BMCR 2009.02.42, T. Corey Brennan, Autobiography: A Scholar's Life

T. Corey Brennan, T. Alan Broughton, Ryan C. Fowler, Andrew G. Scott,
Kathleen J. Shea (ed.), Autobiography: 'A Scholar's Life' by T. R. S.
Broughton (1900-1993). American Journal of Ancient History, n.s. vol. 5
2006 [2008].  Piscataway, N.J.:  Gorgias Press, 2008.  Pp. xvii, 310.
ISBN 9781593338374.  $50.00 (pb).

Reviewed by James E. G. Zetzel, Columbia University
([email protected])
Word count:  2409 words
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The last time I saw T. R. S. Broughton was in the public library of
Keene Valley, NY in 1989 or 1990. He spoke of his last scholarly
project (not mentioned in the present volume, which was completed a few
years earlier), Candidates Defeated in Roman Elections: Some Ancient
Roman "Also-rans", published in 1991 when Broughton was 91. It struck
him as both useful and funny: to collect the losers after a lifetime of
compiling lists of the winners has its ironic side. I also took out of
the library a book about the Flexner family (closely associated with
Bryn Mawr, where Broughton spent most of his academic career) which he
had just returned--and in which, in a neat hand, he had corrected
typographical errors in the few Greek quotations.

The attention to detail and the somewhat distanced and modest (while at
the same time deeply serious) attitude towards his own scholarly
accomplishments seem to me typical of Broughton; one also always had a
strong sense of his physical presence. When I saw him in Keene Valley,
he generally was dressed for the mountains, in a checked wool shirt.
His massive head, his broad shoulders, and his barrel chest made him
seem, even as he neared the age of 90, a mountain man as much as a
scholar. The other immediate impression one had--which was certainly
true when I first met him, when I was an undergraduate and he was a
member of the outside Visiting Committee to the Harvard Classics
Department, and was even more true when I saw him in the audience at
the APA the first time I ever gave a talk in public--was of a kindness
and decency as solid as the man himself. Before I first met him, my
advisor told me that Broughton was the nicest and most honorable person
in the profession. He was right. Broughton was a very good man and a
very great scholar, and the two attributes seemed inseparable.

The same sense of solid worth (dignitas, in Roman terms) that Broughton
projected in person is immediately evident in the work for which he
will always be known, Magistrates of the Roman Republic, first
published in 1951-52 and corrected and revised until the Supplement
published in 1986. I bought my own copy when I was a sophomore, and
although it is more than 20 years since I last taught Roman history,
the two thick green volumes of the original publication are never far
from my desk and (as now) usually on it. While it is not a book I can
claim to have read through from cover to cover, by now there are not
that many pages I haven't opened at some point. MRR (to give it its
universal abbreviation) is probably the most useable (as well as one of
the most useful) works of reference ever created to aid the study of
antiquity: lucid, patient, extraordinarily thorough and impeccably
learned. Above all, the book is designed to be helpful, in organization
as in typography, and it is designed also to teach. One can start
anywhere--with an office, a person, a date--and follow the threads that
Broughton wove into the work to find out more and more about the
political and administrative structures of the Roman republic. And when
one realizes that Broughton accomplished this phenomenal task with only
one assistant who worked on only one small portion of the book (not
including, of course, the many scholars, colleagues and students who
offered suggestions and corrections) over more than forty years in the
pre-computer and pre-database era, one feels--or at least I feel--a
certain embarrassment at the limits of one's own diligence, learning,
or Sitzfleisch. 'Enduring' is the word that comes to mind, describing
in several senses both the man and his work.

