educator in the fullest sense. During his career at UCSB, he taught more than 25 different courses, from Greek Myth lectures that filled Campbell Hall to graduate seminars on archaic Greek language. Athanassakis’ love of Greek culture and folk traditions that enriched his editions of Hesiod and Homer also charmed his students: with his shepherd’s crook tapping out the rhythms of Greek poetry, he held an audience of 500 mesmerized. Athanassakis brought the old ways of life in Greece to UCSB by keeping a flock of sheep on campus near what would become Harder Stadium. This pastoral ethos also guided his work as Director of the Education Abroad Program, for which he ran a popular summer session in Greece, and informed his long-standing position as Faculty-in-Residence at Manzanita Villages. “Dr. A.,” as the students called him, lived on one of the student floors, ate in the cafeteria, and organized faculty-student events to foster intellectual exchange among professors and undergraduates. Athanassakis was truly a shepherd to his flock and will be missed by all who knew him.
The campus flag was lowered on November 6th to commemorate Athanassakis’ legacy. His family, including his children and grandchildren, gathered in Athens for a memorial service in his honor.