And so life went on, as if forever. Then last September I phoned him just to catch up. He told me everything had gone wonderfully in Rome; he had made good progress on what I called his "decadence" book, the project he described as "Food and Drink in Roman Society." Rome had been wonderful, except that he had had a fall and hurt his hip. "Oh John," I said, detecting a worried tone in his voice, "I stumble all the time; it was probably just too much tennis the day before." No, it was something more serious. He was having some tests done. And then, it seems just an instant later, he was gone.

Ours had been a friendship of inadvertence, something that had grown up over the years without either of us thinking about it very much. I had no idea how close we had become or how much I would miss him.

Many of his accomplishments are well known to this group. But I have to say something about him as a scholar, because scholar he was, at the core and to the last. When he came to New York he continued his teaching and research while carrying on his demanding work at the ACLS. When I telephoned him at ACLS, I was often told that he was at his office at Columbia, and when I reached him there we often talked first about his teaching and scholarly projects. I know how much discipline such devotion to scholarship requires, and I finished those conversations feeling stimulated by his ideas but humbled as I compared my own meager efforts to his.

Scholarship was not something he did to please the chair of his department, to win a raise from a grudging dean, or for the glory of it. It was in his bones to keep on learning and keep on sharing what he learned with his students. I cannot do better in summing up his achievement as a classical scholar than to quote another Roma historian, Corey Brennan:

Early on his innovative contributions to the history and archaeology of the Roman Bay of Naples—which impressively illustrated the possibilities of the emerging field of ancient "regional" studies—won for him an international reputation and a broad network of contacts in Italy. That reputation was further solidified in the early eighties by major publications on the social dimensions of Roman commerce. One research interest that seems particularly prescient is his work (starting in the mid-eighties) on the history of the Roman communal meal, for there John D’Arms’ contributions have sparked no end of subsequent inquiry.

His scholarly productivity, I might add, continued right to the end, and included the editing of hitherto unpublished Roman inscriptions, work demanding a high level of technical skill, and more wide-ranging interpretive studies such as his essay "Performing Culture: Roman Spectacle and the Banquets of the Powerful" in a volume published entitled The Art of Ancient Spectacle (1999a). Here one can see very clearly the persistent transdisciplinarity of his work, his mastery of the disciplines of archaeology and epigraphy, and his ability to relate them to literature, social history, and the history of art.

One can also see a broadening of the range of methods he utilized and his willingness to relate the drives and desires of the Roman elite to the experience of the ordinary people who witnessed the spectacles of their processions and elaborately staged dining. Examine the extensive footnotes and you will see the rich roster of those with whom John broke bread in this intellectual banquet. Next to Tacitus and Petronius, and the emperors, senators, and nouveaux riches they wrote about, are the architects and decorators of Roman buildings; the grand figures of Renaissance Italy are there, along with a King of France; nearby he brought in a generation of younger Roman social historians, whose work John knew and valued. Not far away you’ll find the anthropologist Jack Goody, always good at sniffing out cooking, class, and cuisine; Erving Goffman, chatting about strategic interactions; and Barbara Freedman, with an eagle eye for staging the gaze: John read them all and assimilated with great acumen their insights, as he did the knowledge of more traditional scholars. We can see in this and his other recent articles what important new work he was producing on social class, the ideology of equality, and the Roman love of spectacle; they provide good reason to think that, had he lived longer, his scholarship would have risen to even higher levels of excellence. But be that as it may, the publications on his c.v. (four books, dozens of articles, uncounted reviews) are—well, what word can I use except "spectacular"?

Such scholarly contributions came from the core of John’s intellectual life, but they are not the core of his contribution to our shared enterprise. He knew more clearly than almost anyone else how underdeveloped and vulnerable was the infrastructure of the humanities. As Dean and Vice Provost at the University of Michigan he had come to see how the great national laboratories, scientific professional societies and national academies, the National Science Foundation, and the support of universities, foundations and governmental agencies worked together to sustain a scientific enterprise of unrivaled excellence. He admired and respected this achievement, as we all should. But the humanities, by contrast, had a much narrower institutional base, and that base was poorly supported and often in danger of fragmentation. The most pressing problem in the humanities, however, was not the weakness of the infrastructure per se, but its consequence, the diminution of intellectual ambition at a time when humanists needed once again a voice that "resonated with confidence, as they engaged in exploring fundamental questions concerning human life and its meaning," as John phrased it in an essay in the volume What’s Happened to the Humanities? These questions could not be left to the scientists and the economists any more than the scientific breakthroughs of recent years could be shrugged off and ignored by humanists. Humanists need to engage with the big questions; they should not be shy of intellectual ambitions.

