Christoph Georg Leidl In memoriam January 10, 1960 - August 17, 2019. t came as a terrible shock for all of us when just a few weeks after the Biennial Con­ ference in New Orleans this past July, where we had been together with him and shared hilarious chats, drinks, and music, the news spread that our friend, colleague and fellow ISEiR member Christoph Leidl had passed away from this world at the age of only 59 years. Born in Burghausen, Upper Bavaria in 1960, from 1979 to 1986 Christoph studied Greek, Latin, and History at the Uni­ versity of Munich, Germany, and (during the academic year 1982-1983) at St. John's College, Oxford, UK. It was from the University of Munich that he earned his M.A. in 1987 and his PhD in Ancient History, Greek and Latin in 1991, with an edition and commentary on Appian's history of the Second Punic War in Spain, printed 1996. During the years 1987 to 1999 he was Assistant Professor at the Department of Classics in Munich, again interrupted by a stay in Oxford from 1995 to 1997 on a research grant from the German Research Fund (DFG). From 1999 to 2001 he was Assistant Professor in Classics at the University of Mannheim, until he received a tenured post as Akademischer Rat Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVIII, Issue 1, pp. 1-13. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http:/ /www. nrnress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.1 2 RHETORICA at the University of Heidelberg in 2002 (promoted to Akademischer Oberrat in 2006), where he has been working and teaching ever since. Besides a steadily growing emphasis on the theory and history of rhetoric, in which he particularly focused on the theory of metaphor and tropes, the orator's ethos, rhetorical pedagogy, and humour in oratory, Christoph also did research and published on poetics and literary criticism, on ancient historiography and on the reception of ancient drama in music. Christoph had been an ISHR member since 1995, and missed almost none of our conferences, with the sad exception precisely of the one in Tubingen in 2015, when he fell ill. He also held various offi­ ces in ISHR. He was a Council member from 2011 to 2015, and in 2013 also took on the chair of the membership committee, a duty he fulfilled with enormous dedication and accuracy until his last days. Everyone will remember his meticulous membership reports delivered at each Council or General Business meeting. Christoph was perfectly versed not only in ancient literature, but also in modern and contemporary literatures. He knew his Shakespeare, Moliere and Goethe just as well as his Homer, Virgil, or Horace, and he was acquainted with contemporary approaches to rhetoric just as much as with Aristotle, Cicero or Quintilian. His private library filled an entire house and might have been the envy of many a department library. One wondered when, alongside his exorbitant duties in teaching and administration, he ever found the time for reading all those books. In addition, he was also a great lover of music. He had stupendous knowledge in all things music and was able to talk in minute details about concert pianists, conduc­ tors or particular recordings, and he was himself an excellent piano player. He was also a passionate mountain hiker. Besides all this, he had a wonderful and subtle sense of humour, and an extremely amiable character; his big inviting smile remains unforgettable. On the other hand, Christoph was an indefatigable worker with an outstanding sense of duty. Not only was he more than thorough in his research, but he was also always available for his students whenever they needed help. He seemed to be permanently active; it appeared as if he never rested, and indeed he may well too often have burnt the candle at both ends. Only lately he talked about a change in his way of life. But it...