What is presented in the volume under review is not another set of
addenda to MRR, but Broughton's own res gestae, a set of
autobiographical chapters that Broughton's family induced him to write
when he was in his late 80s (he died at 93 in 1993). Like many such
family-induced memoirs (and several of my own relatives have tried it),
it is selective, has some bees in its bonnet, and is rarely
introspective. Broughton emphasizes much more where he went than what
he did there, and while he recounts his scholarly activities and
accomplishments, he has very little to say about his scholarly choices
or methods. Unlike most similar memoirs, however, it displays
Broughton's uncanny and almost perfect memory: he can remember how he
got from one small town in Turkey to another in the 1930s, even if he
is not very detailed about the Roman remains that he saw when he got
there. Parts of the book are fascinating, particularly (to me) the
account of Broughton's boyhood on an Ontario farm and his descriptions
of his work with Tenney Frank at Johns Hopkins (a wonderful description
of their competitive farming stories--Frank won by telling of the
rattlesnake he forked into a hay wagon in his native Kansas) and of his
first travels in Europe. The account of his boyhood explains a great
deal about him, as well as being a singularly evocative description of
the hard life of rural Ontario in the early twentieth century; in many
ways it reminded me of the opening chapters of Robertson Davies' Fifth
Business, a much more negative account of the same world. The
extraordinary demands and sheer physical effort of farming without
modern equipment; the constant poverty; the close awareness of terrain
and topography all helped transform the Ontario farm boy into the
scholar of Roman administration. Broughton was proud of his
agricultural background, deeply attached to the family farm, and made a
point of returning to Ontario for the harvest for many years. Both his
physical stamina and his eye for terrain came from his childhood.

Those qualities, moreover, are apparent in the longest narrative
sections of his autobiography, the accounts of his travels in Europe,
Africa, and Turkey. His first great expedition, from June 1927 to
January 1928 was to give him the background and to collect evidence for
his dissertation on the Romanization of the province of Africa. Landing
in Scotland and discovering the cost of travel (he had almost no
money), he bought a second-hand bicycle in Edinburgh and pedaled his
way, flat tires, accidents, and all, as far as Rome. He luckily did not
decide to bicycle to Sicily and North Africa, using slightly more
conventional means of transport; but one can well imagine him
attempting to pedal over Aetna or through the desert and not
complaining about the impossibility of the task. So too his later
trips, to Turkey in the 1930s and to Spain in the 1950s: Broughton
accomplished vast distances and incredible feats of endurance,
inspecting sites and gathering evidence, but his writing rarely gives
one the sense either of the excitement or of the discoveries that he
clearly was making almost every day. What he gives, more often than
not, is his itinerary through small towns and remote places, with some
notice of what ruins he saw or what the countryside was like. What he
does not give is any clear sense of why he went where he did, what he
learned, and how it fit into some larger pattern of discovery or
scholarly development. All too often--and again, it is not
uncharacteristic of the genre--we get lists without much analysis of
things done and places seen (and in later sections, of children brought
up, students trained, offices held, and honors received). It is not as
laconic as the entries in the "Index of Careers" in MRR, but the author
of this autobiography is not very different from the author of MRR.

The Autobiography is simply too laconic. Some of that clearly arises
from the circumstances in which it was composed, some of it is a matter
of Broughton's own lapidary reticence. But hints emerge of a much more
complicated man lurking within the author of MRR. Over and over,
despite his hair-raising physical adventures, the scholar Broughton
seems to progress by chance and caution rather than a deliberate sense
of direction. He rejects a dissertation topic on ancient criticisms of
Virgil because it seems too difficult for a beginner.[[1]] He seems to
fall into a fellowship at Johns Hopkins (interrupted by a grueling year
trying to maintain the farm after his father's death) and under the
influence of Tenney Frank. The outside world impinges, but Broughton
seems barely to register the great events of his time: he is aware of
the rise of Fascism and Nazism, but seems faintly puzzled at the
hostile silence that greets him on an Italian train when he makes a
joke about going to Rome to see Mussolini, and while he is well aware
of the dictatorship of Franco, it does not stop him from making
extensive travels in Spain. The upheavals of Europe appear largely as
obstacles to his (and others') planned researches on the Romanization
of the provinces of the Empire. And, although his older colleague Lily
Ross Taylor took a leave from Bryn Mawr to work for the OSS, Broughton,
unlike almost everyone I have known of his generation, stayed at his
job, edited TAPA and worked on MRR.[[2]] In reading this account, I
find it hard not to compare the authors of the two most important works
on Roman republican history in the twentieth century, Broughton and
Syme. Broughton's goal in MRR is pure scholarship, objective and
disengaged. Roman Revolution is its opposite; and while I consult MRR
frequently, there are chapters of RR I reread for the sheer power of
Syme's argument and prose.