Ambition was not a bad word in John’s vocabulary. The Burkhardt Fellowships were aimed precisely at stimulating and sustaining the intellectual ambitions of newly tenured faculty members, the next generation of leadership in the humanities. Much of John’s work, indeed, can be seen as a succession of efforts to help humanistic scholars realize their highest intellectual ambitions.

When John came to the ACLS in 1997 the wounds from the protracted culture wars were deep; the intellectual divides within our professions were destroying old friendships and fragmenting departments. The media had little to say about the humanities except to mock the titles of papers presented at the MLA and to denounce the excesses of political correctness. Congress had come close to abolishing the National Endowment for the Humanities, and with a few exceptions, notably the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, foundations were in headlong flight not only from the humanities but from research of any sort that did not fit into their immediate social agenda.

John knew what he was getting in for. He had just completed an essay called "Funding Trends in the Academic Humanities, 1970-1995" for What’s Happened to the Humanities? While fashionable critics were busy denouncing positivism and rejecting empiricism of any form, John set out to gather and analyze the data that showed a major change in support for scholarship during the past generation, the decline in federal funding, and the transfer of the burden of support to colleges and universities that accompanied what he called "the virtual disappearance of large foundations as patrons" of the humanities. (He loved to use old-fashioned words such as "patrons" and "patronage"; while the rest of us were babbling about "funding sources," he would drop the name of Maecenas.)

The impact of these changes in patronage was especially evident, John pointed out, in the fellowship support provided by the ACLS, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Humanities Center. This was, he noted, the lifeblood of scholarly research in the humanities. But the flow of this lifeblood had come perilously close to stagnating. Fellowship numbers were declining and stipend levels were stuck below $30,000, gradually eroding as faculty salaries increased and inflation took its toll. The infrastructure of the humanities, to judge from this crucial leading indicator, was being undermined.

Others will describe in more detail what John accomplished at the ACLS. Let me simply note how easy it would have been in 1997 to sit back and complain about the foundations and what Congress had done to the NEH. But that was not John’s way. He did not complain. He rolled up his sleeves and got to work with all the grace, charm, and other wonderful qualities he had.

Now, since John would insist that I speak in Tacitean mode, sine ira et studio, let me not pretend that he was without flaw or blemish. I must mention the principal failings as well as his many virtues.

He was not beyond prevarication. I remember him arriving at our home in Princeton with a gift bottle of wine which he explained with a perfectly straight face and convincing manner he had received gratis from the special wine cellar in an under-basement of Nassau Hall reserved for the use of Trustees. I almost believed him, since that would explain some otherwise puzzling decisions emanating from that august body. He was also a terrible tease. He loved embarrassing stories about his friends. When he went down to the University of Florida a few months after I had visited there, he ferreted out some damaging details about a kayak trip I had done while there. When I next spoke to John, he twisted the knife mercilessly and gleefully until I succeeded in changing the topic of conversation. This unfortunate tendency to tease was from time to time combined with another bad habit, calling people by their childhood nicknames. He often called me "Bobby," a name that no one else has applied to me, at least in my presence, for over 50 years. He used that habit to good advantage, I must confess, creating the feeling that we were boyhood chums off on a lark, having fun in what otherwise might seem a bleak situation.

How did Johnny accomplish so much? The years after his move to ACLS were a dazzling series of successes. Since the National Humanities Center had a major capital campaign under way at exactly the same time, I know how difficult fund raising in the humanities was—and still is. But John moved with grace and assurance, and immense persuasiveness, through the once chilly corridors of foundation power, scoring one success after another, each with many digits in it. He succeeded precisely where his analysis of funding trends had shown the going was toughest—the major foundations.

John saw one other point with great clarity. If new support for the humanities was to be found, the beneficiaries of that scholarship had to step up to the plate. Who were the beneficiaries? In the first instance, the recipients of ACLS fellowships. He was not shy about reminding us that these fellowships had made a difference in our lives—and our incomes. And he put the question squarely to us: If humanistic scholars will not support humanistic scholarship, then how can we ask anyone else for help? So we stopped complaining about our alleged impoverishment and started writing checks, and maybe even revising our wills. That’s the way the infrastructure of the humanities will be strengthened, through private sources, led by us humanists ourselves.

