All Scholars

Susan Helen Ballou is almost forgotten today. No certain photograph of her exists nor does an obituary except for a brief notice of her death. Nevertheless, she was an internationally respected scholar in the early twentieth century, who made fundamental contributions to establishing a reliable text of the Historia Augusta and was one of the first American classicists to be invited to edit a Teubner edition. 

            The explanation of her current obscurity is twofold. Interest in the HA, the focus of her research, by American classicists is relatively recent. Likewise, her academic career was brief and relatively undistinguished. She was one of the first students in Classics at the University of Chicago and earned her doctorate relatively late in her career at the age of forty-seven. As a result, her academic career after receiving the doctorate lasted only eighteen years. She never gained tenure, serving at Bryn Mawr on multi-year contracts, nor did she attain the rank of professor, retiring while still an associate professor in 1930. It was also her misfortune that her contributions to Classics at Bryn Mawr were overshadowed by those of her more famous colleagues Lily Ross Taylor and Robert Broughton. 

            Although Ballou did much of what we would consider her graduate training in Europe, studying at the American School of Classical Studies at Rome and obtaining her doctorate at the University of Giessen under the supervision of the philosopher Otto Immisch (1861-1936), the direction of her career was determined by the professors she met during her years as a student and instructor at the University of Chicago. Frank Frost Abbot (1860-1924) directed her attention to Roman history and the problems connected with the HA, William Gardner Hale (1849-1928) taught her the paleography of Latin manuscripts, and George Lincoln Hendrickson (1865-1963) introduced her to the potential importance of clausulae for the study of the style of the HA, which she employed in her doctoral dissertation. 

           Study of the manuscripts of the HA ultimately required long-term residence in Europe, and that was made possible thanks to a traveling grant from the Association of Collegiate Alumnae in 1901-1902 and appointment as a Carnegie Research Fellow in Latin Literature in 1905-1906, which enabled her to perfect her paleographical skills and to collate manuscripts of the HA at the Vatican, Ambrosian library in Milan, Florence, and Paris. It was on the basis of this work that she demonstrated that the 9^th century CE Codex Palatinus was of fundamental importance for the establishment of its text. It was also because of work on the text and style of the HA that the historian Ernst Kornemann (1868-1946) invited her to join his student Ernest Hohl (1886-1957) as co-editor of a new Teubner edition of the HA, despite her rejection of Hermann Dessau’s (1856-1931) famous thesis that the HA was the work of a single author, a view that Hohl strongly supported.

           Ultimately, personal differences with Hohl ended her collaboration with him on the new Teubner edition of the HA and World War I ended her manuscript work After her return to the US and ultimately appointment at Bryn Mawr, she published little except several reviews of publications dealing with the HA. Her 1915 article on the chronology of the Prefects of Egypt shows that she recognized the important contribution papyri could make to Roman history, but she did not follow it up. Likewise, her paper “Women in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt” delivered at the 1924 meeting of the AHA suggests that she also recognized the potential importance of papyri for the history of women in antiquity, but again she did not pursue the subject, and the paper remained unpublished. Teaching, instead, occupied the bulk of her career at Bryn Mawr, where she taught a wide variety of courses in both history and classics including such unusual topics for the period as Hellenistic Civilization and Medieval Latin. 

           The last decade of her life was quiet, spent living and traveling with her friend and companion, the distinguished scientist Dr. Eloise Gerry (1885-1970), the first woman hired as a research scientist by the U. S. Forest Service, finally dying of a heart attack in Boston in 1940. Although her plan for a complete edition of the HA based on the Codex Palatinus did not come to fruition, her work was not lost. Hohl used her collations in his 1927 Teubner edition of the HA. More important, as David Magie (1877-1960) noted in the preface to the first volume of his Loeb edition of the HA, she edited the text of the first six lives of his edition--those from Hadrian to Avidius Cassius—which remained the standard edition of those lives for Anglophone students and scholars for the rest of the twentieth century.