All Scholars

Truesdell S. Brown was a distinguished teacher and scholar whose productive career spanned four decades. One word describes him—gentleman. Students, whether those enrolled in his popular lecture courses or his own graduate students, found him to be unfailingly gracious and supportive, always willing to listen and to share the accumulated knowledge of a lifetime of scholarship. He came from an old New England family—his ancestors were part of the first generation of Puritan settlement in Massachusetts—with a tradition of service as ministers and teachers. His grandfather was an early alumnus of Oberlin College and his father a pioneer in the study of Middle English literature in the United States and a distinguished scholar in his own right. Brown, however, found his own academic metier late, studying English as an undergraduate and only turning to the study of ancient history in graduate school under the guidance of W. S. Ferguson. He continued his studies under C. F. Lehmann-Haupt at Innsbruck in the early 1930s and completed his Ph.D. under W. L. Westermann in the late 1940s. He died at age 85 after a brief illness. He retained his enthusiasm for scholarship to the end, still writing and sharing his wealth of knowledge about Greek history and historiography on an informal basis with the ancient history students at the University of Houston during the last year of his life.Brown was one of a small group of scholars who kept the study of Hellenistic history alive in the United States in the two decades following World War II. Although the corpus of his published work is relatively small—four books, 35 articles and fewer than 20 reviews—it is of consistently high quality and characterized by an approach to the study of his favorite subject, Greek historiography, that was by the standards of his time unconventional. He eschewed both the Quellenforschung typical of the classical scholarship of his youth and grandiose theories of the nature of historiography in favor of a kind of literary biography intended to highlight the connection between a historian's individual life experiences, such as political exile or travel in foreign lands, and the manner in which he wrote history. The result was a vivid series of literary portraits of both major and minor Greek historians including figures as disparate as Herodotus and Euhemerus, that served a generation of scholars and students as standard treatments of their subjects and that anticipate the works of more recent scholars such as F. Millar, K. Sacks, and E. Gabba in their use of ancient historical works as evidence for their authors' engagement with the events of their own times instead of quarries for useful facts. At the end of his life he was planning just such a study of the historian Xenophon. His influence continues, however, in the works both of his own students—he was director or co-director of nine Ph.D. theses during his tenure at UCLA—and a new generation composed of their students.