Broughton's apparent lack of engagement with the public world is a part
of what made MRR possible; but the Autobiography suggests a
professional context as well. Broughton's career as a Roman historian
was very much under the influence of Tenney Frank: his dissertation on
the Romanization of North Africa and his contribution on Asia to
Frank's Economic Survey of the Roman Empire were part of a line of
research that has, in the past century, been extraordinarily fruitful.
Frank, although his work seems dated now, was a pioneer in this, as in
his book on Roman Imperialism, and it remained an interest of
Broughton's throughout his life. In part, as he says, it was the
upheavals of Europe, making first-hand research impossible, that
changed his approach; but it is also very clear that Broughton's bitter
disappointment at not being appointed by Johns Hopkins to succeed Frank
had a large effect. Broughton was rejected for the Hopkins chair in
1939; in the same year his student and collaborator Marcia Patterson
began to work with him on what was to become MRR. A certain resentment
at being passed over--perhaps because Broughton, certainly in
hindsight, was a far greater scholar than Henry Rowell, who was
appointed Frank's successor--pervades much of Broughton's writing about
his career. He lists offices and honors; fair enough. But he also
records jobs that he was not offered and seems constantly to have
yearned to teach in a large university (he did move in 1964 to Chapel
Hill as Paddison Professor), somehow not seeming to realize that it was
the extraordinary grouping of scholars in Roman history and literature
at Bryn Mawr, notably Lily Ross Taylor and Agnes Michels, that in fact
provides the background to the composition of MRR. It is not something
he would have been likely to do anywhere else in the United States in
the 1940s.

The Autobiography at times seems to portray a smaller man than
Broughton really was, and that is unfortunate. The present volume,
however, contains some correctives. One is the fine and moving
introduction and poem by Broughton's son Alan (a poet and emeritus
professor of English at the University of Vermont); he reads his father
through the book that he (and I) wish Broughton had written--the
expansive, generous, ironic scholar whom many, many people knew and
admired. It is also made up for by Broughton himself in what is printed
here as an appendix, a talk about Lily Ross Taylor and the study of
Roman history in the United States that Broughton gave in 1970, not
long after her death. It is there one gets a sense of Broughton's scope
and of his acute awareness of the contexts in which he wrote; it is
only there that one sees the more positive and scholarly reasons that
led him to MRR, the desire to test the limits and value of the other
new direction in Roman history, prosopography. That kind of
history--through personalities, families, and factions--was inimical to
the social and economic history championed by Tenney Frank, but
Broughton was open enough to see its value, and while questioning its
more extreme manifestations (as, for instance, in Scullard's work on
early Roman politics) he ultimately provided the single most valuable
tool for its proponents.

There is much in Broughton's Autobiography, as the description on the
cover says, for students of many areas: not just the development of
Roman history in the twentieth century, but Canadian social history and
the history of the institutions with which Broughton was connected. And
in that sense, one is glad that it was published. Corey Brennan and his
students have put in much effort in identifying names (I suspect there
is much in the index for students of Ontario prosopography) and
correcting trivial mis-rememberings of names or facts. But even in what
they have attempted, their work leaves something to be desired. Aside
from minor errors in modern prosopography (the wrong first name is
given for Calvin Plimpton, president of Amherst College from 1960 to
1971) and idiocies (does one really need an entry for "Ivy League" or
the Isle of Innisfree?) in the index, there is one huge gap that
Broughton himself would never have forgiven: there is not a single map.
Broughton himself always insisted on having maps available in his
seminars; without the aid of Google Maps, I could not have made any
sense of the descriptions of Broughton's early life in Ontario, and
there is nary a reader, certainly not this one, who can follow his
peregrinations in Turkey and North Africa without cartographic
assistance. In terms of clarity of presentation and plain good sense,
Professor Broughton still has a lot to teach his editors; frustrating
as they at times are, Broughton's memoirs and his memory deserved
better.[[3]]

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Notes:


1.   I note in passing that Broughton's instincts for Latin philology
seem to have been excellent: he is the only scholar I know who
expresses great admiration for A. J. Bell, his teacher in Latin and
comparative philology at Toronto. Bell's The Latin Dual and Poetic
Diction (Oxford 1923) is hardly ever cited in modern scholarship and is
admittedly eccentric, but is still very much worth reading.

2.   Broughton was over 40 when the United States entered the war, but
Taylor was 55. One assumes that a sense of obligation to his
institution, his students, and his family are part of the explanation,
but I still find it striking. The only clearly political comment I can
find in the book is Broughton's statement that he would have been hard
put to sign California's anti-communist loyalty oath in 1949 (130)--but
he turned the job down in 1948 for different reasons.

3.   I am grateful to Philip Stadter for his comments on a draft of
this review.