TOM WILLIAMS was a brilliant classical scholar, but he was many other things as well, even if he rarely talked about them in public. The Greek and Latin particularly Greek classics were his first love, and he often carried a volume of Homer with him while walking (he loved the Irish countryside) and kept Herodotus by his bedside. Yet he also developed a profound interest in folklore and even toyed at one stage with the possibility of making a career in that field. The Classics, however, won again in the end as they always did. He also, particularly in the last years of his life, made a special engagement with Gaelic culture and eagerly conversed in Irish with a Gaelgeoir friend.
Tom had the inborn gilt of tongues. He was born in Naas in 1932, but his family moved to Wexford while he was a small boy. His father edited Ireland's Own and was also on the board of a local newspaper. When St Peter's College in Wexford opened a primary school in 1941, he was one of its earliest pupils. It was there, at secondary level, that he learned the rudiments of Latin and Greek.
When he finished school, he was unsure of his direction and for a while served with the ESB in Donegal. The interlude lie spent in Ballyshannon, totting up columns of figures, convinced him that this was not what he wanted to do in life though he used to say that the sheer discipline demanded by accurate bookkeeping helped him later with his studies. He entered UCD and took a first class honours degree in 1957, gaining the best marks in Classics of all NUI students.
For his doctoral thesis, he had a choice of several universities and chose Vienna. Typically, he learned German in a matter of months and even mastered the Viennese dialect, so that he could follow Raimund and Nestroy comedies in the theatre in a way which a cultivated Berliner would have found it hard to do. He loved Vienna, but after winning his doctorate returned in 1960 to Ireland where he met Mary McCabe, who went on to have a brilliant career in medicine. He also taught for a time in a London grammar school. Not long after their marriage, in London, he and Mary emigrated to Australia, where Tom first lectured in Brisbane University before moving on to Sydney University for some years. It was in Brisbane that their daughter Thekla was born.
Eventually Ireland drew them back, and for many years he lectured in Greek at UCD, retiring shortly before his death. Essentially rather a private, even shy (yet sociable) man, he nevertheless is remembered vividly by students who heard him, though he could be caustic at times about aspects of academic life and its politics rather bored him. Neither was he a narrow specialist he had a wide range of cultural interests and was deeply read in several languages. He published relatively little, but it was of a high standard. (Tom always had a horror of the spun out pedantry of many scholarly books and used to quote the saying of Callimachus: mega biblon, mega kaka.)
Among friends and colleagues he could talk brilliantly, learnedly and with a dry, epigrammatic with public occasions or unsympathetic company sometimes drove him into silence. The death of his wife from cancer last year was a terminal blow, and he did not survive her by many months, dying of the same disease. Sympathy goes to his devoted daughter and her husband John, to his sisters and their families and to his friends, who know the gap he has left in their lives.