But John’s willingness to look with clear eyes at the data also led to another important conclusion. Trace the dollars that support humanistic scholarship and one sees that the primary "patrons" of humanistic scholarship were no longer foundations or federal agencies but colleges and universities themselves and, ultimately, the parents who paid tuitions and the alumni who contributed to them. That was as it should be. The mission of these institutions was, after all, the advancement of learning, and they were also the primary beneficiaries of the new knowledge and fresh interpretations that humanistic scholarship generates. Since that was the case, it was incumbent upon them to support the humanities both on their own campuses and nationally.

John then set out to increase the annual contributions of colleges and universities to the ACLS; and when he succeeded, quickly and brilliantly, he set his sights higher and developed an ingenious scheme whereby over the next decades universities would endow fellowships at the ACLS. His rapid success was against all the odds. I know that better than anyone. A few years earlier I had tried a similar appeal and, as Neil Rudenstine will remember, failed ignominiously. John got college and university leaders to focus not on cosmic questions—Whither the humanities?—or on the heated rhetoric of the culture wars, or on epistemological angst, or on changing the perception of the humanities in the media, but on getting the lifeblood of the humanities flowing again—fellowship support for scholarship of uncompromising excellence. He knew that if we sought first the invigoration of scholarship, all these other things would be added unto us. And it worked. Soon colleges and universities were joining individuals and foundations, all pitching in, with the confidence that John conveyed so effectively that this was the job that had to be done and that it could be done if we each did our part. His work has been an example and an inspiration to the rest of us. Over the past few years the number of fellowships and the stipend level have gone up dramatically, not only at the ACLS but at the National Humanities Center and in other settings as well. He strengthened the infrastructure of the humanities more than any other single individual. But that was not his greatest gift to us. It was to inspire intellectual ambition by developing an infrastructure strong enough to sustain it.

So we know some of the answers to the question. How did John do it? He set the right priorities, he focused on excellence, he had the determination and the ability to build momentum. But somehow that doesn’t quite do it. There’s something else, something that does not readily show up on a list of publications, or in the recitation of awards and honors, or positions held. It’s something that doesn’t often get rewarded when we think about salaries or promotions, and that all too often eludes search committees when they look for institutional leadership. Thinking back to the time when John was simultaneously Director and Mellon Professor at the American Academy in Rome, Corey Brennan wrote of his "apparent effort-lessness and a slightly offbeat elegance" and his gift of "charisma." I prefer the word "grace." But perhaps humbler analogies are better. Maybe he had the academic equivalent of the gardener’s green thumb, the touch that makes thing flourish. Or I find I sometimes think of John when I cross a little stream near our house. You have to cross on some very wobbly stepping stones. Don’t try testing each stone as you go. Just keep your eye on the far side of the stream and move swiftly without ever admitting the thought that you might fall in. John moved like that.

Well, whatever it was, we need his qualities, need them badly now, just at this moment when we feel his loss most intensely. This is a moment of opportunity for the humanities, a time when many people are looking for academic humanists to help them better understand this strange, often violent world we find ourselves in, or at least to provide some perspective and consolation. We need his ability to use new methods to preserve and extend our understanding of the past, not least the Greek and Roman classics which John knew so well, and at the same time be open to the vast richness of experience that we have so often and so foolishly overlooked. A tall order? But now we have some allies. Our friends at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, following John’s good example, have a new humanities initiative and a project to gather the data that will let us better understand the situation of the humanities and speak more precisely about it. The Association of American Universities has a task force at work on ways to strengthen the humanities on their campuses and beyond. The climate in some of the major foundations is less chilly, thanks in no small part to John’s diplomacy. Perhaps that will prove true on Capitol Hill as well. New centers for the humanities continue to emerge on college campuses and at the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, Radcliffe, and elsewhere. So yes, John was right. There is reason to be "cautiously optimistic"—if we are willing, as John once said, quoting Seamus Heaney, to "make the Orphic effort to haul life back up the slope against all the odds" (D’Arms 1997). If there is ever a time for the reinvigoration of the humanities, this is it, not least because John’s own efforts have made it possible for us to be more ambitious for ourselves, our disciplines, and our institutions, and to restore our fields to their rightful place.