The American Academy in Rome is honored to announce that it has received a $3 million bequest from Michael C. J. Putnam, beloved Fellow, Resident, and Trustee, in vital support of the Humanities.
In fond remembrance, we share the following reflection on Michael's illustrious life and career, written by colleagues John Bodel and David I. Ketzer, Brown University and featured in 'Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome' vol 70, 2025.
Michael C. J. Putnam
(1933–2025)
John Bodel, Brown University
David I. Ketzer, Brown University
We mourn the death of Michael Courtney Jenkins Putnam at the age of 91, on 19 August 2025, following a fall at his summer home in Rockport, Maine. A world-renowned expert in Latin literature, particularly the poetry of the late Republican and Augustan eras, Michael was a prolific scholar, a loyal and tireless supporter of the institutions he cared most about—foremost among them the American Academy in Rome, the American Philological Association (now the Society for Classical Studies), and the Brown University Classics Department—and a warm and generous friend. Educated at the Portsmouth Abbey School, which first nourished his interest in classical literature, Michael went on to earn B.A. (1954), M.A. (1955), and Ph.D. (1959) degrees from Harvard. He taught for a year at Smith College (1959–1960) before moving to Brown University in 1960, where he served for nearly five decades before retiring in 2008 as W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of Classics and Professor of Comparative Literature. He was an inspiring teacher to generations of Brown students, who came to appreciate the artistic beauty and fundamental humanity of Latin literature under his sensitive guidance. His classes on Virgil were legendary and unforgettable.
No scholar of the modern era has done more than Michael to illuminate the Latin poetry of the classical period. His first book, The Poetry of the Aeneid (1965), revolutionized the study of Virgil's epic by revealing a deep undercurrent of ambivalence that haunts the ostensibly triumphant ideological message of the poem. Hailed as a classic, the work became a cornerstone of the so-called "Harvard school" of interpretation of Latin poetry, which combined philological rigor with close intertextual readings in the New Critical mode.
His second monograph, Virgil's Pastoral Art: Studies in the Eclogues (1970), won the Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit awarded annually by the American Philological Association for the best book of the year on a classical subject. Michael would go on to write four more books on Virgil and the Virgilian tradition and to co-edit a fifth. Those books include Virgil's Poem of the Earth (1979), on the Georgics, completing his coverage of Virgil's oeuvre; Virgil's Epic Designs: Ekphrasis in the Aeneid (1998); The Virgilian Tradition: The First Fifteen Hundred Years (with Jan M. Ziolkowski, 2008), a monumental work of more than 1,000 pages; A Companion to Vergil's Aeneid and its Tradition (co-edited with Joseph Farrell, 2010); and The Humanness of Heroes: Studies in the Conclusion of Virgil's Aeneid (2011). His work on Virgil was recognized in 2024 by Italy's Accademia Nazionale Virgiliana with its first lifetime achievement award, the Medaglia alla Carriera. In 2009 the Vergilian Society of North America, of which he was a lifetime member, bestowed on him its highest award, the Alexander MacKay Prize. That same year he inaugurated the Amsterdam Virgil Lectures at the University of Amsterdam.
Virgil was his favorite author, but Michael cast his capacious light over virtually all the major poets of the Late Republic and Augustan period, including, notably, Catullus and Horace, on whose work he wrote four books: Essays on Latin Lyric, Elegy, and Epic (1982); Artifices of Eternity: Horace's Fourth Book of Odes (1986); Horace's Carmen Saeculare: Ritual Magic and the Poet's Art (2000); and Poetic Interplay: Catullus and Horace (2006). He wrote as well on Tibullus, contributing a commentary: Tibullus: A Commentary (1973); and co-authoring, with Rodney Dennis, a translation: The Complete Poems of Tibullus: An En Face Bilingual Edition (2012). During the final decades of his illustrious career he began exploring Latin poetry of the Renaissance, editing and translating Maffeo Vegio's Short Epics (2004) and Jacopo Sannazaro: The Latin Poetry (2009), before turning, in his final book (written with his former student, Antony Augoustakis, and Carole Newlands), to The Poetic World of Statius' Silvae (2023).
Michael once wrote, "The American Academy [in Rome] claims a special place in the hearts and minds of those who have been touched by her magic," and indeed Michael felt much touched and blessed by his long association with the Academy. But the American Academy was greatly touched in turn by all that Michael contributed to it. A Rome Prize Fellow in 1963–1964, Michael then returned as a Resident in 1970, and as Mellon Professor in Charge of the Classical School from 1989 to 1991. Elected a Trustee of the Academy in 1991, he was awarded the Academy's Centennial Medal in 2009, the Trustees' Medal in 2010, and in that same year became one of only two Lifetime Trustees. In all, he served for what must be a record of 34 years as trustee. The Academy staff made sure to reserve Michael's favorite Library Apartment for his regular visits to Rome with his longtime partner, Kenneth Gaulin, as the two delighted in opening bottles of wine and entertaining visitors there.
Michael's services to the American Academy in Rome were innumerable and unmeasurable. Many in the Academy community will remember fondly one of his favorite, albeit minor, contributions, a guided tour of the Cimitero Acattolico at the Pyramid of Cestius, invariably culminating at the grave of John Keats with a moving recitation of selections from Percy Bysshe Shelley's pastoral elegy Adonais, written in honor of his deceased friend. Michael shared Keats's humility about his work, claiming, when pressed about its interpretive range and versatility, that he was a one-trick pony and had "always had the same haircut." We demur. Having built a monument more lasting than bronze, Michael leaves a name, like Keats's, very far from being writ in water.
Atque in perpetuum, Michael, ave atque vale. Sit tibi terra levis