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  • A Scholar Adventurer
  • Christopher McDonough (bio)
Autobiography: A Scholar’s Life by T. R. S. Broughton edited by T. Corey Brennan, T. Alan Broughton, et al. (American Journal of Ancient History [New Series 5], 2008. 316 pages. $62.50)

Attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a graduate student in classics in the late 1980s, I was sitting in my advisor’s office chatting with him early one day in autumn when the sudden clacking of an old typewriter next door silenced us. “Listen,” said my advisor, who smiled. “He is working.”

He was Thomas Robert Shannon [End Page viii] Broughton, then an 89-year-old professor emeritus, and he was laboring on a book of candidates defeated in ancient Roman elections, a small companion to his towering three-volume achievement published forty years earlier, The Magistrates of the Roman Republic, a work listing every single Roman office-holder from 509 to 31 b.c. With its systematic organization of nearly half a millennium’s worth of political data gathered from widely scattered sources, Magistrates was not a flashy work, but upon its release it was instantly recognized as the most useful work on Roman history ever written.

Even late in his ninth decade (he would die at the age of ninety-three), Broughton’s legendary capacity for work and his immense erudition had dimmed not an iota, and it pleased us that fall morning to hear him typing away at what we knew would be another indispensable contribution to Roman studies. Painstaking attention to detail and monumental learning are impressive virtues, but they do not necessarily make for a good memoir. Yeats scholars shuffling and coughing in ink perhaps come to mind; but, as his autobiography makes clear, Broughton lived a full and absorbing life not in spite of but in pursuit of the nit-picking particulars of ancient history.

The eldest son of an Ontario potato farmer, Broughton worked the hard Canadian soil as a boy until earning prestigious scholarships to attend the University of Toronto, where he quickly showed himself a prodigy, and then went to Johns Hopkins for graduate study in classics. After a two-year interruption in his graduate career to run the family farm while his younger brother finished agricultural college, Broughton undertook work on his dissertation about the Roman province of North Africa, which had been neglected by scholars. The dearth of reliable information necessitated a trip to the region, and so in 1927 he crossed from Boston to Glasgow with the intention of traveling south from there to Tunisia.

The cost of a single bus trip, he writes, “convinced me that drastic action was necessary if I were to have any hope of carrying out my plans with the funds available. As meals could not safely be reduced below a dollar a day, the saving had to be the cost of transportation. In Edinburgh I acquired for three pounds a second-hand low-gear bicycle with a rack behind to hold my small valise.” On this bike, dubbed Bucephalus after Alexander the Great’s horse, Broughton rode from Scotland to Italy, at times covering ninety miles a day (!), all the while stopping at Roman ruins to take notes on out-of-the-way inscriptions for their eventual inclusion in Magistrates.

The efforts of this trip and others like it undertaken for the sake of scholarship were enormous, yet the author’s tone in this memoir is habitually unassuming. Returning after dark from a hike to Mount Sipylus in 1933, for instance, he is stopped by two menacing Turkish soldiers who eventually invite him to sit by their campfire. “I realize how much harm others might have done,” he notes with characteristic understatement. Again, in Tunisia, while climbing the summit of Djebel Bou Hanesh, the ferocious dogs he encounters do [End Page ix] little more than make him “feel quite uneasy.” The view from the top, he notes, gave him “a lively impression” of Rommel’s tactics in that region during World War ii.

The world beyond the academy only occasionally intrudes upon A Scholar’s Life though it usually does so in interesting ways. During his visit to Turkey...

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