Peter W. Rose

I graduated from Williams College in 1957 with a B.A. in English literature. I had taken the eqivalant of five years of French, three of Greek, and three of German, intending to pursue a degree in Comparative Literature. I entered Harvard with a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for the program in Comparative Literature. A small monetary prize was contingent on my taking one Classics course. It happened to be Eric Havelock's History of the Greek Mind. It was so much more stimulating than my courses in the English and French Departments and my frustrating seminar in Comp.Lit. that I switched the following academic year into the program in Classical Philology. When Havelock moved from Harvard to become Chair at Yale, he offered me a job. I taught there for eight years (until 1971). The 60s in New Haven were an especially exciting and disorienting period. Not only was there a very active anti-war group; the Model Cities Program was experimenting brutally with urban renewal in New Haven. I joined a group protesting both the war and urban renewal. We organized trips to protests in Washington as well as local teach-ins and demonstrations. I worked on an "underground" newsletter that became pretty popular. Our group, which was very ideologically eclectic, was subjected to attempted take-overs by the local Communist Party as well as by Progressive Labor. In defense, we decided we needed a serious study period to figure out what our own ideological alignment. Our readings were to some extent directed by a grad student in Economics, Rick Wolff, who later became Director of the Economics program at U Mass Amherst and is now frequently interviewed by New York media. We read some Marx, some Lenin, Trotsky, and some revisonist historians like Wiliam Appleman Williams, Gabriel Kolko, and Richard Van Alstyne's The Rising American Empire. In the context of the Vietnam War, the case for a specifically American, capitalist-driven imperialism seemed very compelling. I read more Marx on my own and with a year-long grant produced a Marxist-inspired reading of Homer's Iliad on the model of Finley's The World of Odysseus. The rejection of this MS by six different publishers led me to despair of ever getting into print. Naturally I did not get tenure at Yale. My job at UT Austin was contingent on my book's acceptance. While I did get an article out of my dissertation on Pindar published in Harvard Studies, the failure of the Iliad book was the basis of losing my job at Texas. After one semester as a visitor at Haverford College I was unemployed for a semester, but had the prospect starting the following fall of a year at Harvard's Hellenic Center. Thanks to a recommendation by an old friend, I was asked to apply to be chair at Miami University of Ohio. The experience of unemployment softened me up, and very sadly I gave up my year at the Hellenic Center to take the job at Miami. Sometime in the late 1970s I started attending Fred Jameson's summer institutes of the Marxist Literary Group, a real consciousness-expanding experience. An NEH Fellowship in 1979 enabled me to get a good start on an ambitious book tracing the vagaries of the ideology of inherited excellence, the key prop on the ideological level of the Greek aristocracy, from Homer to Plato. The chapter on Plato alone required my taking a year off without pay. "Sons of the Gods, Children of Earth: Ideology and Literary Form in Ancient Greece" finally came out from Cornell UP in 1992. My next project was a study of rhetoric and imperialism from Thcydides' account of the Mytilene Debate, to Demosthenes, Cicero, Edmund Burke, Fidel Castro (at the UN 1960) and Che Guevara. I thought I was at least half-way through that project when an invitation to contribute 6,000 words on class in the archaic period to a Blackwell's Companion on the period led eventually to the publication of my second book, Class in Archaic Greece, published in 2012 by Cambridge University Press. I've now returned to my rhetoric and imperialism project and realized I need to completely revise what I had written earlier; but I am excited at the prospect of writing for a new audience, especilly people in the field of rhetoric and composition, but also anyone with a more than casual interest in the history of imperialism.