Lynch, Charles Arthur

Charles Arthur Lynch (1903-1963), professor of classics, was born in Providence on May 4, 1903. He graduated from Classical High School and received his bachelor of arts degree from Harvard in 1926, a master’s degree from Brown in 1927 and another from Harvard in 1927, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1936. He was instructor in Greek and Latin classics at Brown in 1927-28 and again in 1932, becoming assistant professor in 1935, associate professor in 1944, and professor in 1951. He taught courses in medieval Latin and in the Greek historians, wrote textual criticism on Aeschylus and Tacitus, and was noted for his reading in Latin of the Christmas gospel according the St. Luke at the annual Christmas Christmas Carol Service of the Department of Classics. With Professor Leicester Bradner he translated The Latin Epigrams of Thomas More, which was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1953, after which he was invited to become a member of the Thomas More Project at Yale University. He was acting chairman of the department in the second semester of 1962-63, when illness caused him to stop teaching in April. He died in Providence on July 16, 1963. He wrote his own epitaph, which he sent to the Brown Alumni Monthly:

If, when I shall have been dead
A day or more,
Friends of mine think to be said
(By custom hoar)
Praise, encomia, and such,
I’d acquiesce:
“A little honor – not too much?
Well, thank you, yes.”
If an epitaph seems best
Where I must rest,
I shall say, “Let it be raised
And me be praised.”
But this much warning I must give:
Don’t say, don’t write
“This man made the classics live.”
It’s trite.