Part 2 (Obituaries) - King's College - University of Cambridge

222
OBITUARIES
In 1972 Paul’s groundbreaking study on the household servants of the Roman
emperors, Familia Caesaris: A Social Study of the Emperor’s Freedmen and Slaves, was
published. His book gave the first comprehensive picture of the lower echelons
of the Roman bureaucratic order that was made up of slaves and ex-slaves in
the imperial household. Paul showed that it was the low-ranking servants who
ran the show, even though they were obscured by the larger egos of the
honorific and political appointees in the administration. On the strength of this
book, and a great number of other publications, Paul was invited as a Visiting
Fellow to prestigious institutions such as Churchill College, Cambridge
(1978), The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (1986/7) and St John’s
College, Cambridge (1990/1). He was also appointed President of the
Australian Society of Classical Studies between 1981 and 1983, and he edited
the Society’s journal Antichthon from 1975 to 1985.
In retirement Paul moved to Canberra where his time was filled by serving on
the Council of the Australian Academy of the Humanities between 1995 and
2000 as well as founding and managing the Cambridge Australia Trust. In his
spare time he learned Biblical Hebrew.
Paul was married three times and is survived by his third wife Alleeta
French. His first marriage ended in divorce, whilst his second wife, Rosina
Perry, predeceased him. Paul is remembered as a warm and collegial man,
always affable and kind. Fending for himself forced him to learn how best
to handle people and how to discard any false pride on his own part. He was
a gentle man, but one with a strong conviction of the importance of the
humanities in today’s world, a field to which he contributed with great
dedication. Meticulous in his professional role, the only thing that would
really upset him was sloppy scholarship. Paul lost a long battle against cancer
on 2 January 2005. He had countless friends and continued making them
at the hospice until the very end of his life.
THIRKILL ARTHUR JAMES WHITE (1919) was born in Lincoln on 21
September 1899. He was educated for a career in the Navy at firstly the
Osborne Naval College on the Isle of Wight and then at Dartmouth, and in
1915 he became a midshipman and served through the remainder of the First