All Scholars

     Thomas Spencer Jerome was one of the great benefactors of American Classical scholarship, including in his will provisions that money from his estate and the sale of his villa on Capri—the Villa Castello--should endow a biannual series of lectures to be delivered at the University of Michigan and the American Academy in Rome and dividing his extensive research library between those two institutions. The first lectures were given in 1929-1930 by Professor John Garrett Winter (1881-1956) of the University of Michigan and published in 1933 under the title Life and Letters in the Papyri (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press). The lectures have continued to the present.  

     The Jerome lectures are a fitting monument to one of the most unusual careers in American Classics. T. S. Jerome was a member of one of 19^th century Michigan’s elite families. His father served a term as governor of the state in the early 1880s and his family was responsible for building the Saginaw Street railway system. Jerome did not prepare for a career in Classics. Instead, after briefly practicing law in Detroit from 1887 to 1900 and a year’s service as counsel to the US Transportation Commission in Havana, Cuba, he moved to Italy where he lived for the last fourteen years of his life. A lifelong Republican, he received from the McKinley administration appointment as Consular Agent of the United States, first at Sorrento and then on the island of Capri from 1901 to 1914.

      It was in Italy that he developed his interest in Roman history, immersing himself in the archaeology of the Naples region and publishing on the basis of his travels his first book, Roman Memories in the Landscape Seen from Capri. He also developed plans for writing a large-scale history of Rome with the tentative title of Roman Morals. Of this work, however, there remained at his death only an article published in Classical Philology in 1912 and a number of unfinished chapters from which John G. Winter managed to assemble what became Jerome’s second book, Aspects of the Study of Roman History. 

     Perhaps because his work bears the unmistakable stamp of the self-taught amateur, the originality of Jerome’s approach to Roman history has not received the recognition it deserved. His long residence on Capri encouraged him to try to rehabilitate the reputation of the emperor Tiberius, and to that end his emphasis on the importance of critical method in historical research and of rhetoric in shaping Roman historiography in general including Tacitus’s treatment of Tiberius in particular was innovative. His work on the conflict between Tacitus’ rhetoric and the actual actions of Tiberius reported by him anticipated the well-known studies of Frank Burr Marsh (1880-1940) and more recent analyses of the literary aspects of Roman historiography.