Robert L. Pounder, professor of classics, to deliver the Spring Convocation address on May 2, 2007 at 3:30pm in the Vassar Chapel
In the good old days before the invention of paper spread westward from China, the ancient Greeks (among others) set important communications in stone. If the Athenians negotiated a treaty with another state, for example, the terms of the agreement were chiseled on a marble slab (a “stele”) which was then set up in a public place. Studying and interpreting the remnants of those inscriptions is the work of highly skilled scholars, epigraphers like Robert L. Pounder, professor of classics and assistant to former president Frances Fergusson for 15 years. Much of what we know about the ancient Greeks and Romans we owe to epigraphy.
Originally from Edmonton, Canada, Pounder arrived at Vassar in 1972 on a temporary one-year appointment that turned into a 35-year career. During summers and sabbaticals, he spent a fair amount of time in the trenches, and in fact was a “trench master” on a dig in ancient Corinth. He also dug in the Agora (the marketplace) at Athens and on the island of Samothrace. “It can be extremely tedious work,” says Pounder, “but it can also be very exciting. There’s always the possibility of discovery.”
The analysis of a stele from the Athenian Agora took about a year and a half from his first look at the stone to the published study in Hesperia, “Honors for Antioch of the Chrysaoreans.” The first step for an epigrapher, says Pounder, is to take very precise measurements and to make “a squeeze,” a mirror image of the inscription. “Basically, you drape wet filter paper on the stone as carefully as you can, and then with a heavy horsehair bristle brush, you bang the thing, which drives the wet paper into each indentation on the surface of the stone. And when it dries, you peel it off, and you have a mirror image.”
Often, as in this case, parts of the stele are missing, and the scholar has to make an educated guess based on comparisons with similar inscriptions, and every word of the text has to be researched and cross-referenced and reconciled with what is already known about the historical context. To the uninitiated, it might sound a bit dry, but according to Pounder, it’s like a time machine, a conduit into the past. “Epigraphy brings you directly face to face with the people of the past. A real person took a hammer and a chisel and inscribed those words on the stone. When you study the words closely, you begin to feel a real connection to the person. I think that’s why we study the past. Ultimately, it’s about people.”
Recently, Pounder has turned his attention to the more recent past – a study of the correspondence between four prominent archeologists from the early 20th century. Whoever thinks history is boring will want to get his/her hands on this biography when Pounder is finished with it (hopefully, when he retires at the end of this year). Ida Thallon (who was a Vassar professor) and Elizabeth Pierce (her student at Vassar) traveled to Greece together, where they met Carl Blegen and Bert Hill. To make a very complicated story very short, Ida and Bert married, as did Carl and Elizabeth, and the four lived together for the rest of their lives. “Their story is particularly interesting in view of all the controversy about what constitutes a family,” says Pounder. “It turns out that these sorts of pioneering arrangements were happening in the ’20s. We just don’t know about them – yet.”