All Scholars

William Scott Ferguson, who as a graduate student conceived a brilliant insight into dating Athenian inscriptions (“Ferguson's Law”), had a long and productive career as author of scholarly monographs, rounded historical narrative, and popular presentations of the Greek world. He directed the dissertations and influenced the careers of some of the most distinguished American historians of the ancient world, including Sterling Dow, J. A. O. Larsen, Charles Edson, Vincent Mary Scramuzza, and A. E. R. Boak. As an administrator, he helped guide Harvard in the tumultuous academic world that preceded World War II. His scholarly work still remains, though largely assimilated, important for research into the complicated world of the Mediterranean in the Hellenistic age.While a graduate student at Cornell, Ferguson had noticed that although the eponymous archons appear in our accounts in no significant order, the secretaries of the council (boule) follow one another from year to year in the official order of the tribes. This discovery made a viable chronology of Hellenistic Athens possible. Following the completion of his thesis and dissertation, Ferguson wrote a number of articles confirming the details of his discovery. From 1904 he wrote articles on a variety of controversies in the study of the Hellenistic age, culminating with Hellenistic Athens: An Historical Essay. His emphasis is on political and constitutional history, but there is also attention to the cultural and religious life. Greek Imperialism shows his ability to generalize and popularize, but his masterpiece of scholarly generalization is his introductory chapter to the seventh volume of Cambridge Ancient History, devoted to the “leading ideas of the new period,” that is, the Hellenistic age. The essay surveys a wide area with a combination of scholarly accuracy and historical judgment.