CATHARINE SAUNDERS
1872 - 1943
Professor Emeritus Catharine Saunders, who died on
January 18, l9h3, had been connected with Vassar
College since 1900 and after 1907 worked continu-
ously on the teaching staff, a long and honorable
service.
Her education in preparation for her life-work of
teaching was varied and rich. She was a high school
student at Belfast, New York, where she was born,
took her A.B. degree at Elmira College and her Ph.D.
at Columbia University. She studied also for part
of a year at the University of Munich, did research
at the American Academy in Rome and enriched her
background by travel that ranged over Europe from
the Roman wall in Northern England to Ancient Troy
in Turkey, with much time spent in Italy and Greece.
On her last leave in 1940 she even went to Mexico,
Guatemala and.Yucatan to see the remains of the Mayan
Civilization.
Her research, which was divided between the two main
lines of her interest, included studies on "Costume
in Roman Comedy", "Masks", "Altars"; and Vergilian
Studies of "Cremation and Inhumation in the Aeneid",
"Vergil's Primitive Italy" and "The Sources of the
Names of Trojan and Latin Heroes in Vergil's Aeneid".
All Miss Saunders‘ publications in book form and in
periodicals snow her painstaking and exact scholarship,
and her imagination in interpretation. In all her
writing she was a perfectionist in her weighing of
evidence, in her clarity of presentation.
These same qualities appeared in her college teaching,
but she was able to simplify and illuminate the re-
sults of her research for undergraduates in her
favorite courses in Roman Comedy, Vergil's Aeneid and
Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin. She presented many
of her papers to the Classical Journal Club and to
the students‘ Classical Society as well as at the
meetings of the American Philological Association and
in all these her clarity of diction and expression
were notable.
Miss Saunders gave distinguished and appreciated ser-
vice as an alumna trustee to her Alma Mater, Elmira
College. On the campus of Vassar she won the devotion
CATHARINE SAUNDERS (Continued)
of her fellow-residents in Kendrick by her humor,
charm, tolerance, and final Stoicism. The students
who had the privilege of knowing her enjoyed her
friendliness and hospitality. One of her last
public services for them, was training the actors
in a Mediaeval Latin Christmas Play given in the
Classical Museum in 1941 with Professor John Peirce
singing a Te Deum after it.
Since she died, a young alumna wrote of her: "She
was so gentle and such a great lady: she will be
greatly missed." Her colleagues join with her stu-
dents in offering to her Horace's tribute to her
beloved Vergil:
"The Muses who rejoice in the country gave her
gentleness and geniality,"
- molle atque facetum.
Elizabeth Hazleton Height
Inez Ryberg
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