The Trials and Tribulations of a Whitehead Professor

Part I

What I Do, What I Get

The job announcement in the online postings of the American Philological Society read, in part: "Duties: None." Nothing could possibly have appealed more to a professor of Greek and Roman history looking for an easy way to spend a sabbatical year in Greece. So I applied to be one of the two Elizabeth A. Whitehead Visiting Professors for 2003-2004 at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.

I remembered the Whiteheads from when I was a student at the School. Elusive presences in the Library or at tea, they slipped on and off my radar screen, preoccupied as I was with reading hundreds of pages of modern Greek archaeological reports to prepare for my reports at sites. During the winter, when long trips away from Athens yielded to day trips in Attica, the two Whiteheads offered each a seminar that met once a week for a few weeks. I took both – Euripides (which I didn't follow through to the end) and the archaeology and history of Keos (which I did).

Turns out that despite that tempting "none," a seminar is pretty much de rigueur. But at the same time nobody here wants the Whiteheads to be too overburdened, because the position is supposed to be essentially a research job. (I think we are supposed to raise the tone by radiating an ineffable essence of high level scholarship.) So the seminars have been trimmed to eight weeks; mine will be broken by a month-long break at Christmastime. I promised a seminar on Greek Agriculture, a topic broad enough that I hoped it might interest the students regardless of their background, and that might let me do whatever I liked, since virtually every aspect of Greek history, society, culture, religion, and economy is linked somehow to farming, and evidence for agriculture derives from literature, inscriptions, coins, and archaeology. But I confess that I haven't had a second to think about the seminar beyond what I wrote in my application – I guess I'd better set aside a little time soon! (Click on the syllabus link above and you can see what sort of ridiculus mus my labors beget.)

Beyond the seminar, my post brings an office (a nice little cubicle, as yet undecorated, in the Tower of the Blegen Library), free printing and xeroxing, and, most importantly, the West House – our home for the year. My research project is to move along substantially my book on Mylasa in Karia, based on about a hundred new inscriptions. The book looks at the history of the city in its regional context from about 400 BCE to 400 CE. I am also working on several articles on economic history, the publication of inscriptions from the excavation at Choma in Turkey for which I am house epigrapher, and a small monograph on part of Karia in the Byzantine period, when monasteries in the Karian mountains controlled large stretches of property in the fertile river valleys and vied with one another (and the ecclesiastical authorities in Constantinople) for power and preeminence. The Gennadion Library attached to the School, which specializes in the Byzantine period (and in early travelers to Greece, another interest of mine), will be a great resource for these projects. I also hope to get a start on another, future book on Greek agriculture (there it comes again), and to find time to read lots of inscriptions and lots of Greek.

To return to the Table of Contents of the Athenian Diary, click here.