All Scholars

Thomas (Tom) W. Africa was one of the remarkable generation of post-World War II academics, who transformed higher education in the USA.  Like many members of that generation, his background was not typical of pre-World War II classics professors. His background was middle class.  He was raised in Portland, Oregon and Los Angeles, California, where he finished High School and trained as a metal worker. His grandfather had been a timber buyer in Michigan and the Pacific Northwest, and his father was a salesman who was by no means an intellectual but was skeptical about religions and systems, both of which his son came to share.. Tom’s interest in history was formed early. His vivid epigrammatic style and his concern for the relationship between history and contemporary social and cultural issues reflected his sympathy for the great 18^th and 19^th-century narrative historians Edward Gibbon (1737-94) and William Hickling Prescott (1796-1859) and the “New Historians” James Harvey Robinson (1863-1936) and Charles A. Beard (1874-1948), whose ideas strongly influenced history teaching in US public schools before World War II.

      Tom began his college education late at age 25, having been drafted into the US army on December 31, 1945, a week after his 18^th birthday, the earliest possible age. He served a total of seven years, first in the army of occupation in Germany after World War II and then in Korea before being discharged in 1952, having attained the rank of Master Sergeant. As he was already married when he entered the University of California, Los Angeles in 1953, Tom was both focused and driven, finishing his A.B. in 1956, his M.A. in 1957, and his Ph.D. two years later in 1959. UCLA was not the great research university it is now in the 1950s. Officially, it was still “the Southern Branch” of the University of California, and it had only one ancient historian, Truesdell Sparhawk Brown (1906-92), whose scholarship focused on Greek historiography. As a result, although Tom is best known as a Roman historian, his dissertation, Phylarchus of Athens: A Study in Tragic History, was on a Greek historian, one of the six fragmentary historians Brown thought were central to the understanding of Hellenistic Greek historiography. 

      Tom entered the academic profession at the peak of the post-World War II boom in the building of new universities and the expansion of old ones. As a result, after brief appointments in California and Louisiana, he obtained tenure at two research universities, first at the University of Southern California, where he remained for eight years before leaving in 1969 to assume an appointment in the history department at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he remained until his retirement in 1995. As the first ancient historian hired at both universities, he left a strong mark on the teaching of ancient history at each institution, but especially at SUNY Binghamton, where colleagues remembered him as a gifted professor and supportive chair, who was excited by and encouraged scholarship in the new fields of history that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s including women’s history and especially social history. The same openness to new approaches and fields of history also characterized his own scholarship.   

      Africa was the author of six books and 28 articles and was one of the most original and creative ancient historians of the second half of the twentieth century. Although he was best known as a Roman historian, he came to Roman history late.  His scholarship in the 1960s consisted primarily of spinoffs from his dissertation on the historian Phylarchus, focusing on Hellenistic Sparta and its historiography. The first signs of his transition to Roman social and cultural history appeared, also in the 1960s in his second book, Rome of the Caesars and his famous article on the drug addiction of Marcus Aurelius. It was after his move to SUNY Binghamton in 1969, however, that Tom hit his stride as a Roman historian, producing not only a well-received textbook, The Immense Majesty: A History of Rome and the Roman Empire, but also a series of creative and innovative articles on topics as varied as mythical themes in Roman historiography,  “The One-Eyed Man Against Rome: A Study in Euhemeism;“ social history, “Urban Violence in Imperial Rome;” and psycho-history, “The Mask of an Assassin: A Psychohistorical Study of M. Junius Brutus.”    

      The breadth of Africa’s scholarship expanded throughout his career, ultimately including topics like homosexuality in Greek history and the history of classical scholarship.  The central theme of his historiography can be summed up in the statement that “salvaging an individual from the obscurity of the past is the most demanding task of a historian.” (Historian’s Palette, 359) Doing so, however, was a demanding task, one that required that “each scrap [sc. of evidence] must be minutely examined before it can be used to justify a hypothesis.” (Historian’s Palette, 235) It was this attitude that animated his repeated critique of the vagueness and religiosity of Arnold Toynbee’s monumental A Study of History, which he once compared to St. Augustine’s City of God, and he kept individuals at the center of his books and in articles such as the vivid portrait gallery of Roman lives contained in Rome of the Caesars and his brilliant study of the Cambridge Ritualist Jane Harrison (1850-1928) in one of his final articles, “Aunt Glegg among the Dons”, which ws  inspired by the work of his second wife, the historian and biographer of Harrison, Sandra J. Peacock.  

       Tom was not however, just a distinguished historian. He was also remembered by his students at both the University of Southern California and SUNY Binghamton as a successful teacher, particularly at the graduate level, with four of his six books being textbooks. With life size statues of two eagles on either side of his seminar table, former students at SUNY Binghamton remembered him cajoling, lecturing, and inspiring students with his deep knowledge and rich humor. Equally important, building on his own experience in graduate school at UCLA, he directed his graduate students to thesis topics that were clearly focused and doable with the result that several went on to long and successful careers as professors and scholars.